Joseph Kassman-Tod Wins Outstanding Student Essay Prize

The American Society for Aesthetics is pleased to announce that Joseph Kassman-Tod (University of California, Berkeley) has won the Outstanding Student Essay Prize for the 81st ASA Annual Meeting, November 15-18, 2023 in Arlington, VA. The essay: "Aesthetic Humility as ‘Remembrance’: A Critical Virtue"

The abstract for the paper: 

What is it for one’s thought to be appropriately and productively responsive to fine art? Responses to this question face two opposing dangers: ‘aesthetic servitude’ and ‘aesthetic hubris’. In this paper I argue that aesthetic humility corrects for both of these alternatives. More specifically, I argue that German idealist poet/ philosopher, Friedrich Hölderlin, provides a promising model of aesthetic humility. In developing this model I contend that the artwork-directed dimension of aesthetic humility takes the form of ‘remembrance’. My proposal is that ‘remembrance’ consists in thoughtful attentiveness to possibilities of sense-making that have been marginalized, which in turn opens our understanding to new possibilities for thought and talk to come. From an analysis of Hölderlin’s mourning-play ‘The Death of Empedocles’ and his theoretical essay ‘The Declining Fatherland’, I argue that the kind of thought with which we appropriately and productively respond to fine art, is a form of ‘remembrance’.

For more information on the meeting: https://aesthetics-online.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1385535&group=