Aesthetics for Birds

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art for Everyone

Tag Archives: painting

January 7, 2014
by Aesthetics for Birds
4 Comments

Images, Generally Speaking

What follows is a guest post by John Kulvicki, John is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College. He works on representation in philosophy of art and philosophy of mind. He is the author of two books on images, one if which is actually called On Images: Their Structure and Content (Clarendon 2006). The other is cleverly titled Images (Routledge 2014), because he’s gotten into the whole brevity thing. He is hard at work on papers on analog and digital representation, and hopes very soon to write more about the philosophy of perception. I just published a book as part of Routledge’s New Problems of Philosophy series, Images(2014). While I spend a good deal of time discussing theories of pictorial representation, my overall hope is to refocus philosophers on a broader class: the images, generally speaking. You all know what this class is like, at least extensionally speaking: photographs, line drawings, radar images, x-ray images, … Continue reading →

September 30, 2013
by Aesthetics for Birds
5 Comments

Jesse Prinz on Magritte (artbullion)

Over at artbouillon, Jesse Prinz has a nice piece Magritte’s place in the Surrealist narrative (prompted by the new exhibition at MoMA). I have to say that I’m hugely sympathetic with Prinz’s call for Magritte’s excision from the Surrealist canon. For one, I’ve never fully understood the pull Surrealism has for so many, as I see the movement itself to be a lateral if not frustrating step backward in the history of 20th century visual art and most works of its “Masters” (especially Ernst, Tanguy, and Dali) little more than crude exercises in artistic juvenilia. Second, I find most of Magritte’s work to be intellectually playful and philosophically astute in ways few if any of his supposed Surrealist kin could hope to be and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, regard the less than impressive examples of Magritte’s work as invariably those commonly taken to exemplify the Surrealist spirit, the most notable of which being Le Viol (The … Continue reading →

September 16, 2013
by Aesthetics for Birds
8 Comments

Interview with Philosopher-Artist Keith Lehrer (Arizona/Miami)

Keith Lehrer is the Regent’s Professor emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Arizona with an affiliation with the University of Miami (Florida). In addition to his numerous published articles in areas such as epistemology, free will, rational consensus, and Thomas Reid, Keith has also authored several books including Thomas Reid (1989), Theory of Knowledge (1990), and Self-Trust: A Study of Reason, Knowledge, and Autonomy (1997). Keith also has a research interest in aesthetics, with his most recent book being Art, Self and Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2011), and can currently be found bridging the gap between theory and practice as an active painter and performance artist (the website for his paintings can be found here). It is truly an honor to have Keith as part of Aesthetics for Birds’ Philosopher-Artist series.