Conferences

A conference on the topic of beauty is planned for January 21-23, 2010, on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. This conference, hosted by the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, will focus on the nature of beauty and various disciplinary and interdisciplinary questions raised about this elusive topic. (Conference Program) The conference will include mathematicians, physicists, anthropologists, economists, lawyers, philosophers, theologians, artists, musicologists, literary critics and film scholars from some of the most renowned universities of the world as presenters and participants. Beauty is one of the three major values — beauty, goodness, and truth — that inspire the Institute.


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These are the current featured topics and speakers:

  • DUDLEY ANDREW (Yale University) What constitutes beauty in film?
  • HOLGER BONUS (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany) What is the function of art in the economy of cultures?
  • PRADEEP DHILLON (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Does beauty lie in the eye of the beholder? A Kantian Response
  • BJARNE FUNCH (Roskilde University, Denmark) Which features of human nature are responsible for the genesis of art as a universal phenomenon of human culture?
  • VITTORIO HÖSLE (University of Notre Dame) What are the driving principles behind the historical evolution of aesthetic theories from ancient civilizations to the present?
  • CHRISTIAN ILLIES (Universität Bamberg, Germany) Can beauty in organisms be reduced to the mechanism of sexual selection and the latter to natural selection, or is this reversed? Does sexual selection point to the recognition of beauty by organisms?
  • MAXIM KANTOR (Moscow, Russia) What constitutes beauty in the visual arts?
  • MARY KINZIE (Northwestern University) What constitutes beauty in literature?
  • PETER LANDAU (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany) Why has art so frequently been a focus in the legal system?
  • ROBERT P. LANGLANDS (School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study) Mathematical Beauty: A Historically Conditioned Personal View
  • MARIO LIVIO (Space Telescope Science Institute) Symmetry: From the Selection of Mates to the Laws of Nature
  • CLAUS-STEFFEN MAHNKOPF (University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig, Germany) Beauty in Music
  • CYRIL I. O’REGAN (University of Notre Dame) Why are beauty and art theologically relevant?
  • FRANCESCO PELLIZZI (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University) What are the differences of aesthetic experience among cultures and are there any invariants?
  • MARK ROCHE (University of Notre Dame) Within modern art, the concept opposite to the beautiful, the ugly, has gained a strange prestige — what is its function in enhancing the expressivity of art?
  • ELAINE SCARRY (Harvard University) Are there any common aesthetic principles acknowledged by most aesthetic theories?
  • DIETER WANDSCHNEIDER (RWTH Aachen University, Germany) In which sense can we speak of beauty in nature, both in its laws and its entities?