ASSISTANCE for AESTHETICS

Fall, 2007!

 

 

 

PHILOSOPHY 3322

Philosophy and the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics

Elmer H. Duncan

Please note that I have a new....well, updated....Syllabus for 2007!!

You could say I have adopted an alternate plan.. For many years, this course has been organized around a syllabus. That has not changed. But in recent years the principal works to be read for this course could be found in an anthology, or course-pack, that I produced, Philosophy of Art: Readings. I have given up teaching from a "course-pack" (too expensive for my students, it was difficult to get all the materials I wanted, etc....). I also decided that it would be well to have my Course Syllabus and a rather Comprehensive Bibliography available on my homepage site (PLEASE NOTE!! The Bibliography requires an Acrobat Reader. If you do not have this software on your computer, you may download it -for free! Computers vary, I suppose, but on mine this material is best read at about 125%). The syllabus was been worked over, and revised again and again, over the past 35 years and more. Again, I have recently decided not to use a course-pack, and to depend on a pair of texts by Noel Carroll (as noted in my new syllabus). I say more about these changes in the Introduction to my course. This Introduction serves as an attempt to justify teaching my course as I do...obviously, readers are not required to agree with me. I hope this is not too confusing.

Oh, I plan to put this in the Bibliography, too, but I need to call special attention to an extremely useful volume, A Companion to Aesthetics, edited by David Cooper, with Joseph Margolis and Crispin Sartwell as Advisory Editors (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Inc.,1997).

FLASH!! Baylor has made life easier, at least for Baylor students and faculty. The Baylor library now has the Past Masters database, with the complete works of Plato, Aristotle, David Hume, John Dewey, George Santayana, etc., available on-line!! I don't suppose I have as many basic moral principles as I should, but one is that I don't like to force students to pay for what they can get free. Actually, Baylor, and, surely, most major universities, now have a number of useful resources that can be accessed online. I have made a start at trying to make this material more "user-friendly" in my paper, "Philosophy and the New Technology: a Beginner's Guide." I am especially impressed by the number of journals that can be accessed online!!

More Help on the Web

{Two preliminary confessions (or warnings, whatever}...

First, if a reader looks at the following material, and then at my syllabus, it might be thought that I am promoting a distinction without a difference, and I fear that may be true. At the time I first put this material together, there seemed a rather clear difference between my syllabus, made up largely of journal articles, which were not available on the World Wide Web, and such things as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which were thus available. Now, most of the "learned journals" are available on the Web, through various databases...so perhaps the distinction I was trying to make is of limited value, at best....or simply mistaken. The reader may judge, as we all must.

Second, when I first put my syllabus together, and put in all those URLs, I naively assumed that any of my students, with a Baylor password, could access the material, both on the campus, and on their home computers. And I find that is not the case. I found that, with some databases, notably JSTOR and PCI Full Text, I could add a prefix to the URL to make home access possible. In other cases, even that doesn't always work. In such cases, the student can look on the Baylor Library webpage, under "Other Electronic Materials," find the proper database, use my bibliographical info, and work from there. And "Good Hunting!!"

But there are a number of things available on the World Wide Web that are useful. I thought it might be helpful to list some of them here. The most important site to list is certainly Aesthetics On-line, the official website for the American Society for Aesthetics. This site has it all: articles and reviews, bibliographies, teaching resources, conference reports, and lots of links to other relevant sites. There is a special website for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and another for the British Journal of Aesthetics, where you can find the contents of back issues, submission procedures, etc. Also worth a look is the site for Leonardo, a good art journal. Also, available only online, see the Canadian Aesthetics Journal/Revue Canadienne D'Esthetique, the Electronic Journal of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics.

Now about that new Syllabus of mine... I am rather proud of the new, 2007, syllabus for my course (see above), and feel certain that all of my students will read all of the printed sources listed. But there is a lot of other material on the web that is related to my syllabus, and I should try to list at least some of that, too. So let us begin.

  • For Lecture 7, John Dewey was a major figure, so the literature is endless, both online and off. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good, detailed, article, with a section on Dewey's aesthetics. I also found useful the essay on Dewey by Richard Schusterman in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism. But the really good news for my students is that Baylor has access to The Collected Works of John Dewey-that means everything, including his Art as Experience, of 1934- in the Past Masters database!! Pardon an aside, that will take too much space, but I must include an example to show valuable this database can be. I recently ran across areference to a "typescript' of a lecture (never published) that Dewey gave to the Washington Dance Association, Nov. 13, 1938. I found it in Past Masters; it has the title, "The Philosophy of the Arts," and I found it very useful. Also, I recently took the time to convert the old Dewey Newsletter into a pdf. document (it is a large document, and takes a while to download, but look at pp. 181-182, and I think you get some idea of his view of the arts--and on civil rights!!)

  • For Lecture 17 on the work of Leo Tolstoy, I have indicated in my history section (below) that part of his book, What is Art ? can be found on the web, plus other information about the man and his work. A good recent addition to the relevant online material is a sort of powerpoint discussion prepared by Sally Fowler. And if you really get fascinated by Tolstoy, you should visit a "Tolstoy Page" at Penn State, where you will find convenient pdf. files of his major works(including War and Peace, complete in 692 pages!!), which you can download to your own computer!! And if you're a bit rusty on Tolstoy, you might want to look at the paper on Tolstoy in the Gale Literary Databases.

  • For lecture 18,check out this power point on the subject-not bad!!

  • For Lecture 31 on "Art and Ethics," Iredell Jenkins has contributed a good historical essay on "Art for Art's Sake" for the Dictionary of the History of Ideas (now online). You probably will think I've got it all wrong, so look at the sources listed in an online site called "The Infography," under "Aesthetics--Ethical Aspects." There is also a database listing essays on opposing viewpoints regarding pornography.
  • For Lecture 33, you can find another copy of the text, plus lots of helps for understanding Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste," in a new site maintained by Theodore Gracyk. And if you get excited about Hume, check out the materials (especially those on Hume's Aesthetics) in the syllabus for my seminar on "Hume and his Critics."
  • For Lecture 36, if, at the end of the day, you find my entire procedure for teaching this course completely misguided, you might look at the course description of his Aesthetics course by one of my favorite writers on the subject, T. J. Diffey.
 

 

The Leonardo Files

From 1975 to 1983, I did a column on Aesthetics for the art journal, Leonardo. I reviewed articles from the major journals and books of the time on my chosen subject. I do not pretend that what I produced was undying prose, but it gives this man's view of what was happening during a rather crucial period of 20th century Aesthetics. When the editor, Frank Molina, died, the new managing editors wanted a "Jack-of-all-trades" to cover all the arts, criticism, etc....this did not fit my job description. I have to add that the new column did not last long. Since Leonardo is now available, online, through JSTOR, I hoped bringing these together might be of use to someone.

Vol..8, no. 2 (Spring, 1975): 163-166.

Vol.8, no. 4 (Autumn, 1975): 341-344.

Vol. 9, no. 2 (Spring, 1976): 150-153.

Vol. 9, no 4 (Autumn, 1976): 328-331.

Vol.10, no. 2 (Spring, 1977): 152-155.

Vol.10, no. 4 (Autumn, 1977): 329-332.

Vol. 11, no. 2 (Spring, 1978): 149-152.

Vol. 11, no. 4 (Autumn, 1978): 328-332.

Vol. 12, no. 2 (Spring, 1979): 156-160.

Vol.12, no. 4 (Autumn, 1979): 329-332.

Vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring, 1980): 153-156.

Vol.13, no. 4 (Autumn, 1980): 328-331.

Vol.14, no. 2 (Spring, 1981): 153-156.

Vol. 14, no. 4 (Autumn, 1981): 327-330.

Vol.15, no. 2 ( Spring, 1982): 153-157.

Vol. 15, no. 4 (Autumn, 1982): 311-315.

Vol. 16, no. 2 (Spring, 1983): 139-143.

Just a Word About History

When I came to Baylor University many years ago, the Philosophy Department was much smaller than it is today. One thing this meant was that in order to offer a variety, each member of the department had to teach several different courses. Today, I teach only one course in Aesthetics, the Junior- Senior course described in the syllabus above. In the past, I taught at least three in Aesthetics. A second course I taught was a Senior- Graduate seminar called Problems in Aesthetics. As the title suggests, I would try to discuss the major problems in the area by plowing through one comprehensive text by a major scholar. The textbook I used was Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism by the late Monroe C. Beardsley (New York:Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc.,1958). Beardsley's book was comprehensive, challenging, and richly documented. It now seems somewhat dated, though there was a reissue-with a "Postscript 1980" chapter added (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981). Had I begun teaching a generation earlier, I might have used The Arts and the Art of Criticism by Theodore Meyer Greene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), perhaps supplemented with The Philosophy of Art by Curt John Ducasse (New York: The Dial Press, 1929, and reissued, with minor revisions, by Dover Publications, New York, 1966). I have to say that if I were to offer such a course today, I don't know what text I would use. Beardsley's work may be dated, but I see nothing to equal it on the market today. Am I just another old man muttering..."There were giants in the earth in those days.....?"

I also wanted to do a course on the history of aesthetics, but my chairman said the department already had too many history courses, so we decided to call the course Classical Works in Aesthetics. The course was offered several times, at the Senior- Graduate level. I am not a great historian, but to me it seems that the history of aesthetics does not exhibit a clear and steady evolution from darkness into light. Instead, there are a number of major works that stand out, so perhaps Classical Works ...was a good title. Once more, the major text I used was by Monroe C. Beardsley, his Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present, a Short History (New York: The Macmillan Company,1966). The book was reissued, in a paperback version, by the University of Alabama Press, in 1975...again, I have seen nothing comparable since. But I also wanted to use original sources. Recently, I dug through the files, and found a list I had used, at least once, I know not when.. Today there are a number of available editions and translations (some on the Web), so I shall not include bibliographical data:

I know that, at other times, I also used Hume's essay, "Of the Standard of Taste". It's #23 of the Essays...I don't recall that I ever used Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy in one of my courses, but maybe I should have. There is a recent edition of The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series that looks very good; it is edited by Raymond Geuss - who also supplied a useful Introduction- and Ronald Spiers - who also served as translator-buy the book (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999)!! I commend these to the reader; perhaps they are only so much ancient history...I hope they are more than that.

A Final Note

In teaching my aesthetics courses, I have always tried to emphasize the fact that I teach PHILOSOPHY, not Art History, or Art Appreciation (or Music Appreciation, Drama Appreciation, or whatever).But having said that, we also know that the Philosophy of Art has little (or no) content without the arts. Thus, for my own use, as well as the convenience of my students, I offer a list of my favorite art-related sites (no, I haven't visited all these museums, but I've been to many of them, and wish I could make it to the others). Further, as we enter a new century, and a new millennium, it could be worthwhile to look at what the various museums are doing with special exhibits just now to mark this rather unique moment in our history. Pardon what may seem an aside, but Robert Hughes did a fascinating review of one such exhibit for Time magazine (June 5, 2000, pp. 78-80), an article entitled "The Stuff Modernism Overthrew." The exhibition under review was at the Guggenheim Museum in New York ,"1900 :Art at the Crossroads.". Hughes notes that the artists whose works were valued in 1900 are not those we value today,.."not Cezanne, Mondrian, Picasso, but Boldini, Carolus-Duran, Zorn, Sorolla, Vrubel, Toorop, and Pellizza da Volpedo"(p.78). He also notes that the criteria for evaluation were different,"The ideal of high craft, of sheer manifest skill as a criterion of aesthetic success, had not yet been consigned to the trash can, and artists placed a value on drawing..."(ibid.). Today, an artist can dump a pile of excrement into an exhibition case, and call it art . We do not ask that he be able to do anything particularly well-we praise him for his creativity and originality,and perhaps for his ability to shock us (we do not even require that the excrement in question be his own, though of course it may be). Hughes apparently rates most of the works in the Guggenheim exhibition as somewhere between bad and gosh-awful. He leaves the reader with a sobering thought...he does not expect to be around in the year 2100 (nor do I)...but we can be sure that that year, museums in New York, and elsewhere, will be doing "Art 2000...!!" exhibitions, and those who attend will say, looking back at us..."How could anybody....??"

Favorite Art-related Websites!!

ENJOY !!!

Oh, while enjoying the arts, perhaps we should take time to remember that they are always in need of support. Everyone knows, for example that public schools (and universities) in America always seem able to find the money to support our football programs, while our music programs often go begging. My nephew, Paul Jennings, has a new website in support of music in America's public schools--check it out! Clearly, a good cause..

 

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EHD