62 | What is Aesthetics? Part I. Schiller's L...

In this episode, we begin our new series on modernity with a discussion of Marshall Berman’s 1982 book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Some of the questions we will tackle in this series will address the substance of modernity, whether modernity is ...  Show more

In this episode, we use Marx’s infamous “Fragment on Machines” from the Grundrisse as a starting-point for a wide ranging discussion about the emancipatory and regressive potentials of AI technologies. Marx thought that automated systems of machinery are incredible embodiments of ...  Show more

On the second half of Friedrich Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), getting into the mechanics of how aesthetic experience work in giving us a midpoint between animality and pure rationality where we can feel free. Also, does art reveal truth? Get more at partial ...  Show more

Starting with letter 20 in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), we tell more of the story of how art is supposed to get us from sensation to thinking. Aesthetic perception ends up being essential to any conceptualization (thinking) whatsoever! Get more at partiallyexaminedli ...  Show more

Covering the elder Schlegel  brother's Theory of Art (ca. 1800). How does our experience of Beauty relate to the infinite? Schlegel provides a Romantic response to Kant on knowing the divine, inner essences of things through art, how genius works, and the relationship between art ...  Show more

We complete our treatment of On the Aesthetic Education of Man by considering its final letters in more detail. Does Reason really make us more moral? And does the embrace of Beauty really point us to Reason, or does self-consciousness rule out immersion in art? If you're not hea ...  Show more