INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS

THE REASONS OF AESTHETICS

CONTEMPORARY DEBATES ON THE MEANINGS OF AESTHESIS

LIMA, 10th – 12th OF OCTOBER 2018

Free entrance, inscription required

Presentation

Aesthetic reflection has not occupied a central place in the history of western
thought. This, partially, because sensibility was understood as a mere passive
reception, considered even in conflict with understanding. And although
imagination was recognized as a productive faculty, it was interpreted as a faculty
all too distant from the from the ideal of objectivity to which the philosophical
tradition aspired. The emergence of Aesthetics, as an autonomous discipline in the
18th century, coincided precisely with the historical time in which reason, as a
superior cognitive faculty, sought to reach most ambitiously a general explanation
of the world and its phenomena. At the same time, this rationalistic project started
to show its limitations, first, in front of empiricism and, later, against Romanticism.
The project of Aesthetics was to integrate reason and sensibility with the aim that
such a conjunction was necessary to enrich and explain the human life and its
relation with the world. As a result, Aesthetics widened its objective field from the
art world to every sphere of knowledge, under the premise that in each one of those
spheres, the aesthesis played a central role as a basic, unavoidable, and in many cases
decisive stratum of knowledge.

Nevertheless, the still young discipline had to face new critics and suffered plenty of
transformations. Thus, for example, since the 19th century, the perspective of the
beholder, privileged in the beginning, was gradually replaced by the creator’s
perspective. At the same time, the relevance of reflection for sensibility was
questioned and separated from the every-day life. Meanwhile, art gained a more
reflexive and deliberately anesthetic character. In addition, “Philosophy of art”
started to replace “Aesthetics” in the common philosophical jargon, thinking that to
constrain the study of art to aesthetics meant to give it away to empiricism and to
reduce its concepts to merely psychological explanations. This proposal was not a
simple change of terms, but the genuine conviction to develop a philosophical
science of art with absolute and universal principles well above the mere
experience. This contributed to the separation of the aesthetic from the artistic, to
the point that, in the 20th century, authors such as Max Dessoir would hold that
Aesthetics could rightly study the sensitive, but the competence of art could only be
achieved by a general theory of art. All this developed along the emergence of other
approaches to art that pretended to give its study a more empirical basis: history,
anthropology, sociology, and psychology of art.

In the 20th century, Aesthetics also had to answer to authors that held an open
rejection of the discipline. Martin Heidegger, for example, considered that aesthetics
was part of the strengthening of modern subjectivity and the disaggregation of art.
Thus, he proposed its “remission” (Überwindung) with the aim to recover a unifying
concept of art, which would be foreign to the subject-object relation and would
understand its ontological character (revelation of thruth), instead of reducing art
to its anthropological value (expression of the human life). A similar critic is held
recently by the “speculative turn” that criticizes the subjectivism of aesthetic for
implying the subsumption of reality into representation. Thus, proposes to consider
aesthesis from an entirely objective ontology. There are those who propose to
“naturalize” the Aesthetics reducing all aesthetic experience, including art’s,
exclusively or mainly to the result of natural process or motivations; that is,
knowable only through biological or neuroscientific methods.

The so-called “Frankfurt School” encouraged the renewal of aesthetics from a

historical and social interest. Among those, we can name authors such as Theodor
Adorno or Walter Benjamin, but also more recent authors like Jacques Ranciere or
Martin Seel, to name only two representatives of this tradition with so many and
different perspectives. At the same time, the phenomenological tradition has
developed an increasing interest on the study of the aesthetic experience as a
creative activity focusing on the transcendental analysis of perception, imagination,
corporality, etc. There we have studies undertaken y Merlau-Ponty, Jean Paul Sartre
and Mikel Dufrenne, among other. Finally, art historians have renewed the dialogue
with aesthetic tradition, as is the case of the historian and curator Georges Didi-
Huberman.

The diversity of perspectives and notions of Aesthetics is currently what

characterizes this discipline in the field of philosophy, but, at the same time, this
connects it with several problems and discussions that press our time. To face this
complexity and the polemic about the relevance of Aesthetics, The Research Groups
on Art and Aesthetics of the PUCP organizes the international congress “The
Reasons of Aesthetics” with the aim of analyzing, debating and relating the different
meanings of Aesthetics, as well as to outline its place in the philosophical discussion
and the contemporary societies.

GUIDELINES:

1. Actuality of aesthetics
2. Autonomy and sovereignty of Aesthetics
3. Aesthetics, anaesthetics and anti-aesthetics.
 4. Aesthetics and Art history.
5. Aesthetics and Ethics (Politics, Society, Art World).
6. Aesthetics and Artistic practices.
7. Aesthetics and theory or philosophy of art.
8. History of art and history of Aesthetics.

Proposal outside of these guidelines may also be considered.

Call for papers

The Research Group on Art and Aesthetics of the Pontifical Catholic University of
Peru (PUCP) invites the academic and artistic community to submit papers fir the
congress “The reasons of aesthetics. Contemporary debates on the meanings of
Aesthesis” to take in Lima at the University Campus between the 10th and 12th of
October 2018.

The modern project of Aesthetics propose an integration of reason and sensibility

with the aim that such a conjunction was necessary to enrich and explain the human
life and its relation with the world. As a result, Aesthetics, as an autonomous
philosophical discipline, widened its objective field from the art world to every
sphere of knowledge, under the premise that in each one of those spheres, the
aesthesis played a central role as a basic, unavoidable, and in many cases decisive
stratum of knowledge. Nevertheless, the diversity of perspectives and notions of
Aesthetics is currently what characterizes this discipline in the field of philosophy,
but, at the same time, this connects it with several problems and discussions that
press our time. To face this complexity and the polemic about the relevance of
Aesthetics, The Research Groups on Art and Aesthetics of the PUCP organizes the
international congress “The Reasons of Aesthetics” with the aim of analyzing,
debating and relating the different meanings of Aesthetics, as well as to outline its
place in the philosophical discussion and the contemporary societies.

The main Guidelines of the Congress are:

1. Actuality of aesthetics
2. Autonomy and sovereignty of Aesthetics
3. Aesthetics, anaesthetics and anti-aesthetics.
4. Aesthetics and Art history.
5. Aesthetics and Ethics (Politics, Society, Art World).
6. Aesthetics and Artistic practices.
7. Aesthetics and theory or philosophy of art.
8. History of art and history of Aesthetic
Proposal outside of these guidelines may also be considered.
The papers shall have an extension between 3000 and 3500 word (notes and
bibliography not included) to be read in no longer than 20 minutes. For their blind
evaluation, papers and CVs (200 words each) must be sent via email to: grupo.arte-
estetica@pucp.edu.pe. The papers will be accepted in Spanish, Portuguese and
English.
Dateline: 30th of May 2018.

Intitutions and other groups could also propose symposiums, thematic talks, book
presentations or artistic workshops with theoretical basis. In those cases, the
proposals and CVs of the participants must be sent to the same email address until
the 15th of June 2018.