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ICS The Aesthetics of Compassion syllabus 2020.1.docx
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ICS Calendar Title: The Aesthetics of Compassion

ICS Course Code: ICS 220104 F20

Instructor: Dr. Rebekah Smick, rsmick@icscanada.edu, 416-979-2331 ext. 288

Term and Year: Thursdays, 10:00 am – 1:00 pm EST, Fall 2020

1. Course Description

In light of recent renewed interest in the meanings and mechanisms of empathy in such areas as theology, ethics, visual studies, and the philosophy of mind, this course examines the place and role of compassion in the development of the Western aesthetics tradition. Considering a range of art theoretical texts, literature, and images for which the theme of compassion has been crucial, the course aims to clarify the ways in which the concept of compassion has been thought able to account for certain of the emotional and cognitive links that exist between an artwork and its audience.

2. Course Requirements

Possible Paper Topics

In addition to the figures treated in class, students might consider investigating the theme of compassion in the thought of any of the following thinkers: Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Spenser, John Dryden, Renee Descartes, David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, William Blake, Joseph Addison, Francis Hutcheson, Lord Shaftesbury, Gottfried Lessing, Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marcel Proust, Emily Bronte.

3. Required Readings

*Note: Items on the ICS Library Reserve Shelf from this list may be borrowed overnight.

Plato. The Ion. In The Dialogues of Plato. Trans. B. Jowett. New York: Scribner

Plato. The Symposium. In Plato: Complete Works. Ed. J.M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

Plato. The Republic. Ed. Andrea Tschemplik. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.

Aristotle. The Poetics. Ed. S.H. Butcher. New York: Dover, 1951.

Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civil Discourse. Trans. George Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Vol. II. Trans. H.E. Butler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Lucius Annasus Seneca. Moral Essays. Translated by John W. Basore. The Loeb Classical Library. London: W. Heinemann, 1928-1935. 3 vols.

Augustine. On Christian Doctrine. Translated by D.W. Robertson. Indianapolis: Liberal Arts Press, 1958. Book I.x.10 – I.xiii.12; Book I.xvii.16; Book I.xxii.20-21; Book I.xxx.31-33; Book I.xxxi.34-I.xxxii.35.

Augustine. The City of God against the Pagans. Translated by David S. Wiesen. The Loeb Classical Library. Vol. III. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968, Book IX, Chaps. 4 and 5.

Michael Psellos. “Sermon on the Crucifixion.” Trans. Elizabeth A. Fisher. In “Image and Ekphrasis in Michael Psellos” Sermon on the Crucifixion.” Byzantinoslavica, 55 (1994) 1, 44-55.

Hermannus Alemannus. “Translation of Averroes” “Middle Commentary” on Aristotle’s Poetics: Extracts’ of Aristotle.In Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100-c.1375: The Commentary Tradition. Eds. A.J. Minnis and A.B. Scott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, 289-313.

Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Mark Musa. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.

William Shakespeare. The Tempest. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Methuen, 1961.

Arthur Schopenhauer. On the Basis of Morality. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. Indianapolis: New York, 1965. Part III, chaps V-VIII

Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Random House, 1992

Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1982

________________. From The Birth of Tragedy. In Tragedy. Eds. John Drakakis and Naomi Liebler. London and New York: 1998, pp. 53-64.

Simone Weil. Waiting on God. London: Routledge, 2009, pp. 38-46.

Simone Weil. Gateway to God. Ed. David Raper. New York: Crossroad, 1982.

4. Some Recommended Readings

Bell, Richard. Simone Weil: The Way of Justice and Compassion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.

Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso, 1963.

Blowers, Paul M. “Pity, Empathy and the Tragic Spectacle of Human Suffering: Exploring the Emotional Culture of Compassion in Late Ancient Christianity.” Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring (2010), pp. 1-27. 

Brueck, Katherine T. “The Sacramental Poetics of Simone Weil.” In The Redemption of Tragedy: The Literary Vision of Simone Weil. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995

Carr, Brian, “Pity and Compassion as Social Virtues,” Philosophy, Vol. 74, No. 289 (1999), pp. 411-429. [UTL e-journal]

Carrol, Noel. “Art, Narrative, and Moral Understanding.” In Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998

Cartwright, David. “Kant’s View of the Moral Significance of Kindhearted Emotions and the Moral Insignificance of Kant’s View.” The Journal of Value Inquiry, 21 (1987), 291-304. [UTL e-journal]

Dox, Donnalee. The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.

Faber, Alyda. “Dancer in the Dark: Affliction and the Aesthetic of Attention.” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2006), pp. 85-106.

Fisher, E.A. “Image and Ekphrasis in Michael Psellus- Sermon on the Crucifixion.” Byzantinoslavica, 55.1 (1994), 53

Fitzgerald, Allan D. “Mercy, Works of Mercy.” In Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009.

Frazer, Michael L. “The compassion of Zarathustra : Nietzsche on sympathy and strength.” The Review of politics (2006), vol. 68, no1, pp. 49-78 [UTL e-journal]

Fulton, Rachel. From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Guyer, Paul. “Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics.” In Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts. Ed. Dale Jacquette. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

HaCohen, Ruth. “The Music of Sympathy in the Arts of the Baroque; or, the Use of Difference to Overcome Indifference.” Poetics Today, 22: 3 (Fall 2001), 607-650. [UTL e-journal]

Halliwell, Stephen. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

James, Susan. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth Century Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Kaufmann, Walter. Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

Keaty, Anthony. “The Christian Virtue of Mercy: Aquinas’ Transformation of Aristotelian Pity.” Heythrop Journal. Vol. 46, Issue 2 (April, 2005), 181-198. [UTL e-journal]

Kirsch, Arthur. “Virtue, Vice, and Compassion in Montaigne and the Tempest.” Studies in English Literature. 1500-1900, 37, 2 (1997), 337-362. [UTL e-journal]

Kobialka, Michal. This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Konstan, David. Pity Transformed. London: Duckworth, 2001.

Levene, D.S. “Pity, Fear and the Historical Audience: Tacitus on the Fall of Vitellius.” In The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature. Eds. Susanna Norton Braund and Christopher Gill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997

McCarthy, John A. “Criticism and Experience: Philosophy and Literature in the German Enlightenment.” In Philosophy and German Literature, 1700-1990. Ed. Nicholas Saul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 13-56.

Morrison, Karl F. I Am You:Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Nussbaum, Martha. “Compassion: The Most Basic Social Emotion.” Social Philosophy and Policy 13 (1996), 27-58. [UTL e-journal]

_______________. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

_______________. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

_______________. “Tragedy and Self-Sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on Fear and Pity.” In Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics. Ed. A. Rorty. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 261-290.

_______________. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Pattison, George. “Desire, Decreation and Unknowing in the God-relationship: Mystical Theology and its Transformation in Kierkegaard, Simone Weil and Dostoevsky.” In Subjectivity and Transcendence. Ed. Arne Grøn. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007, pp. 193-211.

Pensky, Max. Melancholy dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the play of mourning. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1993.

Pinotti, A. , Du Bos, “L’empatia e i neuroni specchio.” In Jean-Baptiste Du Bos e l’Estetica dello Spettatore. Ed. L. Russo. Roma: Centro Internazionale di Studi Estetici, 2007, 203-212.

Springsted, Eric. Simone Weil and the Suffering of Love. Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1986.

Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Webb, Ruth. “Imagination and the Arousal of the Emotions in Greco-Roman Rhetoric.” In The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature. Eds. Susanna Norton Braund and Christopher Gill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Wessel, Susan. Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Williams, Rowan. Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2010.

______________. On Augustine. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016.

______________. The Tragic Imagination (The Literary Agenda). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Young, Julian. Schopenhauer. London: Routledge, 2005.

5. Reading Schedule

1. Sept. 17

Introduction

2. Sept. 24

.

Plato, The Republic, The Ion, The Symposium

  • Book X, 602c-608b;
  • Complete Ion;
  • Diotima’s Speech

3. Oct. 1

Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric

  • Poetics, Chap. 6, 1449b27-28; Chap. 9, 1451a37-1452a11; Chap. 11, 1452a22-1452b13; Chap. 13, 1452b28-1453a34; and Chap. 14, 1453b1-27
  • Rhetoric, Book 2, Chapter 8

Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria

  • Book VI.II.23-36

4. Oct. 8

Seneca, On Mercy

  • I. xix. 2 - xxi. 3; II. iv. 3 - II. vi. 3

Augustine, On Christian Doctrine

  • I.x.10 – I.xiii.12; I.xvii.16; I.xxii.20-21; I.xxx.31-33; I.xxxi.34-I.xxxii.35.

Augustine, City of God

  • Book IX, Chapters 4 and 5

5. Oct. 15

Michael Psellos, “Sermon on the Crucifixion”

The Middle Commentary of Averroes

  • Commentary extracts

6. Oct. 23

Dante, The Divine Comedy

  • Inferno, Cantos I, II, V, VI, VIII, XIII and XX
  • Purgatorio, Cantos XXVII and XXX
  • Paradiso, Cantos XIII and XXXIII

Oct. 26-30

Reading Week - no class

7. Nov. 5

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  • complete play

8. Nov. 12

Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality

  • Part III, Chaps. V-VIII

9. Nov. 19

Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

  • Parts 1-3

10. Nov. 26

Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

  • Parts 4-6 and Epilogue

11. Dec. 3

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Birth of Tragedy

  • Zarathustra, II, III, IV
  • Tragedy, pp. 53-64

12. Dec. 10

Simone Weil, Waiting on God

  • “The Love of God and Affliction,” pp. 38-46
  • “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” pp. 48-82

Simone Weil, Gateway to God

  • “Additional pages on the Love of God and Affliction,” pp. 87-102

13. Dec. 17

  • Wrap up

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