Visita do Prof. Dominic Lopes
(Department of Philosophy - University of British Columbia)



Minicurso:

Aesthetic Pluralism and What It Means for Policy

Dia 22/04: 9h-12h e 14h-17h
Local: CLE/Unicamp

The first part of this two-part minicourse is an introduction to the theory of aesthetic value that Lopes proposes in his 2018 book, Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value. The book mounts a critique of the assumption that aesthetic value is to be realized above all in contemplative experiences. Lopes proposes instead that aesthetic value is (1) practical and (2) practiced. Aesthetic values guide agents as they perform a huge variety of acts in the context of social practices or cultures. According to aesthetic value pluralism, these cultures are on a par with one another.
Part two is dedicated to Lopes's new book, Aesthetic Injustice. People with different aesthetic cultures come into contact with each other, and the contacts can go well or they can go badly. Sometimes they go badly because they are products of unjust arrangements of social life more broadly. Lopes theorizes aesthetic injustice as what subverts interests in the diversity and autonomy of aesthetic cultures. These interests are grounded in aesthetic value pluralism and a special form of respect that it makes available to us. The minicourse focuses on applications to policies concerning cultural appropriation and ideals of bodily beauty.

Dominic Lopes (UBC) é autor de diversos livros importantes sobre filosofia da imagem, da arte, da expressão e da fotografia. Foi presidente da American Philosophical Association e da American Society for Aesthetics, além de atuar como editor em revistas renomadas, como “Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism” e “The European Journal of Aesthetics”. Recentemente, publicou o livro Aesthetic Injustice (Oxford University Press, 2024), que forma uma trilogia com Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value (Oxford University Press, 2018) e Beyond Art (Oxford University Press, 2014).


Inscrições para o minicurso para participantes interessados em certificado. 
Link do formulário para inscrição:
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Palestras dia 23/04
Local: CLE/Unicamp


Dia 23/04: 10h

Dominic Lopes (UBC)
“AI Art and Artists: What They Are, What They Could Be, What They Should Be”

ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Udio generate stories, images, and songs that amaze us… and trouble us too. They can be heartwarming, cheeky, or groovy; also spooky or disturbing. So we wonder: are they art? Could there be AI artists? Would they be creative? might they surpass us? These questions express existential worries. We worry first about our losing our monopoly on making art. Then we worry that, having lost that monopoly, we thereby lose what makes us exceptional. In this lecture, Lopes vets three strategies in response to the existential worries. One strategy seeks to contain the worries by assuring us that our monopoly on making art is safe. A second strategy confronts the worries head-on by arguing that it would not matter if AI artists could be just like us. The third strategy counsels that we jump on the opportunity to reflect upon how to construct AI artists whose doings align with our interests, including our deepest interests in art.


Dia 23/04: 14h

Guilherme Ghisoni (UFG)
Philosophy in Images: Instances of the Relationship Between Photography and Philosophy

Although philosophy and art are distinct domains with their own aims and methods, they
share points of contact that allow for mutual influence. In this lecture, Ghisoni explores the
partial overlap between art and philosophy by reflecting on more than 25 years of work at the intersection of photography and philosophical inquiry — a trajectory that led to the creation of the Research Laboratory for the Philosophy of Photography (UFG). The first part of the talk focuses on how philosophy can inform artistic practice. Ghisoni discusses how reading Dominic Lopes’s Understanding Pictures (1996) inspired visual works addressing the unity of pictorial space, and how Wittgenstein’s reflections on memory informed a series of pieces on the materiality of the photographic image and its relation to the past. The second part considers the reverse movement: from art to philosophy. Ghisoni traces how his adaptation of John Cage’s chance-based compositional methods to photography evolved into a philosophical investigation, culminating in the view that Cage’s aesthetics imply an ontology and an ethics akin to those of the early Wittgenstein. The lecture concludes by showing how photographic practices emerging from this two-way exchange between art and philosophy take on a life of their own, generating new bodies of visual work.