Presented by the Humanities Program Faculty Colloquium.
“If modernity has rejected the rationalist, authoritarian politics of Plato’s Republic, broadly Platonic approaches to logic, science, and ethics have made a surprising return between the symbolist epoch of Frege and Russell and the recent critiques of naturalism of a Nagel or Parfit. Yet art theory and criticism have been slow to follow, despite being concerned with what are perhaps the paradigmatic Platonic entities: fictions, which are conceptual structures shared by different thinkers, but not identical with any concrete material object. There are historical reasons for this, namely Plato’s outspoken criticism of the art of his time—but Platonism in aesthetics does not involve any reactionary demand that art be propaganda. Rather, Platonism is the only view that will explain why art matters to us, and may be true.”