Aesthetics

Embrace tranquil simplicity, rustic elegance, and imperfect beauty. Diane Durston's meditation on the Japanese philosophy of wabi sabi will inspire you to focus on the blessings hiding in your daily life. Celebrating the way things are rather than how...

John Dewey is known as a pragmatic philosopher and progressive architect of American educational reform, but some of his most important contributions came in his thinking about art. Dewey argued that there is strong social value to be found in...

A tale of forbidden love and inevitable death, the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde recounts the story of two lovers unknowingly drinking a magic potion and ultimately dying in one another's arms. Critics have lauded Wagner's Tristan und Isolde for...

Leading theorist and art curator Nicolas Bourriaud tackles the excluded, the disposable and the nature of waste by looking to the future of art-the exform.He argues that the great theoretical battles to come will be fought in the realms of ideology,...

Featuring long-awaited selections from Robert M. Pirsig's unpublished writings, from before and after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an original collection illuminating the central theme of Pirsig's thought: “Quality”“The ultimate goal in the...

Imagination allows us to step out of the ordinary but also to transform it through our sense of wonder and play, artistic inspiration and innovation, or the eureka moment of a scientific breakthrough. In this book, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei offers a...

'Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life'The two works brought together here, 'The Decay of Lying' and 'The Critic as Artist', are Oscar Wilde's wittiest and most profound writings on aesthetics, in which he proposes that criticism is the...

Since its publication fifty years ago, this work has established itself as a classic. It casts the visual process in psychological terms and describes the creative way one's eye organizes visual material according to specific psychological premises. In...

This book is an invitation to read poetry. Simon Critchley argues that poetry enlarges life with a range of observation, power of expression and attention to language that eclipses any other medium. In a rich engagement with the poetry of Wallace...

Grootenboer considers painting as a form of thinking in itself, rather than a subject of philosophical and interpretive thought. While the philosophical dimension of painting has long been discussed, a clear case for painting as a form of visual...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780804171632Author Peter MendelsundFormat PaperbackPage Count 448Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 510gDimensions(mm) 198mm *...

When this book first appeared in 1982, it introduced readers to Robert Irwin, the Los Angeles artist 'who one day got hooked on his own curiosity and decided to live it'. Now expanded to include six additional chapters and twenty-four pages of color...

If an artist sends a live peacock to an exhibition, is it art? 'What is art?' is a question many of us want answered but are too afraid to ask. It is the very question that Nigel Warburton demystifies in this brilliant and accessible little book. With...

Praise for Solitude: "This is a thoughtful and sensitive book from a man who endured the fear and loneliness of captivity. Now, years later, Terry Waite explores solitude in its many forms." - Stella Rimington DBE, former Director General of MI5 ...

Instead of treating art as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate, Elizabeth Grosz argues that art-especially architecture, music, and painting-is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as...

The latest publication by designer Kenya Hara following his acclaimed Designing Design. White is not a book about color. It is rather the author's attempt to explore the essence of "white," which he sees as being closely related to the origin of...

In the early 20th century, art and its institutions came under critique from a new democratic and egalitarian spirit. In an age of secularism and materialism, artworks would be understood as merely things among other things. This meant an attack on the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9789526545905Author Mike WatsonFormat PaperbackPage Count 112Imprint Revol PressPublisher Revol PressWeight(grams) 118gDimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 7mm

In this landmark text by one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Gilles Deleuze takes the paintings of Francis Bacon as his object of his study. The book presents a deep engagement with Bacon's work and the nature of art...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780156519922Author Hannah ArendtFormat PaperbackPage Count 521Imprint Mariner Books ClassicsPublisher Mariner Books Classics

This book concerns the experience of enchantment in art. Considering the essential characteristics, dynamics and conditions of the experience of enchantment in relation to art, including liminality, it offers studies of different kinds of artistic...

Already a classic, this landmark account of early Western thought now appears in a new edition with expanded coverage of the Middle Ages. The Dream of Reason takes a fresh look at the writings of the great thinkers of classic philosophy and questions...

The linking of psychosomatic to literary and literary to a larger political horizon raises the question of conservative premises to linguistic, pyschoanalystic, philisophical, and literary theories and criticisms of such.The linking of psychosomatic to...

Through the concept of "social choreography" Andrew Hewitt demonstrates how choreography has served not only as metaphor for modernity but also as a structuring blueprint for thinking about and shaping modern social organization. Bringing dance history...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring For thousands of years humanity has engaged in creative expression, allowing us to relate to other people, contribute to shared culture, build an identity, and give meaning to our existence. From...

Dominic McIver Lopes articulates and defends a 'buck passing theory of art', namely that a work of art is nothing but a work in one of the arts. Having traced philosophical interest in theories of art to a reaction to certain puzzle cases of avant-garde...

A deeply personal yet broadly relevant exploration of the ephemeral life of the classic in art, from the eighteenth century to our own day Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and...

The novelist Elizabeth Bowen believed that media was a personal and social force. From the 1940s to the 1960s, she took an active role in the media and radio in particular by writing essays for radio broadcast, improvising interviews on the air and...

The Art of Videogames explores how philosophy of the arts theories developed to address traditional art works can also be applied to videogames. Presents a unique philosophical approach to the art of videogaming, situating videogames in the framework of...

A classic work on radical aesthetics by one of the great philosophers of the early twentieth century No work of philosopher and essayist Jose Ortega y Gasset has been more frequently cited, admired, or criticized than his response to modernism, "The...

This is a revised and enlarged version of Bryan Magee's widely praised study of Schopenhauer, the most comprehensive book on this great philosopher. It contains a brief biography of Schopenhauer, a systematic exposition of his thought, and a critical...

Iser examines what happens during the reading process, and how it is basic to the development of a theory of aesthetic response, setting in motion a chain of events that depends both on the text and the exercise of certain human faculties.About the...

The newly expanded and revised edition of Cooper's popular anthology featuring classic writings on aesthetics, both historical and contemporary The second edition of this bestselling anthology collects essays of canonical significance in aesthetics and...

The diversity of Nietzsche's books, and the sheer range of his philosophical interests, have posed daunting challenges to his interpreters. This Oxford Handbook addresses this multiplicity by devoting each of its 32 essays to a focused topic, picked out...

"Every line we succeed in publishing today...is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness." So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to...

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles...

An exploration of public performance in everyday life, by the leading cultural and social thinkerThe Performer explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics and everyday experience. It focuses on the bodily and physical...

Marginalized by the scientific age the lessons of the senses have been overtaken by the dominance of language and the information revolution. With The Five Senses Serres traces a topology of human perception, writing against the Cartesian tradition and...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Imagination: A Very Short Introduction explores imagination as a cognitive power and an essential dimension of human flourishing, demonstrating how imagination plays multiple roles in human...