Nicholas Wiltsher | Relations of Power in Aesthetic Communities | Philosophy Speaker Series

An aesthetic community is a group of people engaged in coordinated practices oriented towards aesthetic value: Marvel fans, classical music connoisseurs, Instagram aestheticians. Recent work on aesthetic communities aims at articulating a "communitarian" account of the aesthetic domain, opposing an  "individualistic" alternative. For example, the communitarian account says that aesthetic value owes to social engagement, rather than individuals' engagements with aesthetic objects.  In this talk, Dr. Nicholas Wiltsher argues that the emerging communitarian account is actually still pretty individualistic. This, Wiltsher suggests, shows that proper analysis of aesthetic communities requires analysis of relations of power within them. He further suggests that focus on such relations allows us to see the theoretical options more clearly than an approach using only a distinction between communities and individuals.

Nicholas Wiltsher is a philosopher who works in aesthetics, imagination, philosophy of mind, and feminist philosophy. He is currently an Associate Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University in Sweden. Prior to this, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp. He has also worked in Auburn (AL, USA), Porto Alegre (Brazil) and Leeds (UK).

This event is free and open to all.