PHL 236 - Philosophy & the Arts

1 course unit

Art works and aesthetic objects are frequently held up as some of the most civilized and civilizing components of any society or community. Foundations preserve their contribution to identity and heritage, museums prolong their status in cultural memory, and institutions receive and distribute funding to ensure their continued role in education and social values. Yet art and aesthetics can also serve as powerful vehicles of critique and disobedience - sometimes attacking these very foundations, museums, and institutions, in addition to government and other bodies of power - in any given community or social whole. It is this double nature of art as enacting both civility (through the aesthetic values of beauty, harmony, symmetry, and proportion) and disobedience (through the aesthetic orientations of ugliness, dissonance, the uncanny, sublimity, and incongruity) that we will explore in this course. After initially considering some aesthetic stereotypes of beauty versus ugliness as they have been documented throughout the ages, our course will look to contemporary applications of the relationship among art, civility, and protest.
Meets general academic requirement HU.