A space to discuss the philosophy of art and design.

This group will be a great resource for artists who want to learn about theories of art, engage with abstract ideas and have philosophical discussions. A lot of the current literature in Philosophy of Art is relevant to practicing artists and creatives.

We will begin with a selection of introductory texts and some guiding questions, such as

1) What is the nature of creativity?
2) What constitutes a work of art, i.e., what ingredients must it have to count as artwork; what makes art good art; who is in a position to tell?
3) What is a picture, and what differentiates the types of pictures from each other? (e.g. paintings vs. photographs)
4) What defines an artform; what counts as artistic medium and what doesn’t?

Every week Stour Space

FREE

More info: https://www.facebook.com/events/105321703622960/?notif_t=plan_user_invited&notif_id=1517934397310887

See More: https://philosophy.sas.ac.uk/events/event/14074

Description

“This is Awesome!” But is it Art? The Aesthetics of Pro-Wrestling

Lisa Jones (St. Andrews)

Familiar within the philosophy of art are discussions of whether or not ‘X’ is art, where X is (the product of) some sort of shared human activity or cultural practice that has not traditionally been viewed as having art-status. In recent times, for instance, we’ve seen this question asked of food, fashion, and comic books, to name a few examples. In this talk, I turn this question onto the practice of pro-wrestling – a world-wide performance phenomenon that occupies a somewhat strange place in the landscape of appreciation. Serious sports fans shun it, citing its alleged ‘fakeness’ as a reason for not engaging with it; meanwhile, pro-wrestling institutions, like WWE, refer to their product as ‘sports entertainment’. While many would accept the ‘entertainment’ classification, few people would be willing to describe pro-wrestling as art.

Non-Foundational Direct Access: What it is and Why it Matters for the Epistemology of Aesthetics

Errol Lord (University of Pennsylvania)

Date: 01 Nov 2017, 16:00 to 18:00

Venue: Room 234, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Abstract

This paper is a defence of the epistemic significance of cognitively penetrated perceptions of high-level properties. While some are motivated by epistemic considerations to accept the existence of cognitively penetrated perceptions of high-level properties, it has been recently argued that such perceptions cannot play a significant epistemic role. This is because such perceptions are ill-suited to provide foundational justification. They are ill-suited because it is plausible that their epistemic standing is held hostage to the background cognitive states that do the penetrating. I argue that such perceptions are epistemically significant even if they don’t provide foundational justification. I do this by showing that the sort of non-foundational direct access such perceptions afford is crucial to the epistemology of aesthetics