Karsten Harries
University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland
University College Dublin where Karsten Harries became Doctor of Literature.
Professor Karsten Harries was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Literature.
Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, United States
Yale University where Karsten Harries received his Bachelor of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees.
Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, United States
Yale University where Karsten Harries received his Bachelor of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees.
University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland
University College Dublin where Karsten Harries became Doctor of Literature.
Professor Karsten Harries was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Literature.
Karsten Harries
Karsten Harries with Peter Oundjian.
(That modern art is different from earlier art is so obvio...)
That modern art is different from earlier art is so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning. Yet there is little agreement as to the meaning or the importance of this difference. Indeed, contemporary aestheticians, especially, seem to feel that modern art does not depart in any essential way from the art of the past.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810105934/?tag=2022091-20
1968
https://www.amazon.com/Bavarian-Rococo-Church-Between-Aestheticism/dp/0300027206/?tag=2022091-20
1983
https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Frame-Three-Lectures/dp/0813206723/?tag=2022091-20
1989
(This volume has its origins in the colloquium Art, Politi...)
This volume has its origins in the colloquium Art, Politics, Technology - Martin Heidegger 1889-1989 held at Yale University in 1989. The centenary provided the obvious occasion: regardless of whether deplored or welcomed, the far-reaching influence of Heidegger today is beyond question, an influence underscored in that centenary year by the literal scores of conferences that took place all over the world.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/084191334X/?tag=2022091-20
1992
(Can architecture help us find our place and way in today'...)
Can architecture help us find our place and way in today's complex world? Can it return individuals to a whole, to a world, to a community? Developing Giedion's claim that contemporary architecture's main task is to interpret a way of life valid for our time, philosopher Karsten Harries answers that architecture should serve a common ethos. But if architecture is to meet that task, it first has to free itself from the dominant formalist approach and get beyond the notion that its purpose is to produce endless variations of the decorated shed.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/026258171X/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(Much postmodern rhetoric, suggests Karsten Harries, can b...)
Much postmodern rhetoric, suggests Karsten Harries, can be understood as a symptom of our civilization's discontent, born of regret that we are no longer able to experience our world as a cosmos that assigns us our place. But dissatisfaction with the modern world may also spring from a conviction that modernism has failed to confront the challenge of an inevitably open future. Such conviction has frequently led to a critique of modernity's founding heroes. Challenging that critique, Harries insists that modernity is supported by nothing other than human freedom.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/026258218X/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(In recent years there has been a great deal of talk about...)
In recent years there has been a great deal of talk about a possible death of art. As the title of Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” suggests, the essay challenges such talk, just as it, in turn, is challenged by such talk, talk that is supported by the current state of the art-world. It was Hegel, who most profoundly argued that the shape of our modern world no longer permits us to grant art the significance it once possessed. Hegel’s proclamation of the end of art in its highest sense shadows this commentary, as it shadows Heidegger’s essay.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1402099886/?tag=2022091-20
2009
(If the Enlightenment turned to reason to reoccupy the pla...)
If the Enlightenment turned to reason to reoccupy the place left vacant by the death of God, the last two centuries have undermined such faith in reason. We cannot escape this history. The specter of nihilism haunts Either/Or. To exorcise it is Kierkegaard´s most fundamental concern. But where are we to turn? To an aesthetic transfiguration of, or escape from reality? Does ethics promise an answer? Or is all that is left an irrational leap to religion? All such questions are shadowed by the specter of Kitsch. What does it mean to be authentic in the modern world?
https://www.amazon.com/Between-Nihilism-Faith-Commentary-Kierkegaard/dp/311022688X/?tag=2022091-20
2010
Karsten Harries was born on January 25, 1937, in Jena, Thuringia, Germany. He is the son of Wolfgang and Ilse (Grossmann) Harries.
His early childhood was spent mostly in Berlin. Toward the end of the war, his father brought the family to a little town in northern Bavaria, then in Munich. In 1951 the family came to the United States. They firstly ended up in Keyport, New Jersey and then Yale, which Karsten liked.
Karsten Harries received his school education in the United States. Then he studied at Yale University where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1958. In 1962 he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the same university. His thesis was on nihilism.
Harries also has an Honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from University College Dublin.
Karsten Harries taught at Yale University since 1961 interrupted by two years as an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin and several years in Germany, twice as a visiting professor at the University of Bonn. In the early days, he worked as an instructor and then as an associate professor and a professor.
In addition to teaching, Harries was engaged in writing. His first book, The Meaning of Modern Art, was published in 1967. Hereafter, he published more books of art and architecture and in 1992 was an editor of Martin Heidegger: Kunst, Politik, Technik (Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology). He also contributed more than hundred-thirty articles and reviews to academic journals.
Karsten Harries is also a frequent visitor to University College Dublin for more than 25 years since the early 1990s. Harries was invited to deliver the sixth University College Dublin Millennium Lectures in 2000 on Technology and Art on the Threshold of the Third Millennium in Newman House. He gave the keynote address at a philosophy conference in Newman House, May 2013. Indeed, he led a seminar on the current state of philosophy at the International Centre for Newman Studies at University College Dublin.
In 2017 Harries retired on a pension.
Karsten Harries received the Guggenheim Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.
In 2007 Yale University’s School of Architecture, in recognition of his work in this area, awarded him the degree of Master of Environmental Design.
In 2015 University College Dublin awarded him the Honorary Doctor of Literature.
On the occasion of his 70th birthday, he was honored with a Festschrift, Himmel und Erde Heaven and Earth, on the occasion of his 80th with the Festschrift Ethics in Architecture.
(Can architecture help us find our place and way in today'...)
1997(Much postmodern rhetoric, suggests Karsten Harries, can b...)
2001(If the Enlightenment turned to reason to reoccupy the pla...)
2010(This volume has its origins in the colloquium Art, Politi...)
1992(That modern art is different from earlier art is so obvio...)
1968(In recent years there has been a great deal of talk about...)
2009Karsten Harries is a defender set against the specter of nihilism and a thinker attempting to reconnect beauty with love.
For him, architecture is a means of resisting mortality and coping with the fear of human transience.
For Harries, the terror of time is, essentially, a universal, eminently human fear of mortality - of the eventual ending of life and, indeed, of all that has been made. He sees architecture as one of the ways that humanity addresses that fear.
Quotations:
"Why do we care about art? What does art have to contribute to our well-being? It’s opened something like a window to some other dimension in a world where money is too important and a lot of our values are tied to those concerns. The very uselessness of art is important … we don’t need it in the way we need food, the way we need medicine or something like that. It pulls you out of every day and the concerns of the everyday. You distance yourself from the concerns. And that lets you look at things with more open eyes."
"Go into philosophy if you really love philosophy. If you look for having a pleasant life, you probably would be better off doing something else. If you go into philosophy, do it for the sake of philosophy. With art, it’s very similar in a different way. Again, most artists have a tough time."
"The real task of today for philosophy is, on one hand, to do justice to the legitimacy of science - no philosophy that cannot give an adequate account of science can be taken seriously. On the other hand, philosophy needs to recognize that that objectifying perspective of science loses sight of dimensions of meaning."
"Most important for me has been teaching. Almost all of my writing comes directly out of my teaching and preparing for classes."
Karsten Harries is a member of the American Philosophical Association, American Society for Aesthetics, Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Cusanus Society.
Quotes from others about the person
"Karsten Harries is a fine teacher and a great scholar, but, beyond all of that, he is a remarkable human being. I feel really privileged to have been in his company and to have been able to learn from him for such a long period of time." - Anthony Kronman, a former Law School dean and former student of Harries
"He made the books live for me. He showed me what it is like to be thinking about a philosopher who is trying to come to terms with philosophical ideas." - Stephen Darwall, Yale University Philosophy Department chair
"Through his unconstrained philosophical inquiry and through his devotion to mentoring students and creating the conditions through which they can flourish, Karsten has been for me a model of the kind of philosopher and teacher I aspire to be. None of my colleagues has influenced me more than Karsten." - Michael Della Rocca, professor of philosophy, the former chair of the Philosophy Department
"He has also pioneered the growing new area of the philosophy of architecture. He is also one of the world’s foremost theorists of contemporary architecture and is internationally known for his contribution to architectural theory." - Dermot Moran, professor of Philosophy (Metaphysics and Logic) at UCD
On July 4, 1959, Karsten Harries married Elizabeth Wanning. They have three children: Lisa, Peter, Martin. The couple divorced later. On March 14, 1991, he married Elizabeth L. Langhorne.
Elizabeth Wanning was born on May 22, 1938, in East Orange, New Jersey, United States. She has a Doctor of Philosophy degree. Her most popular book is Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale.
Elizabeth Langhorne has a Doctor of Philosophy degree. Her specialization is 19th and 20th-century art and architecture.
