The Aesthetics Seminar Week 7 HT17
The Death of Socrates
Speaker: Emily Caddick-Bourne (Hertfordshire)
Title: Love's demonstration in Shakespeare's Sonnets
Abstract: One of the themes present in Shakespeare's sonnets is the desire to preserve the beauty of one type of thing (a person, the Young Man) through the beauty of another type of thing (poetry). An important problem for this project is that the aesthetic value of poetry seems simply to be incommensurable with the aesthetic value of a young man. Through some observations on the philosophical conceptions of love and of futility which we take the Sonnets to suggest, we will argue that the Sonnets resolve the problem of incommensurability by attempting to create, through poetry, conditions which would enable the Young Man to be identified not by name, not biographically, not by description, but demonstratively, as a relatum of a particular instance of the relation of love.
Organising department: Faculty of Philosophy
Convenors: James Grant (University of Oxford), Yuuki Ohta (University of Oxford)
Part of: The Aesthetics Seminar
