Category Archives: Uncategorized

Just recently (2019), I discover that Ranciere has spoken about carnival, recognising it as a cultural form that is akin to the subversive moments “when people do a multiplicity of things: performances, acts or parties whose unruliness undermines the forces … Continue reading →

Permit me to step back for a moment to see where all of this has been leading me. The issue of course is the notion of aesthetics, with trying to make sense of it. In general terms, ‘aesthetics’ has two … Continue reading →

These are a set of images assembled from slide photographs that my father, a marine micro-biologist, shot in the Antarctic. They were recorded over three separate scientific expeditions: the first to Macquarie Island in 1951-2, which was the first scientific … Continue reading →

Burke writes about the sublime and beautiful. That is his explicit, ostensible theme. But evident within this is an underlying set of concerns related to the nature of human identity – the relationship between body and mind and between logical … Continue reading →

There are wide range of current approaches to the field of aesthetics, everything from efforts to resurrect the notion of beauty in contemporary art, to continuing strands of critical aesthetics that envisage both the political possibility and the limits of … Continue reading →

The notion of aesthetics emerges historically within the context of the recognition of a specific and traditionally neglected category of human receptive experience. Alexander Baumgarten (1750) conceives a lower analogue of rational thought, a logic of sense that involves aspects … Continue reading →

What is aesthetics? Is it a universal sphere of qualitative human experience or an historically specific field that is intimately tied to the self-understanding of modernity? How is the term employed? What does it mean in use? How does aesthetics … Continue reading →

We could begin by suggesting that aesthetics is the philosophy of beauty. We could add that it is also the philosophy of the sublime and the philosophy of art, but let’s stick for now with our very minimal definition. This … Continue reading →

Within the context of Kant’s aesthetics, beauty describes a specific context of mediation and reconciliation. It establishes a common ground between our abstract logics-moral selves and our sensible selves. With no sense of compulsion, it demonstrates their potential for agreement. … Continue reading →

Ranciere describes the ‘knot’ of the aesthetic, which he links to the dilemmas of modernity and the paradoxes of contemporary art. Aesthetics is positioned as the conceptual complex for distinguishing a field of art that aspires to both autonomy and … Continue reading →

I should stress at the outset that this is an amateur study of aesthetics. I am not a trained philosopher. I have read few of the works I discuss here in the original language that they were written. I lack … Continue reading →

I can recall that my first response to art was quite simply blank. As a child my parents took me regularly to major galleries. They’d walk around very slowly, far too slowly for me, and ask what I thought of … Continue reading →

A is for art. A is for aesthetics (because aesthetics is much larger than art – if art is conceived in miniature as contemporary art). A is also for Adorno, for he deserves a mention and I am fundamentally shaped … Continue reading →

Aesthetics refers to a dimension of inexplicable value. Aesthetics involves the non-propositional communication of truth. This truth has a holistic character – looking forward (as hope) and back (for strands of vivid memory and counter-memory). Aesthetics has no proper space … Continue reading →

What is the relationship between aesthetics and knowledge? In ordinary use, the term ‘aesthetics’ relates to theories of beauty and art. It is a field of intellectual enquiry that examines non-strictly intellectual aspects of judgement and activity. In this sense, … Continue reading →

Ranciere employs two different notions of the aesthetic: the first represents a restricted conception linked to the self-definition of contemporary art (‘the aesthetic regime of art’); while the second indicates a more general conception linked to notions of sense and … Continue reading →

Kant very often appears as a conservative figure, a philosopher who works at multiple levels to reconcile differences – between dogmatism and skepticism, for instance, and between dimensions of thought, morality and beauty. Yet there is potential to interpret this … Continue reading →

Kant employs the term ‘aesthetic’ first in his Critique of Pure Reason as a means of clarifying the general conditions of experience. He develops the notion of a ‘transcendental aesthetic’ to indicate an a priori dimension of experience. There is … Continue reading →

Ugliness would not be the simple opposite of beauty for Kant. Both the beautiful and the ugly share a subjective basis in an internal reflective sensation (an experience of pleasure or displeasure). The aesthetic moment is one of suspension. There … Continue reading →

Schiller’s aesthetic theory is closely concerned with the issue of time. What is the time of aesthetic experience? When does it happen? When is it needed? Like Plato, Schiller adopts a broadly pedagogical perspective. He is concerned with how aesthetics … Continue reading →

Aesthetics must enable a revaluation of the world. But how is this possible? Especially if aesthetics is conceived narrowly as a form of pleasure? We must either re-conceive aesthetics or abandon it for something else – some other notion that … Continue reading →

My motto from posting this song: ‘If at first you seriously suck then try, try again till you don’t seriously suck so much.’ 91 listens, not a single like. Must persevere! Fear and spending all we have/On nothing very much … Continue reading →

At one level I am tempted to describe aesthetics as a form of value. Very briefly, aesthetics provides an alternative to systems of value that reduce, consume and dispense with the world. It projects a non-exploitative relation to things that … Continue reading →

Mimesis is perhaps the best known of the traditional aesthetic principles. Of course it is never precisely, or simply, an aesthetic principle. This is not only because aesthetics itself is a more recent invention. It is also because mimesis represents … Continue reading →