(École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Paris)

Fellow in the Context of the International Research Fellowship Program IRF

May – August 2012

Genius and the Psychological Turn in Aesthetics in the late 19th Century: the Work of Gabriel Séailles and Georgios Vizyinos

This project aims to study the redefinitions of the concept of genius against the background of an emerging psychological aesthetics in late 19th-century Europe. I concentrate on the work of a French and a Greek philosopher, Gabriel Séailles and Georgios Vizyinos, both of which were largely inspired by German developments in experimental psychology, as students of Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig. Proposing a comparative analysis of Séailles’ and Vizyinos’ essays on genius, I investigate the alliance between psychology and aesthetics in different European contexts, in view of contributing to a cross-cultural history of the humanities.