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The next annual conference of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics will be held during the
2011 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, NB.
The 23rd annual conference
of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics took place at the 75th Congress of the
Humanities and Social Sciences at York University. Downloads (Microsoft Word): The 22nd annual conference
of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics took place at the 74th Congress of the
Humanities and Social Sciences from May 29 - 31, 2005 at the
University of Western Ontario in London. For more information about the
Congress see www.fedcan.ca/congress2005.
Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin
represented the Canadian Society for Aesthetics at the
2004 Canadian Society for Aesthetics Meeting About
twenty-five scholars attended the CSA’s annual meeting, at the University of
Manitoba from May 30 to June 1 this year. The meeting was held along with
fifty or so other Canadian societies under the auspices of the Canadian
Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Although most of the
participants were from Canadian universities, proximity to U.S. cities, a
favorable exchange rate, affordable lodging and the Society’s cordial
ambience brought a number of U.S. scholars north of the border as well. There
were also participants from France and Finland in attendance. A highlight
this year was an architectural walking tour of downtown Winnipeg’s historic
Exchange District, led by Jino Distasio, from the University of Winnipeg’s
Urban Studies Institute. The tour was capped by an enjoyable dinner at the
spectacular Palm Room of the Fort Garry Hotel. Everyone agreed this break
from the disciplined setting of an academic conference was both a pleasure in
itself and a stimulating way to learn something of the rich aesthetic
heritage of the host city. Many thanks to our local arranger, Doug Arrell,
from the University of Winnipeg, for all his careful planning of these
events. The paper
presentations and commentaries were of uniformly high quality and covered a
wide range of topics. There was a session devoted to Wollheim (Bence Nanay’s
“Is Twofoldness Necessary for Representational Seeing?” and M. Carleton
Simpson’s “Wollheim on Representation and Presentation,” with comments by
Roger Shiner); and a session on the photographic image (Evan Wm. Cameron’s
“Michelson, Morley & Me: How We See, Hear and Hear Movies” and Neb
Kujundzic’s “The Phenomenology of Photography,” the latter read by Will
Buschert, with comments on both papers by Carl Simpson). Topics in
literary aesthetics were taken up in three papers: Roger Seamon’s “The
Trouble with Expressive Ideas in Fiction,” John E. MacKinnon’s “Catherine
Bush and the Concept of Dread” and Michelle Weinroth’s “Misreading Morris:
The Aporiai of Utopia and the Aesthetics of Ruralist Englishness,” with
comments on the last paper by Roger Seamon. Four papers focused on issues in
environmental aesthetics: Christian Denker’s “Nature et imagination dans la
philosophie de Martin Seel,” Yrjö Sepänmaa’s “How to Speak of Mount Koli? The
Exemplary Position of Koli in Environmental Research,” Glenn Parsons’s
“Knowledge, Perception and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature” and Ira
Newman’s “The Dream of an Autonomous Natural Aesthetic: Leopold and Callicott
on the Land Aesthetic.” Various issues in general art theory were the subject
of four papers: Sheldon Wein’s “Thinking How to Appreciate Art: Expressivism
and Aesthetic Knowledge,” Daniel Groll’s “Why Nick Zangwill’s Moderate
Formalism Doesn’t Work,” with comments on the latter by Glenn Parsons; Victor
Yelverton Haines’s “When the Elegant Proof of a Theorem Is Not Art” and
Jeffrey Strayer’s “Objectivity and Subjectivity and the End of Art,” with
comments on the last two by Ira Newman. Finally,
there was one paper on the anthropology of art: Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin’s
“Art and Embodiment: Biological Roots and Phenomenological Shoots”; and two
papers on themes in musical aesthetics: Bela Szabados’s “What Do Wittgenstein
and Hanslick Have in Common?” and Jeff Warren’s “The Reconstruction of
Musical Meaning through an Ethically Mandated Hermeneutics,” with comments on
the last paper by Robin Lee. As my luggage
was being swept by security at the Winnipeg airport, the guard asked me what
I had been doing in Winnipeg. When I told her, she replied, “Oh, you must
have learned something there.” My perfunctory answer was, “Yes, I did.” On
the plane I realized my answer was not perfunctory. My thanks to all the
participants who made the meeting so stimulating and enjoyable. Ira Newman 1998 Canadian Society for Aesthetics Meeting The fifteenth
annual meeting of the Canadian Aesthetic Society was held in Ottawa from
27-30 May, 1998. The theme of this year’s meeting was rationality and
aesthetics. Papers were presented in philosophy, literature, and the visual
arts, on the aesthetics of landscape, video productions, dance, architecture,
music and wine tasting, etc. Participants included scholars from Canada and
the United States, and as well this year the CSA was pleased to welcome the
participation of scholars from Finland. Individual
papers included the following. Doug Arrell (Winnipeg) spoke of prejudice in
criticism, referring specifically to the homophobia of many New York theatre
critics in the Fifties and Sixties. Sheryle Bergmann (Manitoba) argued that
aesthetic experiences have rational underpinnings, an argument which leads
into a discussion of the emotions and private versus public knowledge.
Considering art as a nomadic shifter, Elise Bernatchez (Concordia) defined an
aesthetic experience as a moment of truth in which feeling and meaning are
one. Marta Heikkila (Helsinki) underlined the importance of the art object as
a relation between the subject and the object of perception in Dufrenne’s
work; and Kent Hooper (Puget Sound) developped the notion of “abductive
reasoning” from Peirce and Eco in an attempt to understand multiple talents
in artists as well as relations between various art forms. Sylvie
Lachize (Québec, Montréal) outlined the reciprocity of aesthetics and
rationality with respect to the reasons for success or failure of an artistic
production. Paul Murphy (Toronto) argued that Heideggerian phenomenology
typically appropriates other discourses, such as Plato’s Phaedrus, making the
aesthetic experience into a form of disclosure. Erna Oesch (Tampere, Finland)
adressed the notion of the logic of interpretation with respect to the era of
German Romanticism; and Ira Newman (Mansfield) argued that inspite of
apparent banalities in literary works, literature does afford the reader a
genuine learning experience. From a consideration of Hobbes’s writing on
poetry, Avery Plaw (McGill) concluded that Hobbes subordinates aesthetics to
the exigencies of practical politics. Bella Rabinovitch (Concordia) compared
Gadamer’s and Dewey’s approach to art objects, and applied Dewey’s holistic
approach to different works of art. Marie-Andrée Ricard (Laval) considered
Hegel’s pronouncement concerning the death of art and argued that the decline
of art is tied to the advent of subjectivity; and for Jonathan Salem-Wiseman
(York) Nietzsche’s belief that art surpasses science, as a response to Hegel’s
famous aphorism, art is dead, is impractical because truth cannot be
disclosed witout distortion. Roger Seamon
(British Columbia) argued that description is a form of interpretation, or an
alternative, and compared an emotional response to Milton’s Lycidas with an
interpretive, value based response. Robert Stacey (York) read Frances
Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague from the perspective of Edmund Burke’s
aesthetic philosphy. James Steeves (McMaster) invoked the writings of
Merleau-Ponty, and stressed the need to consider artworks, as other objects,
from the perspective of perception. Leon Surette (Western) considered the
implications of a model of interpretation based on Saussurean linguistics as
opposed to Peirce’s triadic model in order to show that the Peircean model is
indeed hermeneutic whereas the Saussurean model is not. Edward Tingley
(Canadian Centre for Architecture) considered how philosophical
interpretation creates puzzles, or pictures of how we relate to art and
reality and argued that although art gives a deeper understanding of reality
it is most often the philosophical picture that predominates. Boyd White
(McGill) considered the use of metaphor as a means to explain the relation
between the self and the object of aesthetic experience. Victor Haines
(Dawson College) argued that because art is transgression, its appreciation
is only possible in the irrational, radical freedom of make-believe. Maurice
Lagueux (Montréal) attempted to define problematic terms such as organicism,
functionalism, formalism and expressionism in an effort to distinguish
between their meanings and uses. Jean-Pierre Latour (Québec, Hull) considered
the aesthetic effects of rationalism with respect to sculpture in Quebec
during the Sixties. Carl Simpson argued that Western interpretation of
pictorial representations is largely subservient to psychological
perspectives. Special
thematic sessions were devoted to the following themes: The aesthetics of
landscape. Victor Haines spoke of the perennial border; Thomas Heyd (Victoria)
presented images of Aboriginal art rock as a form of artistic expression;
Monique Langlois (Québec, Montréal) considered different ways of representing
nauture and their influence on the relation between object and subject. Manon
Régimbald (Québec, Montréal) spoke of the unusual, polymorphic character of
gardens and their ability to provoke memories that constitute the subject. Dialectic and
anti-dialectic: Suzanne Foisy (Québec, Trois-Rivières) spoke of aesthetic
mediation with reference to German Romanticism. Mario Dufour made a
comparison of Derrida and Gadamer. Claude Thérien (Ottawa) considered Hegel’s
philosophy from the perspective of word and action. Yves Michaud, La Crise de
l’art contemporain. Presentations on Michaud’s work by Marie-Noëlle Ryan
(Québec, Trois-Rivières), Jean Phillipe Uzel (Québec, Montréal), and Louis
Jacob (Québec, Trois-Rivières). Roman Ingarden. Jeff Mitscherling (Guelph)
reviewed Kocay’s work, Forme et référence: le langage de Roman Ingarden. And
Victor Kocay (Saint Francis Xavier) gave a review of Mitscherling’s work,
Roman Ingarden’s Ontology and Aesthetics. Astrid Vicas (Saint Leo College,
Florida) and Leon Surette commented on Michelle Weinroth’s work, Reclaiming
William Morris and the author replied. Music: alarmed
that knowledge is increasingly considered as rational and determinate,
Yaroslav Senyshyn (Simon Fraser) argued that creativity is transformative,
that passion is truth. Gerald Phillips (Towson) took up Adorno’s criticism of
Stravinsky, and argued that Stravinsky’s Les Noces in fact coincides with
Adorno’s notion of autonomous works. Charles Morrison (Wilfird Laurier)
argued that a musical work must include experienced temporality as opposed to
latent temporality. Michael Free (McGill) spoke of the understanding of a
musical work from the perspective of performer and listener; and Tamara
Levitz (McGill) considered Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring from the perspective
of bodily understanding. Dance:
Christina Halliday (York) considered dance performance and modes of meaning
making connected with the body, such as repetition, rhythm and disappearance.
Suzanne Jaeger (York) argued that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of chiasm gives a
richer understanding of dance experience than contemporary semiotic models;
and in this perspective Rebecca Todd conducted a workshop that explored the
relation between the body and language. Wine tasting:
Jouko Mykkänen (Helsinki) conducted a wine and food tasting session
emphasizing the aesthetic notions of taste and harmony. Video: René
Derouin presented his work, Migrations, which explores the notions of
otherness and cultural mixing. Commentary by Jocelyne Connely (Québec,
Montréal). Mario Côté presented his recent work, Variations Vertov. Victor Kocay 1997 Canadian Society
for Aesthetics Meeting Our
conference on "The Rock"—the rugged island of Newfoundland—opened
on June 4 with four papers in French on the topic: "Correspondence comme
lieu de Communication." Suzanne Foisy (Université de Québec à
Trois-Rivières) began with an analysis of Schiller's response to Kant in his
correspondence with Korner on the contested topic of the relation of beauty
to the understanding. Ghyslaine Guertin (Montreal) followed with a comparative
analysis of the correspondence of Glenn Gould and Arnold Schonberg. Monique
Langlois (Université de Québec à Montréal) discussed video letters, that is,
art videos formulated as communications or as narratives about attempts to
communicate. The session was concluded by Manon Regimbald (Université de
Québec à Montréal), who presented a discussion of an exchange of public
letters between the critic Thierry de Duve and the artist Michael Snow. The next
session, "Art: Old, New and Eternal," began with a paper by Thomas
Heyd (Victoria) in which he argued that rock art surviving from prehistoric
times in Australia and elsewhere enhances appreciation of the landscape
around it by hinting at the viewpoint of ancient inhabitants of the land.
Duane Burton (Alberta) followed with "Teachings from the Oral Tradition
and Cyberspace," a discussion of the similarities between cyberspace and
non-Western "orality cultures." Gloria Ryder (Guelph) argued in her
paper that art historians and aestheticians have underrated and misunderstood
three-dimensional representation as exemplified by sculpture. Time was
running short, so Allen Carlson (Alberta) graciously truncated his
presentation "Hillerman's Landscapes: Landscape Description and
Aesthetic Relevance." His paper addressed the issue of art appreciation
and the relevance of thoughts not present or proper to the object being
appreciated. The afternoon
session, "Culture, Postmodernism, Deconstructionism," began with a
feminist analysis by Kathleen Batestone (Manitoba) of the art of cooking, as
exemplified in Ang. Lee's film Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. Roger Seamon (UBC)
followed with a paper which argued that modern academic literary
interpretation, of both the formalist and the more recent
"cultural" varieties, resembles biblical hermeneutics and is
"the enemy of the appreciation of art." Bella Rabinovitch
(Marianapolis) defended Dewey's aesthetics against recent postmodernist
attacks. Leon Surette (Western) concluded the session with a paper arguing
that Coleridge reformulated the imagination as a linguistic rather than an
imagistic or iconic faculty (as it was conceived of by Kant) in the light of
Horne Tooke's theory of language. The late
afternoon session featured Joan Munro (Alberta), Roger Seamon (UBC), Danine
Farquharson (Memorial) and Douglas Arrell (Winnipeg) leading a lively but
inconclusive debate about E.D. Hirsch's theories of "cultural
literacy." The next
morning was devoted to music and began with "Co-Authorship of Musical
Texts and the Ritualization of Musical Performance," presented by
Yaroslav Senyshyn (Simon Fraser), who invoked R.G. Collingwood to buttress a
plea for some freedom of interpretation for performers; his view was given
qualified support by his commentator, Paul Rice (Memorial). This was followed
by a panel of composers discussing "The Creative Act and Musical
Communication." The panelists were Allan Gilliland (Grant MacEwan),
Gordon Nicholson (Grant MacEwan), and Clark Ross (Memorial). The discussion
focused on music education and the neglect of composition in it. The following
session concentrated on the visual arts. Tom Roach (St. Francis Xavier)
presented a comparison of the Vladimir Madonna and Child and a Bellini
Madonna and Child. He found that the Orthodox Madonna was more semiotic,
"painted from the inside," while the Belllini was much more
mimetic, "painted from the outside." Mark Cheetham (Western)
discussed Kant's surprising influence on the visual arts; he exemplified this
by a description of the reception of Kantian ideas in the circle of artists
led by Asmus Jakob Carstens in Rome. The afternoon
session, "Education and the Arts" began with a paper by Rowland
Marshall (St. Mary's) which argued passionately for the humanizing force of
education in the arts, and the increased need for it in a technologized and
commodified society. He was followed by Douglas Arrell (Winnipeg), who
reported on his experience of using case studies as a pedagogical tool in
teaching aesthetics to theatre students. James Hamilton (Kansas State)
presented a drama-teaching model in which students were given brief but
intensive exposure to a number of non-naturalistic theatrical styles, and
then wrote and performed a play in one of those styles; this experience led
Hamilton to some insights about the nature of style. Will Buschert (Toronto)
concluded the session with a discussion of the social and pedagogical
implications of teaching students about irony. The afternoon
session, "Words and Meanings" began with "Literature and
Cognition: a Defense from Neuroscience," by Christine Watling (Alberta)
which surveyed the relevance of neuroscientific theories of right and left
brain function to the capacity of verse to express feelings. "Why Donald
Davidson is Wrong about Metaphor," by Leon Surette (Western), found
Davidson's argument that metaphorical meaning is just the literal meaning of
the words to be incoherent Victor Haines (Dawson) closed the session with
"Appreciating Art Appreciations," which argued against Kantian
aesthetic disinterest, maintaining that the appreciator must be
"engaged" with the artwork; that is, appreciation involves
enjoyment as well as evaluation. The third day
opened with "Continental Philosophers." Victor Kocay (St. Francis
Xavier) presented an analysis of Mallarme's sonnet, "Couche" to
illustrate the Ingardian notion that art objects are aptly reconstituted as a
manifold by the art appreciator, and in that sense are "other than"
or a negativity of the object represented. Stephen Boos (King's College)
followed with "The Masks of Imagination: Mirror, Lamp and Looking
Glasses," which surveyed theories of representation from Plato to
Baudrillard. The next
session, "Eminent Victorians" began with "Gerard Manley
Hopkins and the Use of Poetry," by Kerry McSweeney (McGill), which
revealed the Jesuit poet's surprisingly low estimate of poetry and its social
function. Michelle Weinroth (Ottawa) followed with "The Aesthetic
Education of Desire: William Morris, Utopianism and the Marxist
Dilemma," a discussion of the contrasting ways Morris's utopian novel
News from Nowhere was viewed by English conservative and communist thinkers. The final
session of the conference was a discussion of Sheryle Bergmann Drewe's book
Creative Dance: Enriching Understanding, which is a defense of the
educational value of creative dance. The aesthetic arguments in the book were
critiqued by Joan Munro (Alberta) and Francis Sparshott (Toronto), and Drewe
(Manitoba) responded. The
conference concluded with a reception at the Emma Butler Gallery in downtown
St. John's, and, for the hardy few, a pub crawl though some of the city's
famous Irish-style bars. Leon Surette
and Douglas Arrell Canadian
Society for Aesthetics 1996 Meeting The
thirteenth bilingual conference of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics took
place May 27-30, 1996, at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. Due no
doubt to the proximity of the US border, we were joined by an unusually large
number of our American colleagues. The theme of the conference was “Art and
Science,” and a number of sessions directly addressed this topic. Willie van
Peer of the University of Utrecht dissected a number of attempts to apply
“chaos theory” to literature. Haidee Wasson and Janine Marchessault, both of
McGill, presented a rather frightening vision of the manipulative
possibilities of presenting history as “edutainment” by means of interactive
cd-rom technologies. The interconnections of eighteenth-century theories of
science and aesthetics were addressed in papers by Thomas Rueger, Steven Kammerer,
and Matthew Pollard; these papers meshed well with a discussion by Stephen
Ahern of the aestheticization of moral virtue in the eighteenth-century cult
of sensibility Another trend
seemed to be towards defending, albeit in a carefully circumscribed way, the
objectivity of aesthetic value. Cynthia Freeland suggested that a pragmatist
view of truth was compatible with some degree of objectivity in art
criticism, basing her argument on Helen Langino’s similar argument for the
objectivity of science in her book Science as Social Knowledge. James O.
Young argued that a cognitive account of aesthetic value can put some
restraints on aesthetic relativism. And, in one of the conference’s most
memorable sessions, Hugo Meynell valiantly defended his 1986 book The Nature
of Aesthetic Value, which is an unapologetic celebration of the values of
“high art.” An apparently
heterogenous group of papers on modernism and postmodernism in architecture
and the visual arts proved to have many interconnections. Ernestine Daubner
saw in several paintings by Duchamp a reflection of the attack on
enlightenment thinking by Adorno and the Critical Theorists. The
enlightenment project of seeking to contain the unruly female Other is also
evident in Le Courbusier’s obsession with “cleaning up,” according to Melony
Ward. Stephan D’Amour argued for the inseparability of the artistic and
engineering aspects of architecture; Joel David Robinson explained the quest
for “weak form” in Peter Eisenman’s postmodernist buildings. One of the
most significant papers was the presentation by Roger Seamon of a new theory
of “subjective formalism”; the distinguishing feature of art is its creation
of “semantic gaps,” which the audience seeks to bridge by a rapid unconscious
act of reconfiguration. The pleasure of art results from our success in doing
this, which is analogous to getting a joke. CSA/SCE
conferences are notable for their extraordinary diversity of presentations,
and this year was no exception. Tracy Punchard presented Oscar Wilde’s
theory, derived from Herbert Spencer, that art, as a form of play, allows one
to realize oneself in an ideal form, mirroring evolution’s progress towards
the fullest development of the individual. A paper by Manon Regimbald dealt
with the aesthetic implications of the blurring of the distinction between
art and nature in the photographs of Alfred Steiglitz and Robert Smithson.
Eric von der Luft argued that the end of Wagner’s Ring embodies a Hegelian
view of history. Douglas Arrell explained the implications of the contention
of several musicologists that classical music suffers from “homosexual
panic,” as defined by Eve Sedgwick. Trevor Ponech described the epistemic
void created by the failure of “experts” in certain horror films. James
Hewitson described the connection between beauty and divinity in the work of
eighteenth-century theologian, Jonathan Edwards. And there were many other
papers on equally unlikely topics which demonstrated the diverse experiences
of our members and the remarkable fertility of our theorizing imaginations. Doug Arrell |