Throughout the history of culture, people have asked a simple but devastating question: "What is Art?" Answers have been philosophical, anthropological, theological, formal, technical and political. AND THE JURY'S STILL OUT! If you're a student in the humanities, politics or sociology, you cannot afford not to ask what vital roles art plays in society and history.

Since Antiquity, philosophers have struggled to draw the line between art and reality, between good and bad art, between signs and things. (Thus we ask: Is a sign a thing? Or the "picture" of a thing? Or somehow both?). This course provides an introduction to the classical problems raised by critical theories as well as the emerging idea of the aesthetic from Antiquity to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Because there is little agreement about the meaning of art, we shall explore a variety of topics and issues, but we shall focus our discussion on the narrower question: "What is Beauty?" This prompts a further set of questions: Is beauty only in the eye of the beholder? Who decides what is beautiful? What are the links between beauty and truth? Between beauty and morality? Between beauty and form? Between beauty and power? Between beauty and sexuality? How is beauty determined by gender? As far back as the 19th century, Hegel, the German philosopher, wrote, "Art no longer counts for us as the highest manner in which truth obtains existence ... [A]rt is and remains for us, on the side of its highest vocation, something past" In short: has Beauty had its day? What types of cultural work does beauty perform? Finally, how do cultures reproduce their ideas of the Beautiful.

In this course we shall examine some of the social, pedagogical, moral, anthropological, ideological and political functions of art and of beauty as they have been articulated in the works of Plato and Aristotle, Burke, Johnson, Coleridge, Kant, Hegel, Benjamin, Heidegger and others.