The first 5-6 weeks of this module introduce students to Kant’s Critique of Judgement, the foundational text of modern aesthetics for both the analytic and the continental traditions. It aims to give students a good overview of this difficult text, and to help them engage critically with both key ideas in the text, and some of the debates in recent scholarship and aesthetic theory to which it has given rise. It will cover aspects of the Introduction, particularly the idea of reflective judgement, the Analytic of the Beautiful, the Deduction of Aesthetic Judgements, the Analytic of the Sublime, as well as Kant’s generally overlooked remarks on fine art and genius. Key questions to be considered include: are judgements of taste subjective or objective, and in what sense?; what is the relation between the sublime and morality for Kant; how are work of art possible? We will also consider the extent to which Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgement can be applied to works of art, and ways in which this might be problematic. The remaining 3-4 weeks of the course focus on Martin Heidegger’s antipathy to aesthetics as a philosophical understanding of art. Our focus will be the ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ informed by Heidegger’s critique of modern subjectivism in ‘The Age of the World Picture’ and contrast between art and technology as ‘modes of disclosure’ in ‘The Question Concerning Technology.’ Questions to be considered include: why is Heidegger hostile to the very idea of aesthetics as a philosophical understanding of art? What is the ontological function of works of art according to Heidegger, and is this credible? What is the relation of art to truth on the one hand and technology on the other?

This course is a first introduction to philosophy of mathematics, via one of our most fascinating and perplexing concepts: the infinite. We encounter the concept of infinity in myriad ways. In Zeno’s paradoxes of time, space, and motion, the idea of infinite division is used to argue in favour of a radical monism. The ancient atomists Leucippus and Democritus claimed that the universe consisted of an infinity of atoms moving in an infinite void, and contemporary cosmology still considers the issue of whether the universe is infinite to be an open question.

But what does it mean for something to be infinite? It is mathematics that offers us the precise definitions that let us begin to answer this question, and thus in mathematics that many of the most important questions concerning the infinite arise. Do the infinite structures that we talk about in mathematics really exist? If so, how can we have knowledge of them? Is it even coherent to talk about the truly infinite, or does it fall victim to paradox? This course will investigate these and other questions by engaging with the ideas of philosophers and mathematicians from across history, with a focus on the reception of Georg Cantor’s theory of sets, and the crisis in the foundations of mathematics that it precipitated.