Aesthetics and Cultural Philosophy


Key Area: Cultural Philosophy

Ernst Cassirer, Georg Simmel and other thinkers of the early 20th century came to the realization that culture is not an arbitrary object of science, but the medium of our understanding of the world, within which scientific thinking itself takes place. For philosophy, this means that it is equally unable to adopt an external standpoint, but finds itself in the midst of a plurality of interpretations of the world. Cultural philosophy is therefore not to be understood as a specialized discipline of philosophy, but as an attempt to think philosophy as a whole under the conditions of modernity in the medium of the cultural. The integration of philosophy into a plurality of interpretations of the world means that it can only unfold in the confrontation with other forms of world interpretation and their respective scientific reflection, which is why the interdisciplinary opening is a necessary consequence of this understanding of cultural philosophy.

However, human beings not only always move within culturally mediated, historical meanings, but also within a network of social relationships. The structure of these relationships and the different forms of social coexistence are the subject of social philosophy, which is also taught at the professorship.

Key Area: Aesthetics

It is by no means self-evident that we immediately think of art when we think of aesthetics. The word "aesthetic" can be traced back to the Greek “aesthesis”, which initially only meant "sensory perception". The term was introduced by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in the 18th century to establish a separate field of investigation in philosophy, which deals with the sensory part of the ability to acquire knowledge. In a narrower sense, however, aesthetics can also refer to the theory of beauty and a philosophy of art, whereby these approaches are also often based on a reflection of perception. Questions that are dealt with in the courses in this area are, for example, What is beauty? What is art? What does art have to do with knowledge? How do art and nature relate to each other? What is the relationship between art and morality? What is aesthetic experience?