Hermeneutics, autonomy and experience in contemporary German aesthetics. About Art as human praxis. An aesthetic of Georg Bertram.

Abstract

Two years after its original publication (Kunst als menschliche Praxis, Eine Asthetik, 2014), it enters for the first time, in the hands of the excellent translation of José Francisco Zuñiga García, a complete book by Georg Bertram. This German professor of philosophy at the Freien Universitat Berlin has a remarkable productivity as surprising, because it crosses various fields and traditions of philosophical discussion with some comfort. Bertram can discuss both the analytic tradition and the heirs of the critical tradition of German aesthetics (Albrecht Wellmer, Martin Seel, Christoph Menke) and the sources of contemporary hermeneutics. Probably, this fact has to do with his intellectual and formative career that, as the edition of this collection of aesthetics by the Spanish publisher Comares indicates, the author has researched alongside thinkers coming from very different currents of thought, from Martin Seel o Odo Marquard to the Pittsburgh academic circuits guided by John McDowell. The latter is evident in the reconstruction of Kant and Hegel that Bertram performs in chapters two and three of this text. The works of the so-called "New Yorkers of Pittsburgh" or Pittsburgh School (John McDowell, Robert Brandom, Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard) become visible in the analysis of the German idealists.