90862 - Elements of Contemporary Aesthetics

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course the student has the basic tools for interpreting the symbolic and productive processes that characterize today’s aesthetic field. He/she can contextualize the major aesthetic traditions (from arts to fashion) in the framework of last century’s culture. He/she also acquires the conceptual tools enabling him/her to understand and analyze communication through aesthetic categories and current key issues about taste, social roles and personal identity.

Course contents

This course aims to examine and explore the nexus between aesthetic experience and the ecological dimension. Without claiming to be exhaustive of such a vast and problematic theme, some classic conceptual points will be privileged, in order to contextualise and understand the terms of the contemporary debate on the connection between aesthetic and artistic experience and ecological consciousness. Specifically, the intention is to understand how the forms of cultural and aesthetic mediation of sensory experience, i.e. "the way in which human perception is organised", structure the pre-comprehension of the relationship between man and nature, thus constituting the pre-categorical, non-conscious framework of this relationship. Aesthetics stands as that discipline which, since its foundation within modern anthropocentrism, decenters the human: by questioning the nexus between subjectivity and sensibility, it investigates precisely that moment of mediation between human and natural, between the self and the world, thus resulting strategic for questioning the forms and modes through which the human thinks of itself and locates itself within the natural world. Starting from this historical-conceptual framework, aesthetics appears today as a strategic discipline to question the anthropocentric framework of modern civilisation and rethink the relationship between human and nature in an ecological perspective. 

The course will be divided into two sections. The first will take as a starting point the development of the modern notion of nature and the contemporary development of the notion of aesthetics from the Renaissance to the Kantian synthesis. By exploring some key conceptual points such as the nexus between technique, arts and nature, the concept of "judgment," "natural beauty," "natural history," "landscape," etc., the first part will provide an overview of the modern development of the connection between aesthetics and the experience of nature. The second, will take into account some fundamental lines of the contemporary environmental aesthetics' debate concerning the critique and the overcoming of modern and Cartesian anthropocentrism, which will be contextualised within the long-term history of modern aesthetics.

 

Readings/Bibliography

Reference texts:

Erwin Panofsky, La prospettiva come forma simbolica¸Abscondita, 2013.

Hans Blumenberg, «Mimesi della natura»: sulla preistoria dell’idea dell’uomo creativo in Id. La realtà in cui viviamo, Milano, Feltrinelli Editore, 1987, pp. 50-84.

Immanuel Kant, Critica del giudizio, a cura di Emilio Garroni e Hansmichael Hohenegger, Einaudi, 1999.

Theodor W. Adorno, Teoria Estetica, a cura di Giovanni Matteucci e Fabrizio Desideri, Einaudi, 2009, pp. 72-104

Wolfgang Welsch, Cambio di Rotta. Nuove vie dell'estetica¸Aesthetica, 2017.

Paolo D’Angelo, Estetica della natura. Bellezza naturale, paesaggio, arte ambientale, Laterza, 2023.

Gernot Böhme, «L’atmosfera come concetto fondamentale di una nuova estetica», Rivista di estetica, 33 | 2006, 5-24. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/estetica/4319 ;

Giovanni Matteucci, Estetica e natura umana, Carocci, 2019, pp. 37-71.

Further readings:

Ernst Cassirer, Vita e dottrina di Kant, Castelvecchi, 2016, pp. 244-320.

Karl Marx, I manoscritti economico-filosofici del 1844, a cura di Enrico Donaggio e Peter Kammerer, Feltrinelli, 2021, pp. 104-123.

Bruno Latour, La sfida di Gaia. Il nuovo regime climatico, Meltemi, 2020.

Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Harvard University Press, 2007.

Joachim Ritter, Estetica e Modernità, Marinotti, 2013.

Emilio Garroni, Estetica. Uno sguardo-attraverso, Castelvecchi, 2020.

Paolo D’Angelo, Filosofia del paesaggio, Quodlibet, 2010.

Santiago Zabala, Solo l'arte può salvarci, Politi Seganfreddo Edizioni, 2023.

Bibliography may be subject to change during the lectures.

Teaching methods

lecture and collective reading of the texts, following the seminar model.

Assessment methods

Writing a paper, between 30,000 and 40,000 characters (spaces included), on a topic inherent to the lecture themes and based on the texts in the program.

Before writing the paper (sufficiently in advance), is required to agree with the professor on a topic and on a list of primary texts to work develop it.

The paper should be emailed to the lecturer's institutional email in .doc or .docx format 15 days before the term for which you intend to submit.

For those who do not attend the lessons, it is required to read the text by Paolo D'Angelo, Aesthetics of Nature. Natural beauty, landscape, environmental art, Laterza, 2023.

A number of possible topics for the paper are listed below:


Natural beauty and its history

Landscape in modern and contemporary aesthetics

The currents of environmental aesthetics

Aesthetics as "looking through" (Garroni)

Aesthetics as experience-with (Matteucci)

The notion of atmosphere (Böhme)

Perspective as a symbolic form (Panofsky)

Technology and mimesis (Blumenberg)

Aesthetic experience and anthropological de-centration (Welsch)

The reflective aesthetic judgment (Kant)

The natural beauty in Adorno

Teaching tools

Panopto and digital resources

Office hours

See the website of Rolando Vitali