How Does Art Imitate Nature? | Fr. Anselm Ramelow, O.P.
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 21 June 2022
⏱️ 64 minutes
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Summary
This talk was offered at Baylor University on March 29th, 2022. The images for the talk can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/3u42uh7y For information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker Fr. Anselm Ramelow is a Catholic priest in the Order of Preachers. He is professor of philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley and currently the chair of the philosophy department. He obtained his doctorate under Robert Spaemann in Munich on Leibniz and the Spanish Jesuits (Gott, Freiheit, Weltenwahl, 1997) and did theological work on George Lindbeck and the question of a Thomist philosophy and theology of language (Beyond Modernism? - George Lindbeck and the Linguistic Turn in Theology, 2005). He contributed articles to the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophy and essays on topics at the intersection of philosophy and theology, as well as a translation and commentary on part of Aquinas’ De veritate. He continues to work on questions of free will, philosophy of religion (miracles, existence and nature of God) and philosophical aesthetics.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute. |
| 0:03.5 | For more talks like this, visit us at Tamistic Institute.org. |
| 0:08.0 | Thank you very much. |
| 0:13.0 | And when I announced that talk earlier, I actually had a different title. |
| 0:19.0 | I don't know how that was changed, but the title is, |
| 0:21.6 | how does art imitate nature? |
| 0:24.6 | And that title is important, as you will see. |
| 0:27.6 | And it is a bit of a complex topic, and I was wondering, |
| 0:31.6 | how am I going to put this together in one talk, but I'll try. |
| 0:35.6 | And some spots may be a bit more abstract, |
| 0:38.6 | but there will be examples and hopefully that will come together at that point. |
| 0:44.8 | So the title of my talk, how does art imitate nature implies that art indeed does |
| 0:51.0 | imitate nature. And that is a claim that has gone out of fashion. |
| 0:55.5 | And to show how it is nevertheless true is meant to counteract that fashion. |
| 1:00.4 | And the theory that art imitates or represents nature can be called representationalism. |
| 1:08.8 | That's how I call it. |
| 1:13.0 | Representationism. And it has been there from the beginning of theories of art, |
| 1:16.3 | but not necessarily with positive connotations. |
| 1:19.7 | For Aristotle, all the arts imitate nature. |
| 1:22.6 | They differ only according to the modes of imitation. |
| 1:25.5 | For example, with regard to the medium, the objects, |
| 1:28.0 | and the manner of imitation, as he says. Plato agrees, but he does not think that this is a good |
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