Re-turn to Schiller: Dublin v Barcelona

Friday 10^th June 2016

1.30-2.30pm (IST) Dublin

2.30-3.00pm (CET) Barcelona

There shall be a communion between the formal impulse and the material impulse – that is, there shall be a play instinct – because it is only the unity of reality with the form, of the accidental with the necessary, of the passive state with freedom, that the conception of humanity is completed. (Schiller, Letter XV)

In recent years there has been a noticeable turn to education in aesthetic theory and practice. A number of theorists including Jacques Rancière, Grant Kester and Doris Sommer have returned to Friedrich Schiller’s Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Why?

We warmly invite you to an international conversation on the topic of Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetics Education of Man involving a live feed link between a seminar on the topic of “the Educational Turn in Aesthetics” as part of the Creative Agency in Local Communities conference in DIT Grangegorman, Dublin and the European Society for Aesthetics 8^th Annual Conference in University of Barcelona. The seminar in Dublin will host an audience of art practitioners and educators including Professor Doris Sommer (Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University). The conference in Barcelona will host an audience of philosophers of art.

The conversation will be hosted by GradCAM’s Aesthetics Research Group, Connell Vaughan and Mick O’Hara in Barcelona and Jeanette Doyle and Cathy O’Carroll in Dublin. The conversation seeks to marry aesthetic theory, practice and policy and their associated communities. Participation by attendees of both conferences to the conversation is welcomed and integral to this event.

This conversation will continue with a consideration of practice through an introduction to the first Department of Ultimology.