Musical Value: Histories of Aesthetics

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Entering the lexicon of European philosophy in the 1700s, aesthetics attempted to name and analyze a particular kind of experience, judgment, object, or value. Its questions have been extended, critiqued, reformulated, and dismissed in the centuries since. In this seminar, we will read important texts in modern aesthetic theory (Hume, Kant), as well as some notable critiques that followed, from philosophy itself (Shusterman, Roelofs, Ngai) and from sociology (Bourdieu, Wolff). We will also consider two unavoidable questions for modern/colonial aesthetics: what to do with the so-called primitive art of non-European cultures (Boas) and how to understand the challenge of Black aesthetics in the twentieth century (Locke, Baraka, Wynter).