Philosophy 290-4

This seminar will be devoted to a close reading of writings by John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the topic of art. Both thinkers frame their understanding of art against the background of accounts of experience and the natural world. Dewey and Merleau-Ponty held that it is only possible to understand art and its place in human life if you have an adequate conception of experience and nature. In addition, they seem to have believed that art itself may be a medium for arriving at that adequate conception.

The texts for this course will include: Art As Experience, by John Dewey (Penguin/Perigree, 1934); The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, (edited by Galen A. Johnson Northwestern University Press, 1993); Sense and Non-sense, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, (edited by Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Northwestern University Press, 1964). In addition, we will read selections from The Phenomenology of Perception, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Translated by Donald A Landes, Routledge, 2012), as well as writings by other authors.