Aesthetics - I learned that Plato's idea of aesthetics revolves centrally around "beauty" and what we consider beautiful. In essence, the manifestation of something beautiful attracts us to it. I also learned that Kant's idea was that aesthetics brings sensibility and reason together and that ultimately, aesthetic beauty was a feeling.
CARTA - Most of my key concepts revolved around Ramachandran since I found his lecture the most interesting. Perhaps my favorite quote from the video is when Ramachandran said "art is about asserting individuality and science is about discovering universal principles... the best place for them to meet is in the human brain." Later on in the video, Ramachandran talks about "peak shift" and how they can teach a rat to understand that a square means no food and a rectangle means food, but when presented with an elongated rectangle, the rat will pick that.
As I said in my discussion board post, I think Plato, a fifth century philosopher, was one of the most important philosophers to have a theory on aesthetics. His idea was that "beauty had everything to do with aesthetics. His idea that the manifestation of beauty is what ultimately attracts us to something is the concept I related to most. Moreover, Plato paved the way for many other innovative philosophers like Kant to develop other interesting theories about aesthetics.
To be honest, I could barely understand Changeux, so I didn't take very much from his lecture. From what I understood, he was trying to make a connection between the evolution of man and the evolution of art. He related the discovery of man-made tools to what would eventually become art and aesthetics, which I understood and is an interesting concept.
I did, however, enjoy Ramachandran's lecture. Ramachandran's said that art wasn't always about depicting an exact replica of something (in this case he was talking about an Indian sculpture of a woman and suggested that one could create an accurate representation with a $5 dollar camera). Rather, art is about creating a "hyperbole" of an object in order to create a pleasing subject for the human eye to look at. Furthermore, Ramachandran states that "peak shift" can also be applied to humans. Peak shift in rats is similar to how humans do caricatures of one another (as in a characature of Obama might have large ears and a skinny lower face) but also states that it is how one might make an effective portrait of another (he then referred to the slightly hyperbolated sculpture of a woman from earlier and stated "you take what makes a woman 'womanly' and you amplify it").
The video on aesthetics gave me a background on philosophers who came up with the theory of aesthetics, rather than Getlein's book which mainly discussed the concept of aesthetics. Instead of just learning about the concept, I now have knowledge about the philosophers behind it like Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, and Weitz.
The CARTA video had a similar affect, but focused more on the scientific/neuroscience aspect of art. Ramachandran was able to express that there was a reason that aesthetics was important in art - our bodies and physically react to something when it is aesthetically pleasing. Though some of the concepts went way over my head, I was able to get a better understanding of the science of aesthetics as a whole.
Unfortunately, the only part of the videos I really got into was Ramachandran's lecture. I had a tough time understanding Changeux's thick accent and slow English which made his concepts rather frustrating to understand. Furthermore, philosophy is a subject I've never quite grasped; although I understood Plato's philosophy and some of Kant's, I found that I took more history knowledge away from the Aesthetics video, rather than knowledge of art. This is unfortunate since I am really enjoying the readings in the Getlein book.
For me, Ramachandran and Changeux's lectures gave a background to the concept of aesthetics. Now I understand where aesthetics originated philosophically (besides Baumgarten's original definition) and some of the science behind what makes something aesthetically pleasing. Overall, the videos were meant to supplement the reading as extra knowledge about a topic that Getlein was covering in his book.
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