MANTOVARCHITETTURA 2021 – Aesthetics and Environment: The Big Questions. Emily Brady

Emily Brady is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. Her research and teaching interests span aesthetics and philosophy of art, environmental ethics, and eighteenth-century philosophy. She has published seven books, including, Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments (with Isis Brook and Jonathan Prior, Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).

In the field of philosophy, there has been a long history of studying the aesthetic categories of beauty, wonder, and sublimity in relation to the natural world. More recently, global environmental crises and movements have challenged philosophers to tackle a range of issues regarding aesthetics and environment. This lecture explores some of the big questions which concern the field of environmental aesthetics today: What is distinctive about environmental aesthetic appreciation, as compared to artistic appreciation? How do aesthetic values intersect with ethical values, that is, what is the relationship between aesthetics and environmentalism? With the disastrous effects of global climate change and, also, finding ourselves in the new geological age of the Anthropocene, what is the significance of developing an intergenerational aesthetics?

With an introduction by Gioia Laura Iannilli, Professor of Aestethics at Mantova Campus of Politecnico di Milano.

The event will be published on the Mantova Campus Youtube channel.