Teaching Workshop: Aesthetics of Colour

The workshop aims to provide students with some essential philosophical notions and skills. First, we will examine the debate on colour that arose in the Anglo-American philosophy in the past 50 years, starting with one of the most provocative positions, i.e. the so-called "eliminativism", which claims that colour does not exist at all. Students will be invited to discuss and embrace one of the different solutions that have been given to the question: what is colour, and where should it be sought? The goal will be to show the limits of every position, and this will lead in turn to shift the research focus.
In a second moment, the central question will be that of colour in art, and in particular in painting. A special attention will be paid, therefore, to the symbolic meaning of colour, also through a number of concrete examples chosen by the teacher and, later, also by the students themselves. The goal will be, on the one hand, to investigate the relationship between philosophy and painting and, on the other hand, to understand how colour arises from a tension between different dimensions: from an interplay between cultural and natural, collective and personal, perceptive and linguistic elements. Colour, therefore, will appear not any more as something simple and "obvious", but rather as an "object" full of stories and possibilities.

The workshop intends to allow students to acquire new skills of philosophical inquiry, through the investigation of an apparently simple question, i.e. the problem of colour. Through the debate on colour, students will also become aware of the fracture that exists between the vision of the world proposed by modern science and that of our common experience, and to accept the challenge of their rapprochement. Finally, the part on colour in art aims at teaching students to approach artworks from a philosophical point of view, showing how their relationship with colour is determined only within the artwork itself, and requires therefore a constant and active confrontation.