The “Rolling Stone”:
Dewey’s Experience of Art in Today’s Aesthetics

a talk by

       
       
Mario Perniola
Professor of Aesthetics, University of Rome Tor Vergata

Tuesday, 6 May, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Philosophy Department Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
(Moderator: Dr. Loy Hui Chieh)

Abstract: The first part of the talk focuses on the present situation of aesthetics considered as an academic discipline. On one hand, there has been an expansion of the aesthetic horizon to many aspects of every day experiences; but on the other hand, there is also a fragmentation of the aesthetic horizon. The second part deals with Dewey’s aesthetics, highlighting the comparison of the aesthetic experience with a stone rolling down a hill. At first sight, this is a very strange metaphor. In actual fact, Dewey’s view breaks completely with hedonistic aesthetics. Pleasure and pain, as all other emotions, should not be considered separately, but as part of the process characterizing experience that happens as an episode of a novel or play. Emotion is part of an entity that is involved in a struggle, from which it acquires meaning. The aim of this lecture is to consider art as the fulfillment of the aesthetic experience and to strongly deny the idea that every daily experience could be immediately aesthetic.

The Speaker: Mario Perniola (http://www.marioperniola.it/) is Full Professor of Aesthetics and former director of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He was also Visiting Professor in many universities and research centers in France, Denmark, Brazil, Japan, Canada and USA. He has edited the journals Agaragar (1971-3), Clinamen (1988-92), Estetica News (1988-95) and Ágalma: Rivista di studi culturali e di estetica (since 2000). Some of his published books are Enigmas (Verso, 1995), Ritual Thinking: Sexuality, Death, World (Humanity Books, 2001), The Sex appeal of the Inorganic (Continuum, 2004) and The Art and its Shadow (Continuum 2004). Ritual Thinking has been translated into Chinese by Lu Jie (Beijing: Commercial Press, 2006)

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