Dominic McIver Lopes

Dominic McIver Lopes, innovator

Focusing on the nature and significance of art and the aesthetic

One of the foremost contemporary philosophers of art, Dr. Dominic McIver Lopes is a distinguished university scholar and professor in the department of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. His work focuses on the nature and significance of art and the aesthetic.

Dr. McIver Lopes has traced the value of images to how they extend the powers of human perception. His ground-breaking book Philosophy of Computer Art, for example, argued that computer art challenges some of the basic tenets of traditional ways of thinking about art and its creation. He is developing a theory of how aesthetic values guide agents engaged in a variety of aesthetic projects. The elements of his theory could yield novel insights into the origins of aesthetic practices and the foundations of aesthetic education. He is currently working on a book titled Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value.

Dr. McIver Lopes holds a bachelor of arts from McGill University and a DPhil from Oxford University. He has been a fellow of the National Humanities Center and a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Research Professor at the University of Warwick. His awards include an American Society for Aesthetics Outstanding Monograph Prize and a Killam Research Prize..

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* Dominic McIver Lopes is one of 24 Canadian winners of major international research awards in 2015 featured in the publication Canadian excellence, Global recognition: Celebrating recent Canadian winners of major international research awards

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