Invited Speaker Series

Ingvild Torsen (University of Oslo) will give a talk on 'Is there a measure on earth? Heidegger on the Normativity of Art' from 3:15 to 5:00 pm on Thursday 6th November 2025 in the Agnes Cuming Seminar Room D520 in the Newman (Arts) Building.

Ingvild Torsen is Associate Professor at the University of Oslo.

Abstract

Artworks are often deemed to be valuable because they can be true, which entails that they can be an important source of meaning and insight; they can even shape communities, give us a shared sense of identity and offer new social imaginaries. Whereas most theories that emphasise the alethic dimension of art are cognitivist and focus on art’s content to explain its truth, Heidegger’s theory conceives of art as an event – a “happening" of truth.

Heidegger claims that poetry and art is a kind of measuring. This talk make senses of that claim and argues that Heidegger’s account brings out a sense of normative force in the artwork that is mostly overlooked by philosophy: a measure is a standard that is primarily regulative and grounds other normative practices, but whose normative force is not itself reliant on reasons or values. When a measure is established, truth happens, in Heidegger’s idiosyncratic sense of the term.