September 1, 2022
by Aesthetics for Birds
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It’s back-to-school season. For those of us who work in education, that means thinking about readings, syllabi, course design, and all that exciting stuff. For others, it means less outdoorsy vacation time and more indoor activities. No matter which group you fall into, we thought some reading recs might be nice.
This year we are introducing a reading list on art, aesthetics, and disability.
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August 25, 2022
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What follows is a guest post by Hannah Kim.
A symposium on Korean Aesthetics is forthcoming in the next issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, so, to mark the occasion—and perhaps whet your intellectual appetite—I want to share a gem of a passage that I came across a few years ago.
The passage is from Park Jiwon (박지원 (pen name: 연암 yeonam), 1737-1805), an eighteenth-century Korean philosopher and novelist who belonged to the “practical learning” school.
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August 11, 2022
by Aesthetics for Birds
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Voyeur gaming is the phenomenon of watching, reading, or listening to others play (video) games. It has been around for as long as games have. Many of us have fond memories of sitting on the couch with friends or siblings, being wowed by someone else’s (lack of) skill. But the internet turned voyeur gaming into a proper phenomenon. From humble beginnings as a thread in the Something Awful forums, voyeur gaming is now a full blown industry, with millions upon millions of people eagerly awaiting the next video from their favorite YouTuber or Twitch streamer, some of whom earn over $18 million a year. Meanwhile, game companies are paying streamers to play (and build hype for) new releases, and are specifically designing their games with voyeur gaming content creation in mind.
With the rise of Twitch and esports, it is fair to say that voyeur gaming has become a significant part of our culture.
But, for all that, little has been written about the aesthetic aspects of voyeur gaming. The following collection of posts set out to partially address this lacuna.
Our Contributors:
August 5, 2022
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What follows is a guest post by Helen De Cruz (Saint Louis University). She is the editor and illustrator of the recent book Philosophy Illustrated, forty-two thought experiments to broaden your mind.
Pictures may seem like a strange way to philosophize, since people tend to think of philosophy as existing exclusively in written tomes. However, once you let go of the notion of philosophy as abstract ideas put into writing, you start to see it in lots of places. Think of René Magritte’s surrealist paintings such as his “La Durée Poignardé” (literally: Duration Stabbed, but translated more figuratively as Time Transfixed), which features a train racing out of a fireplace. To reflect on this picture requires active engagement and imagination on the part of the viewer.
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May 12, 2022
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What follows is a guest post by Justin Khoo (MIT).
Some of my most cherished memories of graduate school are from a screening room of some kind – sometimes the Whitney Humanities Center, where I was lucky enough to see film prints of 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Exorcist, and Mulholland Drive (among many others), but more often some random classroom in Yale’s Hall of Graduate Studies (RIP!), which became, for one night, a place to gather to enjoy and discuss whatever movie one of us had rented from the library.
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April 14, 2022
by Aesthetics for Birds
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Writing Why it’s OK to Love Bad Movies has given me an opportunity to bring together two of the most important parts of my life: my cinephilia and my research in philosophy of art. This is not a book I dreamed up in a library or classroom. It emerges from the countless hours I’ve spent immersed in the medium of film, and it’s more of a love letter than a treatise. The ideas I present convey my own way of being as much as my views about debates in aesthetics.
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April 6, 2022
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What follows is a case study by Theodore Gracyk, excerpted from Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics, the newest module of the Bloomsbury Philosophy Library. Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics is anchored by a set of exclusive and original case studies contributed by some of the leading voices in aesthetics today, and written to introduce new students to the broad range of topics in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, from interpretation and ontology to appropriation, taste, curiosity, and the aesthetics of confusion. More information on BCA and the Bloomsbury Philosophy Library follows below.
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March 10, 2022
by Aesthetics for Birds
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This is entry #87 in our ongoing 100 Philosophers, 100 Artworks, 100 Words Series.
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February 23, 2022
by Aesthetics for Birds
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This is entry #86 in our ongoing 100 Philosophers, 100 Artworks, 100 Words Series.
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February 18, 2022
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What follows is a guest post by Aderemi Artis.
“All philosophy is based on only two things, having a curious spirit, and bad eyes.”1
In an interesting aside in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke writes, “Were our Senses alter’d, and made much quicker and acuter, the appearance and outward Scheme of things would have quite another Face to us.”2 Raised on comic books wherein heroes and villains often had augmented senses, I have long dreamed about what the world would look like to superhuman perception. Locke himself specifically mentions the prospect of our vision being made “100000 times more acute than…the best Microscope.” Records of his library also show he had a copy of Robert Hooke’s popular and hard-to-get Micrographia (1665),3 in which Hooke described the microscope as an “artificial Organ.” Here is one of Hooke’s images of a fly, the sort of appearance Locke might have had in mind:
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