SJ Cowan

SJ Cowan

American Society of Aesthetics Dissertation Fellow

Period at the center: October 2024 – September 2025

Research Project: The Play of Appearances: Aesthetic Semblance and the Reflective Conception of Art

Email: cowan@berkeley.edu

Website

In academic pursuits, I write my name as SJ Cowan. But I usually go by Scott. I am a philosopher and artist, and also have a background in theology (MA). I’m a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, in the Philosophy department, and work also in the Program for Critical Theory. My interests are in thinkers like Kant, the German Romantics, and Wittgenstein, as well as in Critical Theory, and Feminist and Black thought. My dissertation—which draws heavily on Schiller, Nietzsche, and Adorno—is (tentatively) titled “The Play of Appearances: Aesthetic Semblance and the Reflective Conception of Art”.

Research Project

The Play of Appearances: Aesthetic Semblance and the Reflective Conception of Art

The leading questions of my research are: why has it become so natural to think of art as being a transformative practice—whether socially or politically, or at the level of the individual? And: what does the concept of “aesthetic semblance” amount to?

As I see it, answering one question means answering the other.

My dissertation has two main parts. One is on the historical legacy and development of the concept of aesthetic semblance, with chapters on Schiller, Nietzsche, and Adorno. Besides demonstrating the primary importance of aesthetic semblance for aesthetics and philosophy of art, my main focus in these chapters is two-fold: first, to explain the concept of aesthetic semblance at work in these figures, illustrating that it is central to their conception of art; and second, arguing that aesthetic semblance is key to the reasoning of why they think art has the capacity to transform or criticize the world.

The second part of the dissertation is where (drawing on the historical chapters), I develop my own account of aesthetic semblance, and argue that semblance is key to a broader issue in modern and contemporary aesthetics. Specifically, I argue that there is a nearly ubiquitous conception of art at work today (stemming from figures like Schiller, Nietzsche, and Adorno), in which art is pictured as a means of social transformation and/or social criticism. I call this the “reflective conception of art,” and I argue that aesthetic semblance is fundamental to this conception of art, and to the way art is imagined as critical and transformative today.

Selected publications

Articles

“The Miracle of Death: On the Work of Srijon Chowdhury” in, Srijon Chowdhury: Same Old Song, exhibition catalogue (Seattle: Frye Art Museum, 2022), 27-35.

“On the Way to Nietzsche’s “Ticklish Truths”: Comedy, Poetry, and Chance in The Gay Science”, in: Understanding Nietzsche,
Understanding Modernism, ed. B. Pines and D. Burnham (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 47-63.