The 12th International Conference of

 

ISSEI

 

In cooperation

With

International Society for the Study of European Ideas

 

 

 

Section IV: Literature, Art, Music, Theatre, Culture

 

Workshop: Artistic Thought – Positivism and/ or Fiction (Crisis or Evolution?)

 

Chair: Mihaela Albu

 

The crisis of art, the death of art – these are the subjects of a discourse that, from Plato to Herbert Marcuse, one of the last herald of this message – characterize present-day esthetics. At the beginning of the 20th century, Oswald Spengler warned: “civilization has become a machine and it does or wants to do everything according to the model of a machine. (…) World mechanization has entered in a very dangerous stage”. Thus, in this time when we assist to the pressure of technology and computerizing, the question regarding the place of art in human beings’ horizon becomes more and more of present interest.

 

The Vienna Circle had declared that metaphysics was devoid of sense and claimed that the body of knowledge should be structured according to the paradigms of hard sciences. These efforts towards a reconstruction of logic exacerbated cognitive dimensions, including for art ontology. The transfer of certain ways of thinking from sciences to aesthetics underpinned a different framework for understanding and conceiving.

 

Is art a special “shelter” for everything that we consider represents the authenticity of man? Is art a rational or irrational act? Is art a lie, the mind’s corruption disturbing and dulling it, as Plato warned us? Is art a transcendental intuition, a document of philosophy, an image of the endlessness of life, as Schelling used to understand it? Or maybe, together with Religion and Philosophy, Art could be the door on the path to the Absolute, as Hegel asserted in his Lectures of Aesthetics.

 

The principal aim of the workshop Artistic Thought – Positivism and/ or Fiction (Crisis or Evolution?) is to analyze the dialogue between science and art/ literature and to answer the question about whether or not they can reveal a crucial interdependence.

 

Prof. dr. Mihaela Albu

University of Craiova, Romania

malbu_10@yahoo.com

                         

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

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