Aesthetics and Its Applications: From Plato to Rancière

Dear Colleagues,

Traditionally and retrospectively, aesthetics has been mainly understood as a matter of idealized beauty and forms of art. Aesthetics has often been a question of power relations and the establishing of norms that aim at eternal certainties. But beyond this dominant conception of the history of aesthetics, various lines of escape have been drawn that extend from Plato to Rancière and beyond, and that have remained in the shadow and have not been fully recognized. Behind the established tradition that has focused on ideal and universalized rules, one can discover another path that is less straightforward but often more fascinating and full of unexpected curves and hide-outs. This path, which is more contingent and fragmentary, conceals a variety of pursuits and applications of aesthetics that have been ignored by the tradition as allegedly unproductive and even perilous. From the ancient aestheticizing of the body to the contemporary aestheticizing of the everyday, the door has been open from the very beginning to divergent intuitions. It is time to take a fresh look at the history of aesthetics and explore these ignored paths in order to establish a more diverse picture of the aesthetic tradition that extends from Plato to the present day. Revisiting thinkers and texts from the history of aesthetics serves to show that the tradition of Western aesthetics is rich in intuitions and developments that extend beyond the wide highway of idealized beauty and institutionalized art.

Through this present call for papers, we encourage studies that take a fresh look at the tradition of aesthetics and strive to discover how this tradition has also produced applications of aesthetics that serve to enrich our aesthetic lives from various angles. For example, this may imply moving closer to the ebb and flow of the everyday life or finding similarities between our aesthetic experience of the world and that of other species. In general, articles that look into various applications and outcomes of aesthetics are welcome.

Dr. Margus Vihalem
Guest Editor

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