William Elmer Kennik ( born William E. Kennick ; May 28, 1923; - April 12, 2009, Amherst , Mass.) Is an American philosopher and aesthetic. Emeritus Professor of Amherst College . Author of works on aesthetics : “Art and Philosophy: Readings on Aesthetics”, “Is traditional aesthetics based on error?”
| William Kennick | |
|---|---|
| William E. Kennick | |
| Date of Birth | May 28, 1923 |
| Place of Birth | Lebanon (Illinois) , USA |
| Date of death | April 12, 2009 (85 years old) |
| A place of death | Amherst (Massachusetts) , USA |
| Citizenship |  USA |
| Occupation | philosopher, aesthetic |
| Spouse) | Anna Perkins Howes |
| Children | Sylvia Bowditch Kennick, Justin Howes Kennick, Christopher Campbell Kennick |
Content
- 1 Biography
- 2 “Is traditional aesthetics based on error?”
- 3 Bibliography
- 4 notes
- 5 Links
Biography
William Kennik was born May 28, 1923 in Lebanon, Illinois. His parents divorced when he was 5, after which his mother and children moved to Pittsburgh. In high school, Kennik received a scholarship to study at Oberlin College , which he supplemented by working in the summer, seven days a week, at steel mills. In 1945 he received a bachelor of arts degree in Oberlin, graduating with honors. He went to Cornell to continue his studies, but in 1946 he was drafted into the army and served there for 1.5 years.
After the army, Kennik received a special teaching scholarship in Oberlin, after which he returned to Cornell and received a Ph.D. in 1952. For some time he taught at Boston University , and then returned to Oberlin, where he was appointed permanent head of the Department of Philosophy. Kennik moved to Amherst in 1956, where he began to teach philosophy and taught it there for over 35 years, giving courses on the history of philosophy, aesthetics and Wittgenstein's philosophy.
“Is traditional aesthetics based on error?”
William Kennik’s essay “Is traditional aesthetics based on error?”, 1958, is one of the program texts of anti - essentialism - a direction in the mid-20th century Anglo-American aesthetics that claimed the impossibility of finding the essence of art and, accordingly, creating a unified and satisfactory theory of art.
In his essay, Kennick criticizes traditional aesthetics, arguing that it is based on two errors. First of all, it is a mistake that traditional aesthetics believes that all works of art should have specific qualities common to all, which allow us to define them as art, distinguishing them from everything else. Aesthetics set the task of finding the essence of art or beauty and enclose it in a definition. However, art is an “open” - a changing and complemented structure, and its uncertainty cannot be eliminated by the definitions offered by aesthetics. Kennik's understanding of art, like other representatives of anti-essentialism, is based on the concept of family similarities of Ludwig Wittgenstein . In this regard, it is impossible to determine the full scope of the concept of “art”, but examples of works of art can be given. They may differ from each other, but there is a partial similarity between them. You should know art by recognizing and describing works that are usually called art. Attempts to grasp their common essence in any case will be unsuccessful, since the essence of art is in its variability.
With all this, Kennik does not believe that any definitive theories of aesthetics are useless. Despite the fact that they do not help us fully understand what art is, each of them shows a new approach to the study of art, teaches us to see it in a different way.
Kennik sees the second mistake of traditional aesthetics in the opinion that "responsible criticism is impossible without standards or criteria universally applicable to all works of art." He believes that a critical judgment should not presuppose any canons, because, as was said earlier, there is no definite or exhaustively specifying list of criteria applicable to all works of art, therefore, criticism should come from each specific case. Kennick also especially notes the existing parallel of aesthetic assessment with moral, which, in his opinion, leads to an erroneous understanding of criticism.
In morality, we are ultimately interested in uniformity in order to have an idea of what a person should not do; this is one of the reasons why guidelines and laws are necessary and why they play such an important role in moral evaluation. But in art, if we do not want, like Plato, to be legislators and demand something from art, forcing it to be represented by special educational and public institutions, we are not interested in uniformity as a guideline ... Various works of art are worthy or may be worthy of praise or blame for various, and not always the same reasons. There is no one or a number of requirements that apply to all works. This, I think, is important and helps to clarify (at least partially) the true relativity of aesthetic criteria.
Bibliography
Art and Philosophy (1964; 1979)
Metaphysics: Readings and Reappraisals (1966)
essay "Is traditional aesthetics based on error?" (1958)