Call for Papers for the 33rd Volume of Pli: Aesthetic Education

Call For Papers

Plí invites submissions for its 33rd volume:

Aesthetic Education

We engage in aesthetic experiences. We listen to music, read books, observe paintings and gaze at landscapes. However, if we are lucky, we do not just do this. When engaging in each of these experiences, we can do more than just listen, read, observe, gaze, create; we can also experience objects, events, or states of affairs, aesthetically and we can draw value from these experiences — we can draw aesthetic value. It can be argued that the aesthetic value that we draw on may be in itself enough reason to seek out aesthetic experiences. But, there may be other reasons to do so — reasons that specifically have to do with our development as persons, both individually and within communities.

The next volume of Pli will explore this theme of aesthetic education: what, if any, is/should be the role of aesthetic experiences and aesthetic value on one’s development as a person, and whether these should be pursued actively. To put it another way, Volume 33 of Pli will focus on the reasons that there may exist to pursue aesthetic experiences, other than purely aesthetic reasons, when applied to any object, event, state of affairs, from which one can have aesthetic experiences as an observer or a creator.

Although this is a topic that has been given special attention throughout the history of philosophy, and from all spectrums of philosophy (most infamously from Plato’s expulsion of the poets in the Republic to Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man), we believe that the theme of aesthetic education thus construed deserves continuous attention. We are especially interested in submissions that explore how aesthetic experiences and value may come to shape a person — either from an observer's perspective or the perspective of a creator of aesthetic objects/events — and whether these should be pursued in any of the following (or other related) dimensions:

• the relation between aesthetic value and ethical value;

• how feelings/emotions from those experiences impact reason;

• its relation to our capacity to practical reasoning;

• the role that feelings originating from aesthetic experiences may play on how we should understand morality and its demands;

• its role in understanding oneself and others;

• its relation to the meaning of one’s life;

• its possible impact on the development of specific conceptions of communities and/or individuals;

• the role it may have, or that it should have, on the development of conceptions of the good life;

• whether an artist communicates their intended content or whether that content is in the eye of the beholder?

• does an object have to be created with the intention of stimulating an aesthetic experience or do all objects have the potential to do so?

• is there a difference between an aesthetic object that is created and one that is simply encountered in the world?

We are also interested in receiving book reviews on the theme of aesthetic education. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions regarding the appropriateness of a proposed book review.

Confirmed contributors: Yuriko Saito, Ronald Moore, and Tom Huhn.

The deadline for submissions is the 3rd July 2021. All submissions should be no longer than 8,000 words, prefaced by an abstract, and sent by email to: plijournal@warwick.ac.uk as a Word, ODT or RTF file. Please, include an e-mail address for future correspondence.

Before submitting an article, please ensure you have read the Notes for Contributors at https://plijournal.com/notes-for-contributors/ . See our website for further information https://plijournal.com/.