PHIL 3050 *01: Philosophy of ArtWinter 2016

Location: MINS 103Class Time: Mondays 7pm-9:50pm

Instructor: Rachel ElliottEmail: rellio02@uoguelph.caOffice Hours: by appointment

Course Description:

What is artistic understanding and how is it related to philosophical understanding? This course offers students the opportunity to engage with five key thinkers in the philosophy of art – Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Dewey, and Merleau-Ponty. In equal part, students will develop the skills to reflect philosophically on their own artistic experience. We will identify and consider topics that recur in these texts, such as the nature of the work of art, the relationship between artist and audience, the role of community, genius and virtuosity, embodiment, representation, and the relationship between form and content.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of the course, students should be able to charitably interpret, intelligently critique, and judiciously appreciate the contemporary relevance of primary philosophical texts about art. They will have participated sensitively in a variety of art experiences – as artist and/or audience member – and be capable of talking and writing about these experiences in critical reflection. They will have shown the capacity to discriminatively employ new media as part of their learning process.

The most successful students in this course will have demonstrated the capacity to reflect upon and evaluate their prior beliefs about art, as well as the theories studied in class. A satisfactory performing student will be able to recognize how the philosophies we study implicate their own beliefs, and successfully apply those philosophies in new contexts. Moderate success will be had if a student can correctly recall and explain the theories studied, whereas a barely successful learner will be able to memorize and define the key concepts. Students who demonstrate fundamental misunderstandings of material and lack of effort will not be successful in passing the course.

Learning Activities:

This course is designed to be learner-centered, which means that student activity is considered to be the primary means by which learning takes place. Each learning outcome will therefore be paired with a variety of learning activities, upon which students will receive both formative, and summative assessment. This course is also based on constructivist principles, which holds that new knowledge is ‘constructed’ out of pre-existing knowledge (‘building materials’), not out of thin air. This means that the instructor will using what students already know to teach them what they don’t yet know, in terms of learning outcomes. The instructor will therefore be frequently attempting to assess students’ state of understanding in order to make the learning activities as effective as possible.

Some examples of the sorts of learning activities that may be assigned by the instructor are:

- creating a post or commenting on a post on the course Facebook group

- contributing to group discussion in-class- bringing in a favorite quotation from the assigned reading- attending an art event - creating an art work/doing artistic activity- providing feedback on the work of a peer (e.g. their topic statement)- representing in schematic form the argument in an assigned passage

of text- short critical reflection on your own artistic practice- creating a mind-map of ideas discussed in class- taking notes on a lecture- doing a reading response- answering questions about a video clip- contributing to the class google document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15iD1Ng5N5MXp7NOWSq91ecr2fSDVSb4UBbhNutPh9t4/edit

Forms of Assessment:

1. Learning Activities: 30%

Each activity will be worth 2%, students must complete 15 activities. There will be 20 opportunities to perform a learning activity. Typically, each week, one activity will take place in-class, and one will take place outside of class (as homework). These will be graded based on completion (if you do it at all, you get full marks). Students will receive formative feedback on their work (tips on how to improve).

2. Essay: 40% Total

Topic Statement Due Feb 8th (10%)Outline Due March 7th (10%)Final Version April 4 (20%)

3. Final Exam: 30%

April 22, 2016: 08:30AM - 10:30AM Location TBA

Required Texts:

Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns eds. Philosophies of Art & Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. This is available for purchase at the University of Guelph Bookstore.

Two of the readings will be distributed using the reference management system Zotero. Your will have to sign up for a free account to access these texts. Our class URL is: https://www.zotero.org/groups/452046. Supplementary readings and references from lectures will also be posted there. This will serve as our class bibliography.

Date & Topic Required Reading

The exact pages to be read will be announced in the preceding class.

Supplementary Reading and Media (see Zotoro) & Due Dates

January 11: Introduction

Active Reading Instructions (Zotoro)

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin (1935)“Ways of Seeing” Episode 1, You Tube, by John Berger (1972)

January 18: Imitation

Plato:Republic

Book II: pp. 8 – 11; (376e – “Conceptual and Aesthetic Truth” by Ken Dorter (1990)

379e)Book III: pp. 17 – 29; (392a – 403c)Book X: pp. 32-34 (597b – 599b) pp. 36 – 38 (601a – 602b)Laws

pp. 49 – 51; (667b – 669b)

Elliott, Rachel. “Episode #18: Christine Duncan and the Element Choir.” Sound It Out.Gabriel Dharmoo, Maggie Nicols, Phil Minton & Chris Tonelli - Vocal Improvisation, June 24, 2014. You Tube.

January 25: Inspiration

Plato :Ion

pp.53 – 57; (532b – 536b)Phaedrus

pp.57 – 67; (246a – 256d)

“Ways of Seeing” Episode 2, You Tube, by John Berger (1972)Janice Loreck. “What Does the ‘male Gaze’ Mean, and What about a Female Gaze?” The Conversation. (2016).Mulvey, Laura.“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18.

February 1: Beauty

Kant (Critique of Judgment: Analytic of the Beautiful)pp. 280 – 282 (§ 1— §2)pp. 285-288 (§5 – §7)pp. 291 -295 (§9 – §11)pp. 301 – 304 (§18 – §22)pp. 306 – 307

Winchester, James. “Understanding Aesthetic Judgments Across Cultural Borders: Bell Hooks, Kant, and Cornel West and the Understanding of Aesthetic Judgments of Others.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 38.3 (2000): 499–525.Lewis, George E. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.”

Black Music Research Journal 16.1 (1996): 91–122.

February 8: The Sublime Genius,

Kant (Critique of Judgment: Analytic of the Sublime) pp.82 – 106 Zotero PDF (§23 - §28)Kant (Critique of Judgment: Analytic of the Sublime)pp. 314 – 323 (§46, §48, §49, §50)

Topic Statement DueBell, Clive. Art. London: Chatto & Windus, 1914.Greenberg, Clement. “American Type Painting” (1955/58) Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961)Rosenberg, Harold, “American Action Painters” Art News. 57n8, 1952

February 15: READING WEEK

February 22:Form and Dynamism

Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy)pp. 498 – 504 (§1, §2)pp. 510 - 521 (§5, §6, §7)pp. 524 – 527 (end of §8)

LLe Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror : An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Feminisms: An anthology of literary theory and criticism (1997): 347–362.

February 29:Audience

Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy)pp. 535 - 554 (§11- §15)

Essay Outline Due

“Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated” by Robert Morris (1970)

March 7: Dewey (Art as Experience) “Musagetes Manifesto”

A Way of Life pp. 579 – 615March 14: Experience

Dewey (Art as Experience)pp.615 – 646

Iyer, Vijay. “Improvisation,Temporality and Embodied Experience.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11.3-4 (2004): 159–173.

March 21:Expressing a World

Merleau-Ponty (Eye & Mind)(PDF Zotero)

Essay DueWiskus, Jessica (2013) “Cezanne: Depth in the World.” The Rhythm of Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp.13 – 25.

March 28:Seeing-As

Merleau-Ponty (Eye & Mind)(PDF Zotero)

Zwicky, Jan (2008). Wisdom & Metaphor. Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press. (selections)

April 4: Review

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