I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University of the Incarnate Word. At the heart of its Mission Statement is its commitment to a liberal education, which works in tandem with its emphasis on Catholic Social Teaching. Although there are several initiatives and institutions that carry out the values of Catholic Social Teaching, nothing does so more steadfastly than UIW’s Core Curriculum—considerably unique for requiring all students to complete 45 hours of service work before graduation. The Core Curriculum requires that students take Introduction to Philosophy, and it gives them the option to fulfill another requirement through an upper-division philosophy course. Students in our School of Media and Design, Department of Theatre Arts, and Department of Art typically enroll in my upper-division course, “Aesthetics: Philosophy of Art & Beauty” to complete this requirement.
Teaching to an interdisciplinary population of mostly non-majors is rewarding but requires some strategy. I have tried to construct a course that is relevant to a variety of types of artists and designers, but that does not sacrifice philosophical rigor. During my PhD work at Texas A&M University, I learned that philosophical rigor is consanguine with a diversity of thought. Texas A&M has a highly pluralistic and interdisciplinary program. So, I am always motivated to construct courses that are not exclusively concerned with Western ideas as they are typically conceived. The syllabus, which I taught in spring 2026, is a result of my strategizing. It is organized around four themes—performance, play, picture, and place—which I elaborate in more detail below.
I love beginning my class with the theme of performance. My theater students share their processes for performance and consider whether Aristotle’s aesthetics captures what a performance is meant to do. The students also immediately get to discuss an intellectual touchstone that they all share. Introduction to Philosophy is a prerequisite for this course, which means that each of them has some familiarity with Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” Investigating “Book X” of the Republic with the “Allegory” in mind presents the opportunity for us to discuss the relationship between art and politics as well as metaphysics and aesthetics. Why does Plato banish the poets (even though he doesn’t really seem to want to)? Why do his metaphysical commitments seem to require it? When we reach Kathleen Higgins’ analysis of Rasa aesthetics, an ancient theory of performance issuing from India, the students are prepared to imbibe an alternative metaphysical theory that includes the possibility of impersonal experience.
Admittedly, “play” is the most challenging theme for students. How, they wonder, is play different from performance? By the time we get to read C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Art as Agency and Maria Lugones’s “Playfulness, ‘World-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” they get a clearer picture that aesthetic play shares much with freedom and with imagination. Along the road to this insight, we read Immanuel Kant. I doubt that my students enjoyed reading Kant, but they did enjoy lectures about the development of Kant’s aesthetics and how it fits in with the rest of his system. For these lectures, I drew inspiration from Kristi Sweet and John Zammito. Friedrich Schiller’s response to Kant, then, presented an opportunity to discuss the role of aesthetics in education, which gave aesthetic play far more significance. The midway point of the unit is Hans-Georg Gadamer. His articulation of play, which describes aesthetic experience and promises the possibility of a form of truth distinct to the humanities, was met with interest from many of my students. One even took to referring to Gadamer as “my man, Gadamer.”
“Picture” is my favorite unit largely because it includes a visit to a local art museum. The McNay is only a mile from our campus, and it provides free entry to UIW students. This semester was the second time I brought a group of students to tour the exhibits with the McNay’s highly skilled docents. The “research day” at the McNay is tied to an “Aesthetic Appreciation Assignment.” In this assignment, students get to discuss their own aesthetic experience at the museum in the context of the philosophical concepts from our course. After discussing Daoism and Confucianism in the context of Xie-He, Su Shih, and Wang Ch’In-Ch’en, students are prepared to think about painting as having spiritual significance. With Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Walter Benjamin, they learn that the pictorial arts are also capable of shaping human perception, whether through painting or mechanical reproduction.
We end the course thinking about the relationship between aesthetics and place. Here I am particularly inspired by Yuriko Saito’s Everyday Aesthetics. The aesthetics of our lived-places demands different considerations than the aesthetics based primarily on artworks. Every student has access to everyday examples: a coffee shop, the San Antonio River Walk, or the UIW Chapel. These are places that cannot be treated as we would treat works of art in a museum. Saito’s essay summarizing the aesthetics of the everyday rounds out the whole course. Everyday aesthetics contrasts perfectly with our discussions of Martin Heidegger’s abstract conception of place in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” Students are further prepared to think about everyday aesthetics after considering the common distinctions between craft and fine art in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s reflections on postcolonial aesthetics in In My Father’s House. We equally see Saito carrying out themes that are relevant to Kakuzo Okakura’s Zen Buddhist aesthetics in his Book of Tea.
I am writing this after my last lecture of the semester. My students have definitely broadened their philosophical vocabulary—most even have a sense for Heidegger’s “fourfold.” Their submitted assignments and presentations also evidence that they learned to apply philosophical ideas to their aesthetic lives. All I can hope for now is that they are prepared to expand their philosophical horizons outside the bounds of my classroom.
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Haley Irene Burke
Dr. Haley Irene Burke is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of the Incarnate Word. Her research areas include continental philosophy, social philosophy, aesthetics, feminist philosophy, and the history of philosophy. She is also they assistant editor of the Journal of Gadamer Studies.
