Conferences

Aesthetics and History of Science Workshop

A Conference Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy,
University of Otago,
Dunedin,
New Zealand

25-26 February 2010.

Registration

$20 unwaged / $50 waged

Please register in advance of the workshop by emailing:
Hannah Burgess burha352 AT student.otago.ac.nz
or
Juan Gomez gomju504 AT student.otago.ac.nz

Venue

Hocken Library Conference space: 90 Anzac Avenue, North Dunedin

Abstract

On the face of things it seems that art and science are fundamentally, perhaps irremediably, at odds with each other. The view of our experience of art, that has dominated post-enlightenment thinking about it, is that it stands apart from our ordinary experience of the world. While our ordinary experiences operate according to rules, concepts and determinate ends, our aesthetic experiences do not. Rather, our aesthetic experiences take place precisely in the absence of determinate concepts, rules and ends. Science, by contrast, is a deeply rule-governed and progressive enterprise, which is virtually synonymous with knowledge itself. Much writing about aesthetics, since its emergence as a distinct area of study has assumed this incommensurability with science. This view has led to an obscuring of the undeniable interdependence of aesthetics and science.

With the rise of interdisciplinary study, the last two decades have seen a whole body of literature emerge on the relationship of aesthetics to other fields. These include ethics, religion, politics and science. The attention of various scholars has shifted, to focus on how we might usefully relate aesthetics to other areas of life.

Those interested in the relationship between science and art have been turning their attention back to pre-enlightenment thought, and those times in history when aesthetics and science have been most obviously and deeply intertwined. Questions concerning the beauty of scientific theories, the mechanization of art, and the influence that technological advances have on our aesthetic experience are all part of this still-emerging area of study.

Both science and art are directly concerned with the way that we interpret and make sense of the world. So it would seem that advances made in science might influence our understanding of beauty, and vise versa.

The purpose of this workshop is to promote thinking about the relationship between aesthetics and science, as it has stood over history as well as it might stand today. To our minds, the relationship between science and art is one of the most fascinating areas of study in the humanities, one that is already on its way to becoming a unique discipline in its own right. Our hope, in running this workshop, is to promote a community of thinking about aesthetics and the history of science on a local and national level. We are lucky to have a mixture of experts and graduate students from the fields of art history, aesthetics, the history of science and philosophy contributing to this community of ideas.

Programme

Speakers and Abstracts

We have always lived in intimate contact with non-human animals and understand many aspects of their lives. We eat them, put them to work, farm then, use them for sport, and have them as pets. As well, we admire them and many humans identify non-human animals as gods and tribal ancestors. The earliest European cave paintings are mainly of animals. It is no more surprising that we have aesthetic attitudes to non-human animals, then, than that we have them to fellow humans and to landscapes and environments.

Our aesthetic interest in animals probably has several sources, dating back to our origins as hunter-gatherers: we extend to them aesthetic preferences we have for certain human characteristics; the rare or unusual can have aesthetic appeal; their roles in our ancestors' lives affects whether they are seen as attractive or repulsive; we admire their adaptedness; our senses and perceptual triggers resonate with their mutual displays; we view them literally as God's artworks or imaginatively as pseudo-artworks; or we abstract their appearances from their natural context in order to engage aesthetically with these as formal or sensory arrays.

University of Auckland

Many Locke scholars have claimed that Locke lacked an aesthetic sense. It is also commonly believed that, for Locke, ideas of beauty and form are creations of the mind and not derived from sense experience. This paper argues that both of these views are false. There is plenty of evidence that Locke appreciated art, literature and especially good food. Furthermore, there are passages in his Essay concerning Human Understanding that suggest he believed that the archetypes of those ideas he calls mixed modes, including beauty, are often derived from sense perception.

University of Otago

The Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai (1802-1860) announced his discovery of an alternative, non-Euclidean geometry in extravagant terms. ‘Out of nothing’, he proclaimed, ‘I have created a new and another world’. These sound less like the words of a mathematician and more like those of an excitable artist - corporately once described by the critic Clement Greenberg as ‘inveterate futurists, votaries of false dawns, sufferers from the millenial complex’. Thus, almost inevitably by the beginning of the twentieth-century, a new preoccupation with ‘non-Euclidean’ space had developed amongst artists, critics and theorists.

Yet the idea of a non-Euclidean geometry is, in a significant respect, simply a conceit, and so too its alleged manifestation in early twentieth-century art. Here, discussion will centre on Cubism and the work of Marcel duchamp. What may be more surprising, however, is the contention that perspectival painting before the twentieth century is equally non-Euclidean, and quite as much a conceit of space.

University of Otago

I am currently studying towards a Master's degree in Art History and Theory, looking at the impact of space exploration on the contemporary art genre of Earthworks. This workshop is of great interest to me as it sets the stage for discussion relating both directly to my topic and to the broader peripheral issues arising from my research. I will introduce Earthworks and its place in late 1960s American culture, a culture largely created by the rhetoric and images of space exploration, before looking at topics specifically related to the ideas raised by the workshop.

Topics to be discussed include: 'space' (in all possible ways it can be understood as a term) as both a scientific and aesthetic concept; the NASA art programme; photographs of space and Earth as both scientific documentation and aesthetic objects; the affects of advances in space technology on our experience of Earthworks; science fiction; and entropy as both a law of thermodynamics and an aesthetic process.

University of Otago

University of Canterbury

Modern science has various characteristic features, including experiments, hypotheses, measurement tools, mathematical models, peer review and competition for funding. I am interested in two significant features of modern science that developed during the early modern period: experiment and mathematics. I use 18th century optics as a case study, in order to shed some light on these developments. My work in this area is at an early stage, but I present some interesting initial findings for discussion.

University of Otago

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