3 conferences by THOMAS ADAJIAN | Lisbon, 1 April | Braga, 2 April | PORTO, 5 April - 10h00, Sala DF - FLUP
FLUP | Instituto de Filosofia
PORTO | 5 April 2024 | 10h00 | Sala do Departamento de Filosofia (Torre B - Piso 1)
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (FLUP)
Thomas Adajian
(James Madison University) will be in Portugal for a series of three conferences between Lisbon, Braga and Porto, on the 1st,
2nd and 5th of April 2024, respectively.
LISBON
1 April 2024 | 16h00 | Anfiteatro III FLUL
Towards a pragmatic (Peircean) definition of art
The paper sketches a speculative reconstruction of a Peircean definition of art, which draws on Peirce’s experimentalist theory of definition, and the three branches of philosophy that he calls “normative sciences”– logic, ethics, aesthetics.
Peirce’s views on logic, science, and ethics are experimentalist and deeply communitarian. Can this be extended to art? Peirce’s answer to the demarcation problem in the philosophy of science rests on an account of practices according to which what characterizes science is not scientific methods or products but rather the spirit that animates exemplary scientific practitioners, the ideal that they seek, and the virtues that define them. I generalize this to the case of art. From this perspective, the notion of an art practice (≠ Dickie’s or Danto’s artworlds) is more fundamental than that of artworks. Just as in science gives rise to and is embodied in distinctive scientific virtues (cf. Pennock, An Instinct for Truth: Curiosity and the Moral Character of Science) artistic – i.e., aesthetic -- ideals generate distinctive artistic virtues. Peirce’s account of artistic practices, hence of art, is, then, a sort of virtue theory, with prominence given to feelings. It is, arguably, superior to the other practice-centered views of art: Lopes (Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value (2018)); Wolterstorff (Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art (2015)), two pluralistic views which (over)emphasize the disunity of the phenomena.
BRAGA
2 April 2024 | 15h00 | Universidade do Minho, Auditório ELACH, Campus de Gualtar
The One and the Many: Beauty, Artistic Value
Consider four possible views of F: F is many and not one (pluralism); F is one and not many (monism); F is both one and many (moderate monism or moderate pluralism); F is neither many nor one (anti-realism or nihilism). F can take many values – goodness, truth, pleasure, and many more. The focus here is on the aesthetic: Is beauty one or many? Is visual beauty one or many? Is artistic value one or many? Are they unities or merely heaps?
Views that plump for the many over the one have recently been defended by some prominent aestheticians. Jerrold Levinson states that “visual beauty is irreducibly multiple … the types thereof are essentially different and not reducible or assimilable to one another… [there are] at least six fundamentally different properties of visual beauty,” of “radically different sorts." In short, “beauty has only a superficial unity….beauty is not one.” Dominic Lopes holds that “there is no characteristically artistic value… artistic value is the aggregate of pictorial value, musical value, and other such values; it need not be their common denominator… There is no ‘substantive unity’ to the values realized by works in the different arts. Artistic value is a disjunction of the values that works have as members of specific art kinds.” If views, like these, that emphasize the many over the one, are superior to views that do not privilege the many over the one, then that it may be because (a) their views are explanatorily superior to alternatives that do not privilege the many over the one, or (b) the arguments for them are strong. Is either of these the case?
PORTO
5 April 2024 | 10h00 | Sala do Departamento de Filosofia (Torre B - Piso 1)
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (FLUP)
Towards a pragmatic (Peircean) definition of art
The paper sketches a speculative reconstruction of a Peircean definition of art, which draws on Peirce’s experimentalist theory of definition, and the three branches of philosophy that he calls “normative sciences”– logic, ethics, aesthetics.
Peirce’s views on logic, science, and ethics are experimentalist and deeply communitarian. Can this be extended to art? Peirce’s answer to the demarcation problem in the philosophy of science rests on an account of practices according to which what characterizes science is not scientific methods or products but rather the spirit that animates exemplary scientific practitioners, the ideal that they seek, and the virtues that define them. I generalize this to the case of art. From this perspective, the notion of an art practice (≠ Dickie’s or Danto’s artworlds) is more fundamental than that of artworks. Just as in science gives rise to and is embodied in distinctive scientific virtues (cf. Pennock, An Instinct for Truth: Curiosity and the Moral Character of Science) artistic – i.e., aesthetic -- ideals generate distinctive artistic virtues. Peirce’s account of artistic practices, hence of art, is, then, a sort of virtue theory, with prominence given to feelings. It is, arguably, superior to the other practice-centered views of art: Lopes (Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value (2018)); Wolterstorff (Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art (2015)), two pluralistic views which (over)emphasize the disunity of the phenomena.
This series of lectures is a cooperation between IF-UP, CFUL and CEHUM.
Organization:
Vítor Guerreiro (IF-UP)
Research Group Aesthetics, Politics and Knowledge (APK)
Instituto de Filosofia da Universidade do Porto - UIDB/00502/2020
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)
CFUL - Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa (núcleo de estudantes da FLUL, Páginas Transcendentes)
CEHUM - Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho
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