CANCELLED HPP Talk: November 6th, Daniel Came
UPDATE: Due to unforeseen circumstances Dr Came's talk has be CANCELLED. We will try to reschedule it for later in the series. Apologies to all who intended to come.
On the 6th of November Daniel Came will speak on the topic 'Nietzsche on Art and Philosophy' at the ongoing seminar series organised by the Humane Philosophy Project and the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion.
Time: 8:30pm, preceded by refreshments at 8:15pm
Location: The Aula, Blackfriars Hall, Oxford
Attendance free, all welcome.
Synopsis:
Friedrich Nietzsche was obsessed with art, perhaps more so than any other philosopher of comparable stature. But in this talk I argue that he was not interested in art as such. Nor was he interested in constructing an aesthetic theory of a recognizable traditional sort à la Hume and Kant. He was not particularly interested in, for example, the internal constitution of aesthetic judgements, or the degree of objectivity attributable to them, or in the distinction between judgements of the agreeable and the beautiful. Nietzsche was concerned rather with ‘art from the perspective of life’, for he regarded the significance of art to lie not in l’art pour l’art, but in the solutions it provides to what he took to be the fundamental problem of philosophy – the problem of how to value human experience. Given this practical-existential orientation of Nietzsche’s philosophical reflections on art, attempts to make them speak to the concerns of contemporary philosophers of art are more or less doomed to failure. Nietzsche should be regarded as setting aside the traditional questions of aesthetics in favour a specific set of existential concerns pertaining to the relationship between art, cultural and individual flourishing and the affirmation of life
DANIEL CAME received his B.A. and M.Phil. degrees in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge and his D.Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. He has held a Junior Research Fellowship in Philosophy at Worcester College, Oxford and a College Lectureship in Philosophy at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. His main research interests are in post-Kantian German philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. His most recent publications include an article published in the European Journal of Philosophy on the Kantian-Schopenhauerian characterization of ethical and aesthetic experience in terms of disinterestedness, and an article in the Journal of Value Inquiry on the ethics/aesthetics distinction. He is the editor of Nietzsche on Art and Life (Oxford University Press, 2014) and is currently working on a monograph in which he develops an analytical reformulation of Nietzsche’s ethics in terms of a (sometimes only implicit) engagement with the practical-existential problems posed by Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy. He also has secondary research interests in the philosophy of religion and is currently working on a research project (funded by the Templeton Foundation) which investigates the desirability and meaningfulness of immortality.
