L'Art Veritable: Chaucer's Epistemology of Art

FAIN: FB-12460-75

Judith Ferster
North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC 27695-0001)

To study Chaucer's epistemology of art. Chaucer saw that at its worst, art could participate in the process by which subjectivism becomes solipsism. However, he also saw that at its best, art could help its readers transcend the limitations of individual human perspective by raising those limitations to the conscious level. He thus saw art's ideal function, not as the communication of absolute truth, but as the analysis of the conditions that produce partial, relative truths. The works of St. Thomas Acquinas will also he studied to see how his ideas on art and perception are consonant with those of Chaucer