Corso di laurea magistrale in Filosofia

The next lecture of ART (Aesthetics Research Torino) Philosophical Seminar will be delivered by Prof. Richard Shusterman on May 13th at 2 p.m.

Location: Università di Torino - Aula Guzzo - Via Po 18 - Torino

Richard Shusterman (Florida Atlantic University): Aesthetic Experience and the Powers of Possession

This talk revisits a Platonic idea that has been formative for the history of aesthetics and then explores how this idea can be reinterpreted meaningfully in today’s aesthetic context. The Platonic idea I discuss (which Plato introduces in Ion and Phaedrus) is that artistic creation and its appreciative reception involve a form of divine possession. After exploring how this non-rational, supernatural idea has been critically countered yet repeatedly recurs in important subsequent theories of aesthetic experienced proposed by rational thinkers, my presentation suggests how we might give the notion of possession a more naturalistic explanation. I exemplify this through an analysis of performance art presented in The Adventures of the Man in Gold.

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities at the Florida Atlantic University. Educated at Jerusalem and Oxford, he was chair of the Temple University Philosophy Department before coming to FAU in 2005. He has held academic appointments in Paris, Berlin, and Hiroshima and was awarded senior research Fulbright and NEH fellowships. His widely translated research covers many topics in the human and social sciences with particular emphasis on questions of philosophy, aesthetics, culture, language, identity, and embodiment.   Authored books include T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism (Columbia), Practicing Philosophy (Routledge), Performing Live (Cornell), Surface and Depth (Cornell), Pragmatist Aesthetics (Blackwell, 2nd ed. Rowman & Littlefield, and translated into 12 languages), and most recently Body Consciousness (Cambridge). His non-technical essays have been published in the Nation and the Chronicle of Higher Education and in various art reviews and catalogues, such as artpress and Dokumenta. He directs the FAU Center for Body, Mind, and Culture ; his FAU webpage