Aesthetics

Creatures of Attention excavates the early modern prehistory of our late modern crises of attention. At the threshold of modernity, philosophers, scientists, and poets across Europe began to see attention as the key to autonomous agency and knowledge...

Creatures of Attention excavates the early modern prehistory of our late modern crises of attention. At the threshold of modernity, philosophers, scientists, and poets across Europe began to see attention as the key to autonomous agency and knowledge...

Interpretation and Construction examines the interpretation and products of intentional human behavior, focusing primarily on issues in art, law, and everyday speech. Focuses on artistic interpretation, but also includes extended discussion of...

Although philosophers have examined and commented on music for centuries, Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, had frustratingly little to say about music-directly, at least. This volume, the first to tackle Heidegger...

Detective fiction and philosophy3/4moral philosophy in particular3/4may seem like an odd combination. Working within the framework offered by neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, this book makes the case that moral philosophers ought to take murder mysteries...

Although philosophers have examined and commented on music for centuries, Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, had frustratingly little to say about music-directly, at least. This volume, the first to tackle Heidegger...

The concern in this essay is for our age as one suffering an intellectual severance between our response to existential reality in which the beauty of a created particular thing is divorced from the Cause of that thing's existence. The separation speaks...

This book engages with the question of making sense of seeing in today's technologically dominated world. It does so by exploring the notion of the 'hypermodern', a term which is used to capture the drive in contemporary culture to achieve ever greater...

Traditional aesthetics has tried to locate the reasons for aesthetic value in the transcendental subject while neglecting the importance of culture, even though it is obvious that artistic styles vary from culture to culture in both a geographical and...

Once Upon a Time is a collection of essays in the philosophy of literature with two central themes: the significance of story -telling for us and the question of whether the novel, perhaps the art form most closely associated with story-telling, is a...

In this detailed and comprehensive study of concepts from Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of time, Tromans undertakes a series of practice as research projects that reformulate Deleuze's work via what Tromans calls a "musical-philosophical" practice. Tromans...

In global terms, creative industries are on the rise, as are new media investigations in art and initiatives that encourage innovation in the arts, for end-use in the economy. However, there is a significant lack of critical reflection on this form of...

Should politically concerned and engaged artistic production disregard questions or/and requirements of aesthetic reception and value? Whether art should be "aesthetic" or "political" is not a new question. Therefore, in spite of those several...

This book presents the foundations of classical Chinese aesthetic discourse - roughly from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages - with the following animating questions:What is art?Why do we produce it?How do we judge it?The arts that garnered the...

The guiding theme of these essays by aesthetician, musician, and Santayana scholar Morris Grossman is the importance of preserving the tension between what can be unified and what is disorganized, random, and miscellaneous. Grossman described this as the...

Deleuze's publications have attracted enormous attention, but scant attention has been paid to the existential relevance of Deleuze's writings. In the lineage of Nietzsche, Life Drawing develops a fully affirmative Deleuzean aesthetics of existence. For...

Heidegger's interpretations of the poetry of Hoelderlin are central to Heidegger's later philosophy and have determined the mainstream reception of Hoelderlin's poetry. Gosetti-Ferencei argues that Heidegger has overlooked central elements in...

A leading philosopher and theologian, Jean-Louis Chretien uses poetry and painting to explore a theme that runs through all of his work: how human life is shaped by the experience of call and response. For Chretien, we live by responding to the call of...

Arthur Danto is the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and the most influential philosopher of art in the last half century. As an art critic for The Nation for 25 years and frequent contributor to other widely read...

On the True Sense of Art collects essays by philosophers responding to John Sallis's Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art as well as his other works on the philosophy of art, including Force of Imagination and Logic of Imagination.Each of the...

Beginning with the assertion that earth is the elemental place that grants an abode to humans and to other living things, in Senses of Landscape the philosopher John Sallis turns to landscapes, and in particular to their representation in painting, to...

The Arts and the Definition of the Human introduces a novel theory that our selves-our thoughts, perceptions, creativity, and other qualities that make us human-are determined by our place in history, and more particularly by our culture and language...

In this, one of the last published books planned by one of the major cultural philosophers of our time, Lyotard addresses, in his powerful and allusive critical voice, Malraux's reflections on art and literature. The result, more than a sequel to...

In this book, Barry and Gail Lord focus their two lifetimes of international experience working in the cultural sector on the challenging questions of why and how culture changes. They situate their discourse on aesthetic culture within a broad and...

This collection presents twenty-seven new essays in Japanese aesthetics by leading experts in the field. Beginning with an extended foreword by the renowned scholar and artist Stephen Addiss and a comprehensive introduction that surveys the history of...

Karl Morrison discusses historical writing at a turning point in European culture: the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century. Why do texts considered at that time to be masterpieces seem now to be fragmentary and full of contradictions? Morrison...

Karl Morrison discusses historical writing at a turning point in European culture: the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century. Why do texts considered at that time to be masterpieces seem now to be fragmentary and full of contradictions? Morrison...

This is a sweeping and provocative work of aesthetic theory: a trenchant critique of the philosophy of art as it developed from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, combined with a carefully reasoned plea for a new and more flexible...

Updated and revised, the Second Edition of Danto and His Critics presents a series of essays by leading Danto scholars who offer their critical assessment of the influential works and ideas of Arthur C. Danto, the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus in the...

Connecting aesthetic experience with our experience of nature or with other cultural artifacts, Aesthetics as Phenomenology focuses on what art means for cognition, recognition, and affect-how art changes our everyday disposition or behavior. Gunter...

Arthur C. Danto is unique among philosophers for the breadth of his philosophical mind, his eloquent writing style, and the generous spirit embodied in all his work. Any collection of essays on his philosophy has to engage him on all these levels,...

Musing in Florence in June of 1858, Nathaniel Hawthorne said of himself, "I am sensible that a process is going on-and has been, ever since I came to Italy-that puts me in a state to see pictures with less toil, and more pleasure, and makes me more...

Since the middle of the twentieth century, virtue ethics has enriched the range of philosophical approaches to normative ethics, often drawing on the work of the ancient Greeks, who offered accounts of the virtues that have become part of contemporary...

What is the difference between judging someone to be good and judging them to be kind? Both judgements are typically positive, but the latter seems to offer more description of the person: we get a more specific sense of what they are like. Very general...

Antithetical Arts constitutes a defence of musical formalism against those who would put literary interpretations on the absolute music canon. In Part I, the historical origins of both the literary interpretation of absolute music and musical formalism...

In De Gustibus Peter Kivy deals with a question that has never been fully addressed by philosophers of art: why do we argue about art? We argue about the 'facts' of the world either to influence people's behaviour or simply to get them to see what we...

Argument and imagination are often interdependent. The Aesthetics of Argument is concerned with how this relationship may bear on argument's concern with truth, not just persuasion, and with the enhancement of understanding such interdependence may bring...

Does philosophy gain or lose when it is embedded within literature or embodied by drama? Does literary criticism gain or lose when it turns to literary works as occasions for abstract reflection? Leading literary scholars and philosophers interrogate...

Oedipus presents ceaseless paradoxes that have fascinated readers for centuries. He is proud of his intellect, but he does not know himself and succumbs easily to self-deceptions. As a ruler he expresses the greatest good will toward his people, but as...

Since its publication in 1890, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler has been a recurring point of fascination for readers, theater audiences, and artists alike. Newly married, yet utterly bored, the character of Hedda Gabler evokes reflection on beauty, love, passion,...