Art and Knowledge in Romantic Philosophy (original) (raw)

The Work of Art in German Romanticism

Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus, vol. 6 (2009), Karl Ameriks and Jürgen Stolzenberg, eds., 2009

The Jena romantics are both artists and philosophers, but it is not always clear just what the relation between art and theory is. I start by trying to articulate this relation, focusing in particular on the differences between the romantics and Hegel. I argue that the romantics do not view art as sublated by philosophical theory, but rather as intensified by it. For the romantics therefore aesthetic form is more than the presentation of essentially philosophical propositions in an attractive way: instead, artistic style does real (philosophical) work. In romantic literature, for instance, language is set to work presenting its own unpresentable condition (what Jean-François Lyotard calls the postmodern sublime) in a way that can only be effected within the literary work; accordingly, the literariness of the work is not a mere ornament to a philosophical theses, but actually comprises the thesis.

"From Poetry to Music. The Paradigms of Art in German Aesthetics of the 19th Century", «Aesthetica Preprint» (Monographic Issue: "Art and Knowledge in Classical German Philosophy"), No 116 (2021)

Aesthetica Preprint, 2021

This paper analyzes a decisive moment in the German aesthetics of the nineteenth century, that is, the passage from a view that considered poetry (i.e. literature) the most perfect art within the system of the individual arts to one in which music is the art par excellence. On the one hand, we find the philosophical perspectives of the first half of the nineteenth century (Hegel, Solger, Schelling). On the other hand are the views that, beginning with Schopenhauer, dominate the second half of the century with Nietzsche and Wagner. The aim of this paper is to show the meaning of this historical-philosophical moment in order to produce an interpretation that concerns both the theoretical consideration of art and the general philosophical approach of these authors. I intend to read this transition as one of the initial moments of the upheavals that affected art in the twentieth century, which some recent interpreters have read, in Hegelian terms, as the "end of art".

International Workshop: "Art and Knowledge in Classical German Philosophy" (University of Padova, December 19th-20th 2019)

Speakers: F. Campana, G. Cecchinato, P. D’Angelo, G. F. Frigo, A. Hamilton, P. Hamilton, L. Illetterati, G. Pinna, E. Ronzheimer, B. Santini, P. Stekeler-Weithofer, G. Valpione.

Exegesis V: Romanticism - the German Romantic Tradition

This piece, written during my postgraduate studies of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Anglo-American University in Prague, maps the Romantic cultural movement, specifically its origins in Germany. The first section covers the early German Romanticism, outlining, debating and analyzing its founding principles vis-á-vis the works of Novalis, Tieck and Schlegel. The second section continues to the High German Romanticism, discussing the work of Heidegger's favorite poet Friedrich Hölderlin. The final third section loops back to the advent of German Romanticism, focusing on Goethe and his seminal play "Faust".

Romanticism and the Philosophical Tradition. Co-editor.

2015

The various contributions in this collection explore the kinship and the conflicts which bind literature and art to philosophy during two major phases of Romanticism, in Germany and in England, opening passages and highlighting continuities between the philosophical ambitions and innovations of Romantic artists and the legacy of Romanticism in philosophy and literary and aesthetic theory. Each in its own way, the essays gathered here view Romanticism as a key moment in the history of thought and examine how Romanticism both inherits and departs from the tradition of philosophy, from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, as much as they explore the many legacies of Romanticism in contemporary philosophical debates up to Deconstruction and beyond. Written by philosophers, literary scholars and art historians, the different chapters not only confront British Romanticism with its German counterpart, in an effort to reconfigure our understanding of these two national “moments” in the history of Romanticism, but they also work at the crossroads of several disciplines, true to the inaugural spirit of Romanticism, at a time when generic and institutional boundaries were challenged and largely redrawn, and when art, literature and philosophy as we still know them today first emerged.