Event: '"Separatism And Syncretism In The Philosophy Of Architecture"- Paul Guyer' Print
  Greater Boston
Events taking place in the Boston area.
Date: Tuesday, October 02, 2012 At 06:30 pm
Contact Info:
Email: htc@mit.edu

 Location: MIT Room 7-431 (Long Lounge), 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

 

This lecture illustrates the argument of Professor Guyer’s forthcoming History of Modern Aesthetics by discussing some philosophical thought about architecture. Aesthetics from Aristotle through the Renaissance was generally cognitivist, but in the eighteenth century two new approaches to art emerged, namely an emphasis on the emotional impact of art and an account of the free play of the imagination triggered by the experience of art. Only a few thinkers in that era managed to synthesize all three approaches, and the great thinkers about architecture in German idealism at the start of the nineteenth, namely Hegel and Schopenhauer, reverted to a purely cognitivist approach. In the Seven Lamps of Architecture, however, John Ruskin demonstrated the power of a synthetic approach drawing on all three approaches. This lecture will interpret Ruskin’s accomplishment in light of this background. 

 

BIO: Paul Guyer received his A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard College and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1974. He taught at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Illinois-Chicago before teaching for thirty years at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was Florence R.C. Murray Professor in the Humanities. He is now the inaugural Jonathan Nelson Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Brown University. He is the author of nine books and editor of six collections on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, including three books and one anthology focusing on Kant’s aesthetics. He is also the co-translator of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and Notes and Fragments in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, of which he is Co-General Editor. He has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Prize. His most recent project has been a three-volume book, A History of Modern Aesthetics, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Professor Guyer is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been president of both the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and the American Society for Aesthetics.