Module 2

In the Aesthetics: Philosophy of the Arts video, the key concepts I learned are about the different ways that beauty can be looked at.  Plato felt as though beauty was through ideas, mainly.  Aristotle wrote an entire rebuttal on Plato’s views of the arts.  I feel as though Plato’s theory is most important.  Plato mainly discusses beauty and ideas.  I think it is interesting that he believes that ideas are beyond our senses and that the idea of beauty is “a beauty by which all things are beautiful.”  It really got me thinking because what we think is beautiful, someone else may think the opposite so it seems as though Plato is right when he says beauty is an idea.  We all have our own individual idea of beauty.  Plato felt as though aesthetics took away from things that were real and confused the real from the fake.   I think that he feels that what we need to be exposed to is real art to really feel an appreciation for it.  The video went into detail about how aesthetics can be interpreted by people.  While the Middle Ages didn’t have aesthetics, they had their main focus on their devotion to God.  Building on each other’s ideas, philosophers over time have come to their own meanings about beauty and idea.  Francis Hutcheson said “The ideas brought about in our soul by beauty and harmony delight us necessarily and immediately just like other sensible ideas.”  This stood out to me because what we feel from our soul is just as important to us as any other idea brought to our attention.  They both delight us, just maybe in different ways.  The second video, CARTA: Evolutionary Origins of Art and Aesthetics: Neurobiology, Neurology and Art and Aesthetics, was very interesting to me.  In my post on ANGEL, I had discussed how art was a form of expressing ourselves and this video talks about that.  Changeaux discussed how the brain can relate to art and how different parts of our brains help us with this.  Ramachadran discusses how science and art coincide with each other.  I suppose you can think of any different subject going along with art in some way.  It was interesting to hear about how the brain works with art and how it is pleasing to us.  The article by Elizabeth Landau, What the Brain Draws From: Art and Neuroscience, relates to the second video I feel more than the first.  Just from the titles, one can assume this.  It was interesting to read about how the brain can perceive something that is two-dimensional as three-dimensional, just depending on the shows and colors that are used.  Artists are able to portray things differently for us and it may bring the pictures to life.  It’s interesting to see how this happens.  The films and the article added a lot more, along with the text.  The videos went into history, as did the text, and talked about different philosophers and their beliefs.  Learning the more “science-y” part of art was what was most appealing to me because you never really think of art as a science and it goes into so many details to help you see that it really can be.