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Aesthetics in Canada: The State of the Art*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

W. E. Cooper
W. E. Cooper
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Extract

Opuscula Aesthetica Nostra is a pioneering publishing effort, blazing a trail which specialists in other philosophical fields should consider following. It purports to represent what is happening in aesthetics throughout English-speaking and French-speaking Canada today, and in consequence it is an intriguing exercise in Canadian bilingualism. It purports also to show, as co-editor Calvin Seerveld says in the Preface, that “aesthetics deserves its own bona fide place in the national market place of ideas”; so the editors have reprinted strong previously published papers, in addition to soliciting new material on the occasion of the Tenth International Congress of Aesthetics held in Montreal in 1984. The result is a satisfying pot-pourri of ideas.

Type
Critical Notices/Etudes critiques
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Spring 1987 , pp. 123 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1987

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References

1 I shall not discuss these primarily Quebec-oriented articles here.

2 Aside from the articles referred to in footnote 1, I have omitted discussion only of Cecile Cloutier-Wojciechowska's nicely textured and sympathetic “Claude Gauvreau et l'esthetique surrealiste”. I have not read Gauvreau's Ouevres créatrices complètes, and Cloutier-Wojciechowska's musings upon its 1,498 pages persuaded me that it is probably not my cup of tea. Hearing that he “fait sauter lois, grammaire, syntaxe, bienséance, habitudes, servitudes” (140), that he “élimine le superego pour retenir un peu d'ego et du id à l'état pur” (140), and much more in the same vein, I am not encouraged to put his work near the top of my reading list. (I say this without prejudice of course to the merit of his oeuvre.)