Aesthetics and Philosophy of Science
The philosophy of art and beauty alongside the philosophy of science, mathematics, and technology, examining how humans create meaning and produce knowledge.
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The ancient and early modern foundations of aesthetic theory, tracing a line from Plato's suspicion of mimesis and Aristotle's defense of tragedy through Neoplatonic and medieval accounts of beauty to the Renaissance theory of artistic genius and the eighteenth-century debates over taste, the sublime, and the objectivity of aesthetic judgment.
Kant's Critique of Judgment and its transformation of aesthetics into a distinct branch of critical philosophy, along with its Romantic and modern successors, from Schiller and Hegel through Schopenhauer to Benjamin and Adorno.
The twentieth-century inquiry into scientific method, explanation, and the rationality of theory change, from the Vienna Circle's verificationism through Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend to the contemporary realism debate.
The foundational debates over the nature of mathematical objects, truth, and proof — from Platonism and formalism to intuitionism, logicism, and Gödel's theorems — that shaped modern logic and set theory.
The philosophical examination of technology's transformation of human life, culminating in contemporary debates over artificial minds and machine agency.
The extension of aesthetic theory beyond the artwork to the natural world, and philosophical reflection on humanity's place within nature, from the sublime landscapes of Burke and the Romantics to contemporary debates over how to appreciate, and preserve, nature on its own terms.
The extension of aesthetic theory into cinema and popular culture, examining how mass art forms generate meaning, emotion, and philosophical reflection.