Università Roma Tre

The course intends to critically introduce the main themes and problems of Aesthetic, with particular attention to new media, pointing out the theoretical contribution it has made and can give to the understanding of the contemporary process of naturalization of technology and aestheticization of education and communication.
Aesthetic will analyse the changes in contemporary configurations of presentation/representation of the world and how to access a different way of conceiving experience, taking into consideration also that, if on the one hand, the world becomes "a global village" where any distance is cancelled, languages are unified and the common visions disappear, on the other, precisely this sort of planetary homogeneity can convey, - and sometimes determines -, "new differences and new cultural fractures". In this sense, Aesthetic can represent a "link between sciences and cultures" and the chance for a dialogue, a confrontation with diversity, in a perspective of pluralism, of inclusion. The reflection on the proposed beauty could, in fact, represent a shared empathic social space (J. Habermas) whose foundation is based on that existential condition on the awareness of "being-in-a-common-world".
Since beauty is a productive principle of an action that belongs to the original and inspirational moment of the realization of the person as the original disposition of the human being, and art is a specific and proper operation of artists, but it could never arise except as an intentional programmatic accentuation of an activity that is present in the whole spiritual life and that accompanies, indeed constitutes, every manifestation of industriousness human, the course will try to combine the aesthetic dimension of the life with the ethical dimension and formative (Luigi Pareyson's Theory of Formativity). The course will also deal with new frontiers in the use of the body, as the main issuer / receiver of perception/communication.

1. Aesthetics, the epistemological statute; 2. Aesthetical experience as anthropological practice: an historical path; 3. The Aesthetics of Media: the aestheticization of communication (M. McLuhan, J. Habermas);4. The contemporary context: between real and digital. A reflection about a possible redefinition of the concepts of perception and experience; 5. Virtual realities and illusory worlds: the paradigm of Augmented Reality, an aesthetic anthropological reading. Digital identity and online identity processes: datamining, practical profiles of identification "without body"; 6.The new narrative modalities. An interpretation of reality through the "aesthetics" of the TV series. 7. The processes of aestheticization in the different cultural contexts (India, Africa, Europe).

F. Desideri, C. Cantelli, Storia dell'Estetica occidentale. Da Omero alle neuroscienze, Carocci editore, Roma.
F. Desideri - A. Mecacci, Estetica contemporanea. Dalle filosofie della crisi alle culture postmediali, Carocci Editore, Roma 2023