Art Appreciation and Aesthetic Experience: Research Seminar with Noël Carroll
Abstract
In this seminar, we will discuss two recent papers by Noël Carroll – “Forget Taste” (2022)” and “Two Approaches to Aesthetic Experience” (2023). Together, these papers reckon with the legacy of 18th century philosophy (especially that of Hume and Kant) on contemporary thinking about art appreciation and aesthetic experience, as well as the relationship between the two. Departing from the well-known conception of the aesthetic appreciation of art as a matter of attending to the work for its own sake and making a judgement of taste, Carroll develops an alternative view according to which aesthetic appreciation is centrally a matter of ‘sizing up’ an artwork. More specifically, one central aim of appreciation, for Carroll, is to discern an artwork’s constitutive purpose and evaluate both how successfully it executes that purpose and the appropriateness of the means by which it executes it.
Presenter
Noël Carroll is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of twenty-three books including The Philosophy of Horror: or Paradoxes of the Heart and Humor: A Very Short Introduction, and he has edited or co-edited nine anthologies including The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. In addition to being a philosopher he has been a journalist and he has written five motion picture documentaries.