The Aesthetics 1-4 course series offers students a comprehensive overview of the tradition and present of aesthetic thinking in a broader cultural context. The primary focus is on the philosophy of art, but the series also includes an explanation of basic aesthetic categories (aesthetic experience, aesthetic attitude, aesthetic object, aesthetic function, norm, quality, value, taste, beauty, ugliness, the sublime), an introduction to issues of non-art aesthetics (aesthetics of nature, applied art, design, popular and mass culture, aesthetics of the everyday), or topics in the theory of individual art forms, media theory, and visual culture studies. In addition to philosophical conceptions of art and aesthetics, approaches from other humanities disciplines (psychology, sociology, anthropology, visual studies, gender studies, critical race theory) are also considered. Over the course of the four-semester cycle, students will gradually become familiar with the interpretation of the issues from both historical and systematic perspectives.  

Aesthetics 3 focuses on a systematic survey of key issues in contemporary aesthetics: the definition of art, the ontology of the artwork, the value of art, originality and reproducibility, the media and material conditions of art, the relationship between art and mass culture, the social role of art, the relationship between images and power in society, corporeality and identity in art with respect to gender and race, the environmental aspects of the artistic worldview and aesthetic experience, and the historical and geographically bounded nature of notions of art and aesthetic experience.