PhD Programs / Faculty Strong in German 19th Century and Aesthetics

[bechkafish]

Hi GradCafe-ers,

I'm trying to compile a list of programs to which to apply this winter, and I was wondering if anyone had additional recommendations. My interests are in German Romanticism (all post-Kant German philosophy, basically) and aesthetics, and particularly the combination of the two; philosophy of music, philosophy of literature; an offering of a terminal MA in German / German Studies or some sort of joint program would be about a million extra brownie points. My list so far includes: CUNY, Columbia, Brown, UChicago, Princeton, Notre Dame, DePaul... What else should I look at?

[philstudent1991]

Well, Georgia State offers the terminal MA, and they have people working in German philosophy as well as Kant. Berry does Nietzsche, Rand does German Idealism incl. Hegel, Wilson does Kant, Moore does Nietzsche and aesthetics, and Weiskopf does philosophy of art as a side interest I believe. Leiter has called GSU the place to be to do Nietzsche and German philosophy among MA programs. Especially given how crazy competitive your list is, I'd add GSU. 

[maxhgns]

When you say "aesthetics" and "philosophy of music", and "philosophy of literature", do you mean those in general, or do you have a particular stream (analytic vs. continental/historical) in mind? I ask simply because those are pretty different beasts, and there aren't many aesthetics faculty in North America. You,re lucky to have one in a department, let alone two, so the stream you're interested in can really make a difference. Generally speaking, philosophers of art are quite friendly and conversant across that divide, but it's worth being aware that you're likely to miss out on in-depth training on one side or the other of that equation.

At a glance and without further information, I'd say your best options for that combination in North America are going to be Columbia, Texas Austin, McGill, and NYU. All four have top-notch faculty in both 19th c. Germany and aesthetics. If your aesthetics interests are more historical/continental, Columbia and Texas Austin are definitely the best of those (Goehr is really fantastic, and as much a historian of philosophy as a philosopher of art; Higgins is at home in the 19th c., and both analytic and historical aesthetics); if they're more analytic, then McGill and NYU are the way to go (Davies and Hopkins are the aesthetics superstars there; McGill is pluralistic overall, but its aesthetics is analytic).

CUNY is much stronger on the aesthetics side than it is on the 19th c. side, and it leans more analytic than continental-historical (although Carroll is something of a jack-of-all-trades). Brown, Princeton, Notre Dame, Chicago, and DePaul don't really have anything going for them on the aesthetics side at all, although I'd say that DePaul might well have the best continental department around. I don't say that to discourage you from applying to these by any means; I just want you to know what you're gunning for. You might also have a look at Illinois-Chicago, Northwestern, and SUNY Buffalo. All three of those are pretty good on the the 19th c./aesthetics axis, although nowhere near as good as the four I mentioned above. Finally, there's Toronto. It's quite weak on the aesthetics side, but Diana Raffman is a prominent proponent o a rather notorious position in the philosophy of music. 19th c.-wise, however, it's quite good.

In the UK, have a look at Warwick. It's probably the most pluralistic department in the UK, and it's got some very good faculty on the 19th c. and aesthetics/phil. lit. fronts (although the aesthetics/phil. lit. there is of the more analytic variety). Further afield, there's Auckland, whose aesthetics side is very, very strong.

 

Oh, and incidentally: there are no jobs in aesthetics. None. Check philjobs for this year: not a single TT job. Nor are there likely to be any in ten years' time. The sad fact is that it's a very low-status subfield. 

Edited October 17, 2015 by maxhgns

[bechkafish]

Philstudent1991, thank you for your suggestion! I am currently finishing up an MA at Boston University, though, and would like to progress to PhD work this coming application season, so I don't know that GSU really fits the bill.

Maxhgns, I'm coming down particularly heavily on the continental/historical side of that line. I know the job market for anything aesthetics is worse than dismal, so I'm pretty resigned to the fact that it will have to be a bit of an ancillary interest. 19th Century Continental is much more generally the watchword for me this application season, though of course it would be very excellent if any of the strong continental departments had faculty interested in aesthetics as well. I suppose my general worry is that the departments ranked high in 19th Century on the PGR are, like you say, insanely competitive... and I've been getting a lot of conflicting advice on the SPEP-ranked departments.

[Glasperlenspieler]

On 10/17/2015, 5:50:02, maxhgns said:

Brown, Princeton, Notre Dame, Chicago, and DePaul don't really have anything going for them on the aesthetics side at all,

Sorry to resurrect the dead, I've been away from Gradcafe for awhile. But I have to point out that this is simply wrong. Brown has Paul Gyuer; Princeton has Alexander Nehamas; Robert Pippin and Martha Nussbaum at Chicago have substantial side interests in philosophy of literature in particular; and Notre Dame has both Fred Rush and Stephen Watson. Given that all of these individuals as well as other faculty at these institutions also have substantial interests in German philosophy, these four schools along with Columbia strike as possibly the best places to study a combination of aesthetics and 19th C German philosophy. Texas may also be strong due to Higgins, although I get the sense that the rest of the program is pretty narrowly focused on issues in contemporary analytic philosophy.

[maxhgns]

11 hours ago, DerPhilosoph said:

Sorry to resurrect the dead, I've been away from Gradcafe for awhile. But I have to point out that this is simply wrong. Brown has Paul Gyuer; Princeton has Alexander Nehamas; Robert Pippin and Martha Nussbaum at Chicago have substantial side interests in philosophy of literature in particular; and Notre Dame has both Fred Rush and Stephen Watson. Given that all of these individuals as well as other faculty at these institutions also have substantial interests in German philosophy, these four schools along with Columbia strike as possibly the best places to study a combination of aesthetics and 19th C German philosophy. Texas may also be strong due to Higgins, although I get the sense that the rest of the program is pretty narrowly focused on issues in contemporary analytic philosophy.

 

Look, it all depends on how serious the OP's interest in aesthetics is. If it's not particularly serious, and takes a back seat to historical figures, then fine. If it's dominant or not primarily tied to historical figures, then the OP would be very poorly served to attend these programs. Not because they suck, their faculty are bad, or because those faculty members have no connection to aesthetics, but because those programs do not feature a single scholar working primarily in aesthetics. Their scholars do dabble in aesthetics, but they're not especially heavy hitters, especially not beyond their narrow sphere of interest.

Guyer dabbles in aesthetics purely as a function of the history of philosophy (mostly Kant's third critique and in modern philosophy), and self-describes as an outsider to the subfield. I'll grant that he's involved with the ASA, but his interest in aesthetics is still very narrow. Of all the people you mention I'm most ready to concede Guyer (since he at least has an active and coherent research program in the subfield), but the caveats where he's concerned are still significant.

Nehamas has some students in aesthetics, but he barely publishes in the subfield except for the occasional work on the notion of beauty. He's had a little activity at the ASA recently, especially as an invited speaker, but it's still not much.

Pippin's interest and work is almost exclusively on Hegel's aesthetics. Nussbaum likewise has indeed done some important work on moral attitudes to and in literature, but that's the extent of it. Even in the philosophy of literature, their interests are narrowly focused on specific issues; you won't see them wading into debates on the nature of fictional characters, the reference of fictional names, or the semantics of fiction, for example, and these are seriously burgeoning areas. From what I can tell, neither is particularly involved with the ASA, the BSA, the ESA, or the CSA. They may be major figures in their ordinary areas of specialization, but I regret to say that aesthetics is not among them.

As for Rush and Watson... I'll confess to very little familiarity with their work. I'm not a continentalist, so there's that. But I also don't recall seeing them on programs for the meetings of the various societies, and their publication records don't indicate a strong and active research program in the subfield. Rush does better than Watson on that front, to be sure, but not by very much.

I'm sorry. I'm not saying this to be mean or discouraging, or to disparage these people and their work. They're at excellent schools, and do excellent work, and I can only wish to be a fraction as successful as they are. But the fact that they occasionally publish on some topic in aesthetics just isn't enough to count them as masters of the subfield. They just aren't. Guyer comes closest, but even he is fairly narrowly focused.

As I said in my first post, everything sort of hinges on how much emphasis the OP wants to place on 'aesthetics', and on what part of that subfield, as well as which methodological approach to it (viz., historical, analytic, or continental) s/he wants to adopt.

But if you and I are having a separate discussion about which schools are good for 'aesthetics', then I'm sorry to say that Brown, Princeton, Chicago, Notre Dame, and DePaul just don't cut the mustard. Not even close.

[SamStone]

While Pippin is interested in Hegel's aesthetics, I don't know that it would really be correct to characterize him as almost exclusively interested Hegel's aesthetics. (Though it is true that aesthetics is not his primary subject matter.) He has 2 books on cinema: one on film noir and one on hollywood westerns. He also worked on literature (as you mention): he has a book on Henry James and essays on Proust and J.M. Coetzee. And has written directly about painting and Michael Fried. Also, his book Persistence of Subjectivity which deals quite a bit with aesthetics throughout. 

So I don't see any general, or overall, reason why someone who is interested in German Romanticism and aesthetics would not want to study at U-Chicago. Besides Pippin, they have Conant, who has taught several different courses on aesthetics. And, for Romanticism they have Robert Richards—whose Romantic Conception of Life deals with science, philosophy, and Romantic aesthetics via Goethe.

(But, yes, it does depend on what the OP has in mind with aesthetics.)

Edited November 23, 2015 by SamStone
typo

[maxhgns]

6 minutes ago, SamStone said:

While Pippin is interested in Hegel's aesthetics, I don't know that it would really be correct to characterize him as almost exclusively interested Hegel's aesthetics. (Though it is true that aesthetics is not his primary subject matter.) He has 2 books on cinema: one on film noir and one on hollywood westerns. He also worked on literature (as you mention): he has a book on Henry James and essays on Proust and J.M. Coetzee. And has written directly about painting and Michael Fried. Also, his book Persistence of Subjectivity which deals quite a bit with aesthetics throughout. 

So I don't see any general, or overall, reason why someone who is interested in German Romanticism and aesthetics would not want to study at U-Chicago. Besides Pippin, they have Conant, who has taught several different courses on aesthetics. And, for Romanticism they have Robert Richards—whose Romantic Conception of Life deals with science, philosophy, and Romantic aesthetics via Goethe.

(But, yes, it does depend on what the OP has in mind with aesthetics.)

 

As a matter of personal opinion, I don't think Pippins's work is particularly central to aesthetics as a contemporary subfield. I'll confess that I've not read them, but from what I can tell his books on cinema aren't really 'about' philosophical issues in cinematic practice. They take particular films as case studies for popular/public philosophy-style questions: the Western book is about the view of law and politics promoted in those films, and the film noir one is about those particular films and questions they raise about intention and self-control and stuff. His stuff on Proust and Coetzee similarly looks like it's about close critical readings of Proust and Coetzee. 

To me, that kind of stuff just isn't really philosophical aesthetics. It's related, perhaps, but it's not really of a kind with the work that I see going on at conferences, or in the main journals. I mean, all right. I don't mean to be policing boundaries, and maybe I've let my own biases get the better of me. I probably have, since it's increasingly sounding like I'm policing boundaries.

 

[Glasperlenspieler]

Thanks for the responses! I'm glad to see there's enough interest in aesthetics/philosophy of art on these boards to spark a disagreement. You're certainly right in suggesting that these figures are probably not representative of mainstream contemporary philosophical aesthetics (whether that says more about contemporary aesthetics or these figures, I'm not sure!). In truth the list I provided probably betrays more my peculiar interests than any impartial evaluation. As someone very interested in the intersection of German philosophy and philosophy of art, these are the sorts of programs I'm planning on applying to next season after (hopefully) another year teaching abroad. In particular, I'm drawn to approaches that blur the line between literary/art/film criticism and philosphy, something these individuals do rather adeptly in my view. 

So while these programs may not be in mainstream (not that anything in philosophy of art is), given the OP's stated preference for continental/historical perspectives, they are probably worth considering if the OP has a similar interests to me.