Aksel Øijord

In the late 1980’s and throughout the 1990’s I worked as a part time lecturer at the Norwegian National College of Arts and Design, namely Statens Håndverks- og Kunstindustriskole (SHKS), in Oslo. I wrote two books based on my lectures, one about esthetical argumentation and one about perception, knowledge and science in the visual arts:

• Analytisk Estetikk eller Jakten på Skjønnheten  – Tell forlag 1992.
• Se –persepsjon, erkjennelse og vitenskap i visuelle kunstfag – Tell forlag 1994.

From 1992 I have worked as a lecturer at the University of Oslo, namely in the common obligatory course Examen Philosophicum, which nowadays consists of two parts, namely history of philosophy and science, and ethical theory.

I have always had a special interest in colour theory, mainly from a philosophical point of view. The focus of my magisterial thesis from 1985, at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo (UiO) was to explore Goethe’s theory of colours in the light of theory of science and epistemology.

In the latest years I have been working on a thesis on the ontology of colours and during this time I have lectured in a ten credits bachelor course at the UiO, called Colour Philosophy (Norwegian: Fargefilosofi) – which introduces different colour theories, within for example Aristotelian, Newtonian and Phenomenological traditions.

The methodological foundation of my thesis is inspired by and partly gathered from George Berkeley’s book An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, and the practical means developed is the formal method, which is formal, first because it does not rely on causal determinations of colours and, second, because it does not conceptualize particular colours.

If interested, you may consider two small pieces of text with illustrations, collected from the thesis: Text and Pictures