Artistic Visions and the Promise of Beauty

Kathleen M. Higgins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.  Her main areas of research are aesthetics, continental philosophy, and philosophy of emotion.  She is author of a number of books, including The Music of Our Lives (1991/ rev. 2011) and The Music between Us: Is Music the Universal Language? (2012), which received the American Society for Aesthetics Outstanding Monograph Prize in 2013.  She has been a Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Shakti Maira is a respected contemporary artist in India.  His work is in international collections and in the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.  In 2005 he helped organize the ‘Learning through the Arts in Asia’ symposium.  Subsequently, UNESCO invited him to formulate <The Asian Vision of Arts in Education: Learning through the Arts.  His book, Towards Ananda: Rethinking Indian Art and Aesthetics was published by Penguin/Viking in India in 2006.  His paper, “Socio-cultural Learning through the Arts in India” was included in Transmissions and Transformations – Learning through the Arts in Asia, edited by Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan, published by Primus Books, India (2011).

Sonia Sikka is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. Her primary areas of research are philosophy of culture, philosophy of religion and continental philosophy. She is the author of Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference:  Enlightened Relativism (2011), and editor, with Lori Beaman, of Multiculturalism and Religious  Canada and India (2014). Her current research focuses on the idea of religion, and on intersections between religion and politics.