Welcome on the Course

 Dear students of Philosophy and Theory of Art 1

This is a course on aesthetics, i.e. philosophy of art and the aesthetic, and theories of art. We study scholars and texts, who/that have a major role in the formation of today's theoretical paradigms and discussions. The more classics and root texts you read, the easier it is to understand any contemporary discussion. To take an example, for understanding Marx it is good to understand at least a bit Hegel - and to understand the contemporary feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, it is good to have some understanding of the tradition of phenomenology.

(Don't worry, you don't need to have any background in philosophy, aesthetics and art theory... This is really a basic course. As these names might mean something for some people, I anyway mention them...)

Some classics and schools of thinking are unavoidable, no matter where you are in this world and what theoretical stance you adopt. We will touch upon these thinkers and schools as much as possible. You might feel that they are too often dead upper class Western 'Central Europeans' (England and Spain counted in), or offsprings of their colonialism and diaspora. To understand art and its theory today, they are in a constitutive role, though - and cannot be dismissed. The ones who survived the test of history are of course great thinkers, but of course overused, still, and too often constituted to be simply just 'the base' of thinking.

We will, though, not simply subordinate ourselves to these classics. In his Manifesto Antropófago (1928) Oswald de Andrade suggests that Brasilians should cope with 'European thinking and art' (I'd prefer the 'colonial West') the way the indigenous Tupi people were once claimed to have done in the 16th Century with the missionaries, i.e. by eating them (acquiring their strenght through a cannibalist act). De Andrade might have been just a bourgeois heretic, but the basic idea is useful: some things you just don't get rid of, but it doesn't mean that you couldn't find a fruitful way of coping with them. Many classics of philosophy are both poisons and medicine, and this might be the best way to read them.

We will also take a look at texts and lifeworks of theorists and philosophers who are not canonized or used in the aforementioned way. They are studied as they offer alternative paths, or because they might be important for some of you following your ways of specialization on this MA course. Sometimes I present my own research interests.

All philosophers we read, belong to a context - you could even say that some of them are site and time specific - and we will not be shy about that. We read e.g. German philosophers as representing a certain German, ethnic tradition. E.g. Hegel thinks poetry is 'awesome' at least partly because he lived in a country with a red hot literary scene.

We read only original texts. I am critical about introduction books, which these days fill the shelfs of the bookshops. They are often actually not introductions. They package the thinkers so much that you could say they resemble quite much Reader's Digest 'classics'.

What else? The rest of what you need to know we will discuss on lecture one, that you absolutely need to attend, as even if you can be away once during the course, we need one shared session to lean on later on during the course discussions.

As this year is still logistically a bit challenging, we have to conduct this course in a special way. We will keep the schedule for the course, but not have long lectures. They will be in Zoom, and you will get the links to the lectures a couple of days before they actually start. Besides the lectures, which I try to keep as short as possible, as Zoom is quite heavy for you, we will have more course materials and maybe small videos on the course blog.

In the end, the course is still what it has always been... I talk, you ask/comment, and you read... It just has to be done in a bit of a different way now.

To get the credits you need to

* be on the first lecture. If you can't make it, come next year. We need to be able to share some ideas about the course and some facts too, to be able to build a discussion later on. To make it easy, I have chosen the first lecture to be shared by everyone, as it is also a good way to confirm that you are on the course.
* be present 80% of the lectures (i.e. you can be away from one lecture during the fall).
* you can choose to write a) an essay, or b) a learning diary. Anyway you need to produce a minimum of 6 pages for me. If you choose to write an essay, choose one philosopher, text or lecture, and focus on that. Format: paragraph 1,5, Times New Roman. The deadline for the fall is (note the change) December 15. Please send it to me to the address myfirstname.mylastname@aalto.fi. Now you know it, and you have plenty of time to write it. I will immediately after the deadline print the essays, read them, and grade them. Please write your name and student number on the essay / learning diary, so I can see who to write a response to when I print it and read it. You will all get some kind of response from me.

(For those who haven't written a learning diary: you can write freely about what we discussed on the course, e.g. "3rd lecture... today Max bla bla. I disagreed... bla bla."

GRADES

I will grade the course essays / learning diaries with the following system:

1 you have sent me text, and it made sense
2 you have also understood something and you have presented some of your own thoughts
3 you have a good understanding of the content and you have some meaningful thoughts about the issues we discussed
4 you have done a very good work
5 je ne sais quoi (a quality that cannot be described or named easily): to get this grade you probably have to be attentive on the lectures to understand what I consider to be really, really good work - or then you are just lucky... anyway: I think that you have done a superb work!

You might think of this as a vert subjective system of grading, but my judgements are products of my training, and they, supposedly, represent well a meaningful way of thinking about these issues in the community of philosophy, aesthetics and art theory. If you still, though, feel like you have received the wrong grade, I am open to rethink my judgement, or to offer you a possibility to rework your text. Do not hesitate to contact me on this matter!

The Zoom codes will come just before the lecture. Be online and check your mail! Please note, that it is forbidden to send the Zoom code to anyone. Students of the course receive a code, and they can always ask me to resend it, if needed. This is to make sure, we have no problems during the sessions.


SCHEDULE


Lecture 1
Monday 27 September, 15-17
(AESTHETIC) EXPERIENCE (AND THE BODY)

Main thinkers of the lecture: Abhinavagupta, John Dewey, Richard Shusterman, Luce Irigaray
Minor thinkers of the lecture (might include at least): Bharata Muni, Al-Ghazali, René Descartes, W.E.B. du Bois, Wolfgang Welsch, Luce Irigaray
Texts (on the right) you can choose from: Abhinavagupta, Irigaray, Welsch

Lecture 2
Mon 11 October, 15-17
CRITICAL THEORY

Main thinker of the lecture: Theodor Adorno
Other thinkers: Hegel, Marx, Herbert Marcuse, Marx Horheimer, Chantal Mouffe
Text: Adorno

Lecture 3
Monday 15 November, 15-17
MASS CULTURE AND MEDIA, KITSCH AND CAMP

Main thinkers of the lecture: Walter Benjamin, Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag
Minor thinkers of the lecture: -
Texts (on the right) you can choose from: Benjamin, Sontag

Lecture 4
Monday 22 November , 15-17
PHENOMENOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS

Main thinkers of the lecture: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Gianni Vattimo

Minor thinkers of the lecture: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Luce Irigaray
Text: Heidegger

Lecture 5
29 November, 15-17
ART WORLDS, ART CIRCLES, ART SCENES

Visitor: Petteri Enroth (University of Helsinki)

Main thinkers of the lecture: George Dickie, Arthur C. Danto
Minor thinkers of the lecture: -
Texts (on the right) you can choose from: Danto