Hanne Appelqvist: Art’s Part in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (Contemporary European Aesthetics)

Hanne Appelqvist (University of Helsinki) is a docent of theoretical philosophy and editor in chief of the journal Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics. She will give a lecture as part of the lecture series Contemporary European Aesthetics organized by the Department of Aesthetics at CU FA in cooperation with the Czech Society for Aesthetics (Czech Academy of Sciences). Hanne Appelqvist has published several texts on Wittgenstein, among others in the British Journal of Aesthetics, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, and History of Philosophy Quarterly. She is an editor of the book Wittgenstein and the Limits of Language, published in Routledge in 2019.

The lecture series is supported with the project European Aesthetics in the 21^st Century and it is an addition to a course of the same name. The lectures are held every Thursday in May 2021. Everyone is welcome.

Annotation of the lecture:

Many philosophers, especially those representing the analytic mainstream, tend to read Wittgenstein\’s remarks on aesthetics and the arts as his personal musings or aphorisms disconnected from his more \“serious\“ philosophy. There are several reasons for such a perception. The way in which Wittgenstein\’s Nachlass has been made available to readers effectively isolates his remarks on aesthetics from their original context of broader philosophical discussions. Moreover, the analytic tradition itself typically treats aesthetics as a minor subfield of philosophy, not relevantly related to such core fields as metaphysics, epistemology, or logic. Hence, if viewed from the analytic perspective, the intermittent and seemingly unmotivated way in which aesthetics surfaces in Wittgenstein\’s work may seem quite erratic. However, if placed in the context of the Kantian tradition, Wittgenstein\’s approach becomes quite understandable. Such a reading, which has recently gained more momentum, serves to show that for Wittgenstein aesthetics has a pride of place in the philosophical quest for the limits of our experience. Or so I will argue.