“Universalem 1.0″ was a temporary blog by Steve Krause; it disappeared and was replaced once he discovered WordPress’ “blog network” feature (in recent releases). Homo Aestheticus is that replacement …
… get it while it’s hot!
Homo Aestheticus:
- covers a wide variety of topics of interest to the author, in particular [1] food, [2] popular culture (for some definitions of popular and culture), [3] computers and coding, [4] language(s) and literature, and [5] art and aesthetics.
- is written mainly by Steve Krause (aspiring Germanist, occasional German professor and instructor, translator, etc.)
- shares a name with Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why by Ellen Dissanayake (U of Washington P, 1995), which I once found used in a thrift store; and is to be contrasted with Homo Geographicus by Robert David Sack (Johns Hopkins UP, 1997), which a friend gave to me soon after her dissertation defense, and Homo Faber by Max Frisch (1957), a novel I’ve twice taught as part of a ‘German Literature in Translation’ seminar. Other topics and titles? Homo Ludens, Homo Academicus, Homo Novus, Homo Symbolicus, and even Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo.
- is most directly a reference to my work/research, particularly an interest in 18th-century German philosophical aesthetics. For a tie to “Homo Ludens,” consider Friedrich Schiller’s so-called ‘Aesthetic Letters’ (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters); for the centrality of ‘the aesthetic’ to the human condition, consider Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1793).