PHIL 732

Philosophy of the Arts 2


Please note: this is archived course information from 2017 for PHIL 732.

Description

This course considers contemporary debates about possible connections between aesthetics, art and evolution.

Aesthetics is typically regarded as concerned with the beautiful and awesome (sublime) and their opposites. We look particularly at humans' aesthetic responses to non-human animals and to landscape and the environment. We also discuss the account of human beauty as sexual attractiveness offered by evolutionary psychologists and debate whether this can be reconciled to the typically broader notion of aesthetic beauty.

Many theories of art are explored in depth. These include theories that group the arts and regard them as together serving some general adaptive function, that present particular art forms each as adaptive in their own distinctive fashion, that attempt to explain the origins of art, that argue that art is not itself adaptive but is a by-product of behaviours or systems that are and that analyse art as a technology not closely connected to evolved behaviours.

As well as philosophical literature on aesthetics and the philosophy of art, reference will be made to work in other disciplines, such as evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, evolution theory, philosophy of biology and art-based disciplines.

Availability 2017

Not taught in 2017

Lecturer(s)

Coordinator(s) Distinguished Professor Stephen Davies

Reading/Texts

Stephen Davies, The Artful Species, Oxford University Press, 2012. Paperback version

Other readings will be supplied.

Points

PHIL 732: 15 points