Philosophy Course Descriptions: Fall 2007

PHIL 502

Professor Dennis Schmidt

One of the hallmarks of what we today, in the States, refer to as “Continental Philosophy” is the link that this tradition draws between truth and art. Following in the wake of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the tradition that eventually defines Continental thought begins by taking Kant’s claim seriously: something a priori emerges out of aesthetic experience and, furthermore, what emerges here cannot be translated into the conceptual language of philosophy. Art thus comes to represent a possible disclosure of truth that not only appears apart from philosophy, it also represents a resistance to philosophy and its language.
The development of this tradition – from Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin through Schlegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche – has entailed a greater effort to take works of art seriously as such claims to truth and as challenges to philosophizing. In the 20th century, this effort has played a central, if not the central, role in the thought of many of that century’s key thinkers. For many reasons – some traceable again to Kant, some to Plato – the question of painting has come to be the exemplary question about the achievement of the work of art in the present age.
The purpose of this seminar is to trace the development and analyses of some of the most decisive texts devoted to this project. While we will situate this project within the larger concern with images as such (a concern that is as old as philosophy itself), we will concentrate upon the topic of the painted image in the work of art. We will begin with the assumption that there is, as Gadamer writes, an “enormous gap” between traditional forms and contemporary forms of painting and as such traditional interpretative approaches no longer serve the purpose of helping us understand what happens in the painted image. Non-objective art, abstraction, and other ways in which traditional forms of art have been disrupted will be of special interest.
We will concentrate upon the question of the image, however, we will necessarily have to address the topic of ekphrasis, that is of the relation of words to the images that they seek to describe.

Undergraduate