Das Institut für Philosophie der Universität Wien, in Kooperation mit der Wiener Gesellschaft für interkulturelle Philosophie (WiGiP), lädt ein zum Vortrag von
Richard Shusterman (Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities, Director of the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture at Florida Atlantic University)
Ethics and Aesthetics: From Pragmatism to Somaesthetics and the Art of Living
Ort: Institut für Philosophie, NIG, HS 3B (3. Stock)
Zeit: Montag, 30. Mai 2022, 16.45-18.15 Uhr
Abstract: Ethics and aesthetics tend to be sharply distinguished and frequently opposed as rival realms of value. The apparent conflict between them is discomforting for artists and theorists who seek to combine aesthetical and ethical aims in their work. My lecture seeks to ease this theoretical tension in two principal ways. First, through a genealogical analysis of the complexity of our concepts of ethics and aesthetics, I argue that, in some of their conceptions, they display considerable convergence. Here I appeal both to classical Western and Asian theories of ethics and aesthetics. Second, I show how ethics and aesthetics converge in the pragmatist, somaesthetic notion of a philosophical art of living in which the soma is not only the medium of life but also our essential medium of self-knowledge and self-cultivation. Finally, if time remains, I explore how somaesthetically inspired performance art can contribute to this critical work on the self by considering the case of the Man in Gold, who challenges some conventional limits of personal identity and of philosophy as an exclusively linguistic enterprise.