Aesthetics

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...

Christian Gauss Award ShortlistWinner of the ASAP Book PrizeA Literary Hub Book of the Year"Makes the case that the gimmick...is of tremendous critical value...Lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag's best work."-Los Angeles Review of...

In his Berlin lectures on fine art, Hegel argued that art involves a unique form of aesthetic intelligibility-the expression of a distinct collective self-understanding that develops through historical time. Hegel's approach to art has been influential...

Philosophy has inherited a powerful impulse to embrace either dualism or a reductive monism-either a radical separation of mind and body or the reduction of mind to body. But from its origins in the writings of the Stoics, the first thoroughgoing...

From Edison's invention of the phonograph through contemporary field recording and sound installation, artists have become attracted to those domains against which music has always defined itself: noise, silence, and environmental sound. Christoph Cox...

Why pause and study this particular painting among so many others ranged on a gallery wall? Wonder, which Descartes called the first of the passions, is at play; it couples surprise with a wish to know more, the pleasurable promise that what is novel or...

With the rise of review sites and social media, films today, as soon as they are shown, immediately become the topic of debates on their merits not only as entertainment, but also as serious forms of artistic expression. Philosopher Robert B. Pippin,...

"Like Dewey, he has revolted against the empiricist dogma and the Kantian dualisms which have compartmentalized philosophical thought. . . . Unlike Dewey, he has provided detailed incisive argumentation, and has shown just where the dogmas and dualisms...

One of Europe's most mythologized Marxist intellectuals of the 20th century, Pier Paolo Pasolini was not only a poet, filmmaker, novelist, and political martyr. He was also a keen critic of painting. An intermittently practicing artist in his own right,...

Have we become beauty-blind? For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us from more important issues; that it is the handmaiden of privilege; and that it masks political...

A revised second edition of the bestselling anthology on the major figures and themes in aesthetics and philosophy of art, the ideal resource for a comprehensive introduction to the study of aesthetics Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology offers a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780981484600Author Leonard KorenFormat PaperbackPage Count 96Imprint Imperfect PublishingPublisher Imperfect PublishingWeight(grams) 198gDimensions(mm)...

An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learningIn an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781947544482Author Matthew David SegallFormat PaperbackPage Count 262Imprint Integral ImprintPublisher Integral ImprintWeight(grams) 286g

In this thought-provoking book, Jane Rendell explores how architectural space registers in psychoanalysis. She investigates both the inherently spatial vocabulary of psychoanalysis and ideas around the physical 'setting' of the psychoanalytic encounter,...

The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship between art and politics, reclaiming "aesthetics" from the narrow confines it is often reduced to. Jacques Ranciere reveals its intrinsic link to politics by analysing what they both have in common:...

In the latest of his books exploring a lifetime's passion for music, bestselling author and philosopher Roger Scruton brings his immense critical faculties to bear on a panoply of different musical genres, both contemporary and classical. Music as an...

This book offers an original and challenging study of Marx's contact with the visual arts, aesthetic theories, and art policies in nineteenth-century Europe. It differs from previous discussions of Marxist aesthetic theory in looking at Marx's views from...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679735793Author Camille PagliaFormat PaperbackPage Count 736Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 686gDimensions(mm) 202mm *...

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the...

This is a fresh, bold study of the emerging field of Sound Art, informed by the ideas of Adorno, Merleau Ponty and others. "Listening to Noise and Silence" engages with the emerging practice of sound art and the concurrent development of a discourse and...

The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance...

Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic intellectual figures of this century. Not only was he a thinker who made an enormous impact with his critical and philosophical writings, he shattered disciplinary and stylistic conventions...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781953730817Author Leon DegrelleFormat PaperbackPage Count 124Imprint Antelope Hill PublishingPublisher Antelope Hill PublishingWeight(grams) 140g

'To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, religion, all in one'"Brilliant" - Philip Hoare, New StatesmanJohn Ruskin - born 200 years ago, in February 1819 - was the greatest critic of his age: a critic not only of art and architecture but of society and life...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780399531972Author John DeweyFormat PaperbackPage Count 371Imprint Perigee Books,U.S.Publisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 301g

The German Left and Aesthetic Politics examines the articulation of contending materialist aesthetic practices within the ideological fractures of the German Left between the Second and Third International. It is hinged on the major literary critical...

Does humour make us human, or do the cats and dogs laugh along with us? On Humour is a fascinating, beautifully written and funny book on what humour can tell us about being human. Simon Critchley skilfully probes some of the most perennial but least...

In this book, the founder of object-oriented ontology develops his view that aesthetics is the central discipline of philosophy. Whereas science must attempt to grasp an object in terms of its observable qualities, philosophy and art cannot proceed in...

The "Other"-source of fear and fascination; emblem of difference demonized and romanticized. Theories of alterity and cultural diversity abound in the contemporary academic landscape. Victor Segalen's early attempt to theorize the exotic is a crucial...

A beautifully illustrated visual and cultural history of the color blue throughout the agesBlue has had a long and topsy-turvy history in the Western world. The ancient Greeks scorned it as ugly and barbaric, but most Americans and Europeans now cite it...

The fine arts are traditionally seen to have intrinsic value: that is, they are valuable in themselves. But this poses a problem for architecture: its works are designed to serve our purposes, and therefore it is classed as functional. Carving out a new...

Against those who consider architecture to be a wholly optimistic activity, this book shows how the history of modern architecture is inextricably tied to ideas of failure and ruin. By means of an original reading of the earliest origins of modernism,...

Translated by Steven Corcoran Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed. But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an...

This gorgeously photographed volume features the under-published private spaces of both the icons and unknown vanguards of European mid-century architecture and design. In keeping with the functional beauty of mid-century design, Handcrafted Modern:...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781939773050Author Dietrich Von HildebrandFormat PaperbackPage Count 100Imprint Hildebrand PressPublisher Hildebrand PressWeight(grams) 82g

How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today's worldThe demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to...