Aesthetica Prima Philosophia is an international research group dedicated to questions at the intersection of aesthetics and theoretical philosophy. It provides a platform for collaborative work aimed at rethinking concepts such as truth, knowledge, understanding, representation, reason, meaning, modality, and reality through the lens of aesthetics and art. In doing so, it seeks to establish a field of philosophical inquiry concerned with the ways in which aesthetics can reformulate questions traditionally addressed within epistemology, metaphysics, logic, and the philosophy of language. The idea of aesthetics as a ‘first philosophy’ aims, on the one hand, to counter the predominant discursive paradigm in theoretical philosophy (e.g. reducing knowledge to propositions, being to empirical reality, truth to correctness) by reformulating these concepts as aesthetic phenomena or problems. On the other hand, it seeks to resist the tendency to treat aesthetics as a merely applied (or ‘last’) philosophy—an auxiliary theory of art focused on definitions of art or aesthetic properties—by reclaiming aesthetics as a primary site for re-engaging fundamental questions in sensuous, affective, imaginative and artistic modes of thought. The group hosts monthly colloquia, annual workshops, and reading groups, while providing a platform for collaboration on conference panels, joint publications, and funding applications.
The idea of aesthetics as first philosophy is conceived in deliberate tension with dominant tendencies in both contemporary theoretical philosophy and philosophical aesthetics.
In much contemporary theoretical philosophy, fundamental questions are articulated primarily within a discursive context. Within such a paradigm, knowledge is predominantly conceived as propositional knowledge; truth is typically understood in terms of correctness or validity; semantics is investigated primarily through language; logic is largely concerned with formal relations of inference; and the question of being is frequently equated with that of empirical reality. The idea of aesthetics as first philosophy seeks to challenge the primacy of this discursive paradigm by asking what happens when these fundamental concepts are reconsidered as aesthetic phenomena and problems.
Contemporary aesthetics, on the other hand, is often treated as a form of applied philosophy: as an auxiliary theory of art or a philosophically informed form of art criticism. Whereas aesthetics once was the cornerstone of Kant’s critical philosophy, the highest organon of Schelling’s system of transcendental idealism and an indispensable phase in Hegel’s absolute spirit – today, it has degraded to just another encyclopaedic branch of specialisation, a minor subdiscipline of philosophy. Conceived in this way, aesthetics risks becoming a kind of last philosophy: a field concerned primarily with the definition of art, the nature of aesthetic properties, or the objectivity of beauty judgements for the sake of understanding artworks only.
Aesthetica Prima Philosophia proposes a different path. Rather than treating aesthetics as an autonomous domain with its own restricted set of objects, we reclaim it as a site for re-engaging fundamental philosophical questions through sensuous, affective, imaginative, bodily, and artistic modes of thought.
By the aesthetic, we therefore understand not merely the domain of art or beauty, but those non-discursive or extra-discursive dimensions of meaning and experience that cannot be exhausted by propositional articulation or argumentative reasoning alone. To reformulate metaphysical and epistemological concepts aesthetically is to attend to their singular and non-empirical dimensions without denying the indispensable role of empirical and discursive structures on that domain.
Such a project necessarily embraces a constitutive paradox of philosophical aesthetics: it seeks conceptually to articulate dimensions of experience and meaning that are not themselves reducible to concepts. It attempts, in this sense, to speak about what resists being said, while remaining aware that discursivity can never simply be abandoned. Rather than opposing the aesthetic and the discursive as mutually exclusive domains, the research group takes their tension and interdependence as an object of philosophical investigation.
Our guiding hypothesis is that concepts developed within aesthetics and the philosophy of art can disclose dimensions of traditional philosophical problems that remain obscured when those problems are treated exclusively in discursive and empirical terms. The task is therefore not to replace theoretical philosophy with aesthetics, but to make visible the non-discursive dimensions already operative within concepts such as truth, knowledge, meaning, reason, and reality, and to investigate their dialectical relation to conceptual and discursive forms.
The research group is concerned not only with developing a theory of the aesthetic, but also with asking how theory itself may become aesthetic. Philosophy may remain an essentially discursive practice, yet its methods, forms, and techniques possess an aesthetic dimension of their own. Particularly within continental philosophical traditions, experiments with philosophical form — whether under the headings of aesthetic theory, poetic saying, aphorism, fragment, dialogue, constellation, essay, or other forms of writing — have played a constitutive role in philosophical practice.
This raises a further question: whether the form of philosophy merely communicates an independently constituted content, or whether philosophical form itself participates in the production of thought. Aesthetica Prima Philosophia therefore investigates not only aesthetic phenomena as objects of theory, but the aesthetic constitution of theoretical thought itself.
Our aim is to build an international intellectual community around these questions. We organize online colloquia, reading groups, book symposia, workshops, and conferences, while creating opportunities for collaborative research, publication, and funding initiatives. Over time, we hope that this collective activity may develop into a dedicated journal and a broader intellectual movement committed to the proposition that aesthetics can become prima philosophia.
Back to the home page