Title: Everyday Aesthetic Experience and the Life-World
7 June 2017; 1600-1800
Senate House 246
Abstract:
This talk critically reviews the recent attempts for setting a better theoretical grounding for the new research area called “Everyday Aesthetics” (EA). I contend that: 1) many of these attempts are impeded by shortcomings rooted in inappropriate conceptualizations of the key targets of the analysis, the experiencing self, the aesthetic experience and the everyday; and 2) it is possible to improve the analytical framework for approaching everyday aesthetic life by clarifying EA’s underpinning assumptions and open questions, such as the nature of everyday aesthetic experience, the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity in the flux of one’s experiences, and the relationship between the subjective-private and intersubjective dimensions of everyday life. This claim will be supported by means of some insights on the essential structure of the aesthetic experience and the characteristics of life and life-world supported by practical philosophy and phenomenology.