Enoch, Taylor D; (2017) Analyticity and Systematicity in Anglophone Aesthetics. Masters thesis (M.Phil), UCL (University College London).

Preview

Text ASAA - Final Thesis Submission (Taylor Enoch, MPhil Stud 2017) RESTRICTED VERSION.pdf Download (5MB) | Preview

Abstract

The scope of this project is threefold. Firstly, it is metaphilosophical, as it concerns a question of method. Secondly, it is aesthetical, as it concerns a question of method in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Thirdly, it is historiographical, as it draws from the corpus of the philosophy of art, aesthetics and art history, and considers these texts not only by way of their ideas but also by way of their history. This dissertation entertains a significant organizational shift by adopting and adapting a narrower scope of anglophone aesthetics (AA). This shift renders AA as biphasic, admitting of earlier (EAA) and later (LAA) phases, the ‘early-late distinction’, categorized by exemplary texts per phase. Upon investigation of these texts, the EAA-LAA shift poses a constitutive methodological shift, the Problem of Systematic Inconsistency (PSI), from non-systematicity to systematicity. This inconsistency, it is argued, is merely apparent, and is explainable as a swapping of priority between analytic and systematic methods from EAA to LAA, which holds systematicity of some sort to be implicit in EAA. To elucidate this, various modes of analysis and models of system are presented. From a formalist outlook, an historiographical examination of cubism is used to concretize the proposed solution to the PSI. Of particular focus is the shift from analytic (AC) to synthetic (SC) cubism, wherein it is diagrammatically shown that cubist ‘signs’ played an implicit role throughout AC like that described of systematicity throughout EAA. Comparison between realist and idealist art yields a key distinction, the ‘unitary-plenary distinction’, between two definitions of system in terms of the presence or absence of a privileged ‘kernel’. That both EAA and LAA entertained a realist plenary rather than idealist unitary systematicity, implicit in the former and explicit in the latter, is the solution to the PSI.

Download activity - last month

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Archive Staff Only

View Item