Jan 13th 2017

The Concepts of Aesthetic Form conference, part of The Idealism Project at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, is devoted to the concept of form in humanistic inquiry. It is especially interested in the kind of formal generality at issue in humanistic disciplines, and the differences between such formality and, for example, the concept of scientific law. Our approach is exploratory, and we begin with no fixed commitments. Our initial orientation assumes that what distinguishes objects of study in the humanities — literature, art objects, music, etc. — is that they are the objects they are by virtue of the self-understanding embodied in these objects, and that humanistic inquiry attempts to articulate the self-understanding and purposiveness that is the basis of the distinct unity of the objects themselves.

We are interested both in basic transformations in the history of philosophical thought about these issues, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel and many others, as well as in the embodiment of different alternatives of such formal unity in various art works and in critical thinking about these works.

This conference is a sequel to the Revolutions in the Concept of Form conference.

This conference is jointly organized by Prof. James Conant (Univeristy of Chicago), Prof. Robert Pippin (University of Chicago), and Prof. David Wellbery (University of Chicago), assisted by Garrett Allen (Chicago). The conference is funded primarily by The Neubauer Collegium. The following institutional partners have also provided support for this conference: The Franke Institute, The Committee on Social Thought, The Department of Philosophy, The Department of Germanic Studies, and The Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture.

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