Posted: April 18th, 2015

Assess Hegel’s account of the nature and significance of art.

The essay should be written by looking at some extracts from G. W. F. Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art. Hegel puts forward the claim that art prefigures our philosophical understanding of the world. As such, we can see in different forms of art express different stages of development in our self-understanding.

In the essay, an artwork or case study should be chosen to illustrate the argument.

Primary Reading

Hegel, G. W. F., ‘Extracts from Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts’, in Clive Cazeaux (ed.) The Continental Aesthetics Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), 35-52.

Secondary Reading

Ameriks, Karl, 2002, “Hegel’s Aesthetics: New Perspectives on its Response to Kant and Romanticism,” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 45/6: 72–92.
Bowie, Andrew, 2003, Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche, 2nd. ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
Bungay, Stephen, 1984, Beauty and Truth. A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Desmond, William, 1985, “Hermeneutics and Hegel’s Aesthetics,” Irish Philosophical Journal 2: 94–104.
Desmond, William, 1986, Art and the Absolute. A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany: SUNY Press).
Etter, Brian K., 2006, Between Transcendence and Historicism. The Ethical Nature of the Arts in Hegelian Aesthetics (Albany: SUNY).
Fowkes, William, 1981, A Hegelian Account of Contemporary Art (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press).
Gaiger, Jason, 2000, “Art as Made and Sensuous: Hegel, Danto and the ‘End of Art’,” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 41/2: 104–19.
Gardiner, Patrick, 1987, “Kant and Hegel on Aesthetics,” in Hegel’s Critique of Kant, ed. S. Priest (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 161–71.
Hammermeister, Kai, 2002, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Harris, H.S., 1984, “The Resurrection of Art,” The Owl of Minerva 16, 1 (Fall): 5–20.
Henrich, Dieter, 1985, “The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in Hegel, ed. M. Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 199–207.
Hilmer, Brigitte, 1998, “Being Hegelian after Danto,” History and Theory 37, 4: 71–86.
Houlgate, Stephen, 1997, “Hegel and the ‘End’ of Art,” The Owl of Minerva 29, 1 (Fall): 1–21.
Houlgate, Stephen, 2000, “Hegel and the Art of Painting,” in Hegel and Aesthetics, ed. W. Maker (Albany: SUNY Press), 61–82.
Houlgate, Stephen, 2005, An Introduction to Hegel. Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell) (chapter 9: “Art and Human Wholeness”).
Houlgate, Stephen (ed.), 2007, Hegel and the Arts (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press).
Maker, William (ed.), 2000, Hegel and Aesthetics (Albany: SUNY Press).
Moran, Michael, 1981, “On the Continuing Significance of Hegel’s Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics 21: 214–39.
Wicks, Robert, 1993, “Hegel’s Aesthetics: An Overview,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. F.C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 348–77.