Fall lecture series: Howard Caygill

The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts is proud to host the second part of the year-long symposium: On the Anthropocene: Either/Or. Launched in spring 2021, with a series of lectures by renowned theorists and philosophers, the symposium addresses the role of art and philosophy in relation to ecology, climate change, co-existence, and sustainability as an existential urgency of our times.

The first lecture of the fall 2021 series, Howard Caygill’s Planetary Aesthetics, will be held on Saturday, September 25 (12–2pm EDT). The lecture is free and open to the public. Register here.

Caygill will discuss the conditions for the construction of the Earth as an aesthetic object and the emergence of a critical planetary aesthetic theory and practice in the 21st century. Beginning with Kant’s equivocation regarding the aesthetic in the first critique, the lecture will critically discuss the work of Jacob Darwin Hamblin and Thomas Nail and will propose a contemporary planetary aesthetics oriented with respect to an elemental synechis.

Howard Caygill is Professor of Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Visual Culture at IDSVA. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including A Kant Dictionary; Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience; On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance; Kafka: In Light of the Accident, and most recently Force and Understanding: Writings on Philosophy and Resistance.  He is currently working on the philosophy and aesthetics of the Anthropocene and the role of philosophy in curating and interpreting the art produced by inmates of mental hospitals during the first half of the Twentieth Century.