FREN 6945

Aesthetics, Before and Beyond Kant

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

Kant’s third Critique is often read as a text that inaugurates aesthetic philosophy proper and confirms the essential connection between aesthetics and (the modern metaphysics of) the human subject. Challenging this humanist understanding of Kant, this seminar studies pre- and post-Kantian philosophy, literature, and theory so as to rethink aesthetic categories as modes of being, ones deeply consequential in a time of nascent posthumanist and environmental thought. Alongside ancient, early modern, and contemporary readings, we will study relevant cases in the arts (the grotesque; landscape; sketching; the non-finito; fragments; ruins) and in ecological theory (fungi; plants; monstrosity; spontaneity).

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