{jctv}//aesthetics = judgment [OF] {quality}//{character}//{style}\\ Back to 7X700

 

 

Aesthetics is the discipline that concerns itself with judgment. To do this it attempts descriptions of qualities, character and style (These last two can in fact be reduced to the first but I wish to emphasize their presence in this particular course) The description of quality can never be neutral. It may try to be what people like to call objective. I take that to mean that a quality is described without reference to our insterest and desire. For things to be dscribed in that way is highly desirable as it is thought, with some justification, to lead to greater cogency. At the same time any quality describes the relationship between two terms: me and it. A quaility (a whatness) is a description of the behaviour of something relative to us. It is its behaviour at our scale of observation. This is not a usual description of either quality or the discipline of aesthetics, but it is a compelling and useful one. I would resist the temptation to invent a separate discipline, by some called meta-ethics, to define qualities that are desirable or udesirable. Aesthetics can do that work well. Words come to be, are invented, crafted by people living in the world and these words are then filled by the users on the basis of experience. We need discourse to make sure the meanings of our dictionary are commensurable to the dictionaries of our fellows. This is the only way to enure a reasonable transfer of meaning. All that can be hoped for. Words are necessarily sloppy ad reasonably vague beacause the world is far too rich to capture in a vocabulary that does not become ipossibly heavy even for the most verbose. So beauty, like goodness, in fact like any quality, is a metaword, a veil, vessel and place. It bellows to the dictates of its own material nature as word, obeying the light pressures from within and without. It is sensitive to breeze and covers anything. By covering its object, it creates value and reshapes itself. To declare something beautiful is to issue an order, generously but without further comment. It is the order to maintain a pregnant silence, while the breeze plays with the veil. The quality beauty predicates is unstable, often liquid; the attempt to cup that quality causes the uncontrolled mobilisation of a full but hopeless string of arguments, the unravelling of the dense and labyrinthine knot of connections. Good luck to that! Know thyself better! As such beauty is a go-between; it accepts this string, this knot, quietly, personally, unconditionally and then covers it by a thin cloth and proclaims an irreducible love to the world. That love is not loyal, it changes with the wind. Let's face it, the word beauty cannot lose its currency or be usurped without being supplanted by a word just as incapable and powerless, as potent and suggestive. At the same time its power to suggest a belonging to the gods makes it subject to semantic jealousy, hatred and worship. We have only one option and that is to take full responsibility for our capacity for beauty. So aesthetics is a discipline that describes all qualities and brings them in an appropriate relation to us, an so-called objective one, or subjective one, it describes qualities that could be seen as desirable and undesirable in relation to us and it can describe qualities that are generic or specific. The more carefully we observe, the more our world differentiates into a high resolution picture with nuanced differentiations. Iris Murdoch calls the words needed for this further differntiation secondary words. (The idea of perfection) So we have Good and Bad, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, joyous and sad, desirable and undesirable as primary words, dividing the world into black and white and then we nuance these blacks and whites into their infnite range of grays, pinks greens, blues, and yellows by secondary words such as bumptious, fickle, cantakerous and personable. This is no different to what Spinoza did in his aesthetics of feeling, (the word aesthetics had not yet come into existence when he was writing) where the whole gamut of possible feelings was built up of situational descriptions of sadness and joy. (Spinoza Ethics Prt III)

  [om kijken] [waar nemen] [goed vinden] een oefening in het denken
Voorwoord
Een forensisch manifest
Harde gronden
Het hogere, het lagere en de continuïteit
Geluk: doel & gevoel
Zaad: Het probleem van de erotiek in de esthetica, een oefening in het denken
Museum zonder titel
Don Quichote en het gevecht tegen de willekeur: arbitrair, arbitrage, arbiter
Fijn/Verfijning: raffinement en tovenarij
Empirie en relaties, een oefening in het genereuze denken
Vooruitgang en verval, het meten van de samenleving
Relatie
Kwaliteit
Schoonheid
Esthetiek, het territorium van kwaliteit
Smaak
Cultuur
Wat is kunst? Kunst als object en kunst als relatie
Het kunstwerk als ding en als voorstelling
Spreekt het object ook zelf? Het maken van waarde
Architectuur?
Architectuur: de relatie tussen ons en onze omgeving
Architectuur en Kunst
Heerlijk nominalisme
Representatie vs. Presentatie
Codering, overcodering en decodering
Het oefenen van de werkelijkheid
De fysiologie van het waarnemen: het portretteren
Kijken
Compositie
Abstractie en essentie
Plekken portretteren: achtergrond/voorgrond hier/daar
Angst portretteren
Landschap, De vertraging van de ervaring
Stijl, voorgrond/achtergrond
Maniërisme: een stijl
De Barok, een stijl
Een metafysica van het vinden
Umbilly/Machine/Mens: een oefening in het denken over kunst en wetenschap
Interpretatie als kunstwerk
Narratief/descriptief: De echo van Narcissus
Retoriek van het kunstwerk: de relatie van vorm en inhoud
Perspectief als ordening
Ruimte: Chora‐Choreografie
Iemand leren kennen via zijn kunst: een oefening in het denken
Tektoniek, oftewel het gebied van het maken
Vorm als licht en donker, textuur en kleur
Ruimtes van de Renaissance
Context, Autonomie, Autisme
Authenticiteit, bling‐bling, stijl, traditie, en originaliteit, een moeilijk gesprek
Muziek en Architectuur
 
 

A selective bibliography on aesthetics: introductions and overviews

Title  
A.A. van den Braembussche, Denken over Kunst, een inleiding in the kunstfilosofie, (2003)  

Alberto Perez-Gomez, Built upon love: architectural longing after ethics and aesthetics. London: MIT Press.(2006)

 

Anthony Vidler, The "art" of History: Monumental Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Quatremère de Quincy, Oppositions (1982)

 

B. Cold, Aesthetics, well-being and health: essays within architecture and environmental aesthetics. Aldershot: Ashgate (2001)

 

Benda Hofmeyr, Ethics and Aesthetics in Foucault and Levinas, Doctoral Dissertation Radboud Nijmegen (2005)

 

Bruno Latour, What is the Style of Matters of Concern, Two lectures in Empirical Philosophy, Van Gorcum(2008)

 

Carolyn Korsmeyer, The Eclipse of Truth in the Rise of Aesthetics, in: British Journal of Aesthetics (1989)

 
Christian Helmut Wenzel, An Introduction to Kant's Aesthetics: Core Concepts and Problems, (2005)  

D. Collinson, " 'Ethics and Aesthetics are One'," British Journal of Aesthetics, XXV, 3 (Summer 1985) 266 - 272.(1985)

 
David Berger, Kant's Aesthetic Theory: The Beautiful and Agreeable (2009)  

E.H. Gombrich, The preference for the primitive: episodes in the history of western taste and art. New York: Phaidon Press (2002)

 
Edward Winters, Aesthetics and Architecture, (2007)  

Elinor S. Shaffer, "Coleridge's Revolution in the Standard of Taste," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXVIII (winter 1969) 213-21(1969)

 

Elinor S. Shaffer, "Coleridge's Revolution in the Standard of Taste," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXVIII (winter 1969) 213-21.(1969)

 

Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation, New York, Routledge (1992)

 

G.N.G. Orsini, , "The Organic Concepts in Aesthetics," Compara­tive Litera­ture, XXXI (1969) 1-30.(1969)

 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, 2 vols., transl. by T.M. Knox.(1975)

 

George, Boas, "The Arts in the Encyclopédie," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXIII, 1, pp. 97-107.(1964)

 

Gordon Graham, Philosophy of the arts: an introduction to aesthetics, 3rd ed., Routledge, New York (2005)

 

H. Dieckmann, "Theories of Beauty to the Mid-Nineteenth Century," in: Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. P.P. Wiener, New York(1973)

 
H.W. Cassirer, A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment, (1970)  
Henry E. Allison, Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (2001)  
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, transl. by James Creed Meredith and revised by Nicholas Walker, (2007)  
Immanuel Kant, Opmerkingen over het gevoel van het schone en het verhevenen, vertaling Ike Kamphof, (2006)  
Immanuel Kant, Over Schoonheid, Ontledingsleer van het Schone, (2002)  
Iris Murdoch, The Fire & The Sun Why Plato Banished The Artists Based upon the Romanes Lecture 1976 (1977)  
Jacques Derrida, La vérité en peinture, (1978)  
Jean-Luc Nancy, et. al., De kunst van het denken (2007)  
John Armstrong, Move Closer, An Intimate philsophy of Art, (2000)  

John Dewey, Art as Experience, Perigree, New York, 2005 (1934) (2005)

 

M.C. Beardsley, "Theories of Beauty Since the Mid-Nineteenth Century," in: Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. P.P. Wiener, New York (1973)

 

M.C. Beardsley, Aesthetics From Classical Greece to the Present, A Short History, University of Alabama (repr. 1985)(1966)

 
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the body, The Aesthetics of Human Understanding (2007)  

Michael, Emily, "Francis Hutcheson on Aesthetic Perception and Aesthetic Pleasure," British Journal of Aesthetics, XXIV, 3 (Summer 1984) 241-255.(1984)

 
Mieke Boon en Peter Henk Steenhuis, Filosofie van het Kijken, Kunst in Ander Perspectief (2009)  

Nigel Taylor , “Ethical Arguments about Aesthetics of Architecture”

 
P. Guyer, Kant (2006)  
P. Guyer, The Cambridge Companion to Kant, (1992)  

Patrick Healy, “Beauty and the sublime”, Amsterdam (2003)

 
Paul Virilio and Julie Rose, Art And Fear (2006)  

Peter de Bolla, The Discours of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject, Oxford (1989)

 

Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject, Oxford, Basil Blackwell (1989)

 

Peter, Kivy, "Hume's Neighbour's Wife: An Essay on the Evol­ution of Hume's Aesthetics," British Journal of Aesthetics, XXIII, 3, (Summer 1983) 195-208.(1983)

 

Peter, Kivy, Francis Hutcheson: An Inquiry concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, The Hague (1973)

 

Peter, Kivy, The Seventh Sense: A Study of Francis Hutcheson's Aesthetics and its Influence in Eighteenth Century Britain, New York (1976)

 

Richard Hill, Designs and Their Consequences: Architecture and Aesthetics (1999)

 

Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (2008)

 

Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (1999)

 
Roger Scruton, Beauty (2009)  
Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture,   (1980)  

S. Chandrasekhar, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivation in Science, Chicago (1987)

 
Salim Kemal, Kant's Aesthetic Theory (1997)  
Stephen Davies, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Robert Hopkins, and Robert Stecker, A Companion to Aesthetics (2009)  
Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Technologies of Lived Abstraction) (2009)  
Umberto Eco, A History of Beauty and On Ugliness (2008)  

Wladislaw, Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, 3 vols., The Hague (1970)

 
Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, J. Harrell, Cyril Barrett, and D. Petsch, History of Aesthetics, 3 Volumes, ( 2006)  

A selected bibliography of earlier sources (ongoing)

Kallich, Martin, "The Meaning of Archibals Alison's Essays on Taste," Philological Quaterly, XXVII (October 1948), 314-24(1948)

Kallich, Martin, "The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory: Hobbes, Locke, and Addison," English Literary History, XII (December 1945) 290-315.(1945)

Steegman, J., The rule of Taste, (1936)

Ladd, H.A., The Victorian Morality of art: An Analysis of Ruskin's Aesthetics, New York, 1932.(1932)

Scott, G. The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste, London 1914; revised 1924, ed. with an introd. by David Watkin, London 1980.(1914)

Santayana, George, The Sense of Beauty, New York(1898)

A.T. Bolton, "The Inlfuence of Literature on Architecture," R.I.B.A., (Essay Medal for 1895).(1895)

Fergusson, J., An Historical Inquiry into the True Principles of Beauty in Art, More Especially with Reference to Architec­ture, London(1849)

Legh, Peter, The Music of the Eye; or, Essays on the Prin­ciples of the beauty and Perfection of Architecture, as Founded on and Deduced from Reason and Analogy, and Adapted to what may be traced of the Ancient Theories of Taste, In the Three First Chapters of Vitruvius. Written with a View to Restore Architecture to the Dignity it had in Ancient Greece, Priestley and Weale, London(1831)

McDermot, M., Critical Dissertation on the Nature and Prin­ciples of Taste, London 1823.(1823)

Gordon, G.H. Earl of Aberdeen, An Inquiry Into the Principles of Beauty in Grecian Architecture; with an Historical View of the Rise and Progress of the Art In Greece, Extracted from Wilkins' Translation of Vitruvius, London(1822)

Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine Chrysostome, The Destination of Works of Art and the use to which they are applied, considered with regard to their influence on the genius and taste of artists, and the sentiments of amateurs, transl. from the French by H. Thomson, London(1821)

Knight, Richard Payne, An Analytical Inquiry into the Prin­ciples of Taste, London 1805 (3rd ed., London 1806)

William Gilpin, Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty, (1794)

Alison, Arachibald, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, Edinburgh(1790)

Hogarth, William, The Analysis of Beauty: Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste, London 1753; ed. with an introd. by Joseph Burke, Oxford 1955.(1753)

Soufflot, Jacques-Germain, "Lecture on taste given in 1744" repr. in: Nouv. Archives hist. du Rhône, I (1832) 114 f.(1744)

Hutcheson, Francis, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affec­tations. With Illustrations of the Moral Sense. By the Author of the Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, London(1728)

Hutcheson, F. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; in Two Treatises, In Which the Principles of the Late Earl of Shaftesbury Are Explain'd and Defended, Against the Author of the "Fable of the Bees" and the Ideas of Moral Good and Evil Are Established, According to the Senti­ments of the Antient Moralists. With an Attempt to Introduce a Mathematical Calculation in Subjects of Morality, London(1725)

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