Teaching Aesthetics by John M. Carvalho

In my teaching and my research, I distinguish Aesthetics from Philosophy of Art and artworks from works of art. In my graduate seminars, I present aesthetic experience as an embodied engagement rather than a judgment of taste testing that thesis in encounters with artefacts and distinctive forms of life that turn up in the world. In my undergraduate courses, I start with encounters with artefacts, notably popular music, and tease embodied engagements with these artefacts from critical theoretical, pop cultural, rhizomatic and phenomenological accounts of them. In this presentation, I rehearse an embodied, enactive aesthetics of popular music drawing especially on a text by Jacques Attali: Noise: A Political Economy of Music (Minnesota 1979).

BIO: John M. Carvalho, Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University and Associate Editor of Contemporary Aesthetics, is the author of Thinking with Images: An Enactivist Aesthetics (Routledge 2018) and of several dozen essays published in journals or anthologies on the history of ancient Greek philosophy, 20th century French philosophy and aesthetics, especially the aesthetics of music and motion pictures.