Aesthetics

One-Way Street is a thoroughfare unlike anything else in literature-by turns exhilarating and bewildering, requiring mental agility and a special kind of urban literacy. Presented here in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation...

Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World examines how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, theologians, and humanist critics turned to tragedy to understand providence and agencies human and divine in the crucible of the Reformation. Rejecting...

Everyone deplores narcissism, especially in others. The vain are by turns annoying or absurd, offending us whether they are blissfully oblivious or proudly aware of their behavior. But are narcissism and vanity really as bad as they seem? Can we avoid...

Science fiction is filled with spacecraft. On Earth, actual rockets explode over Texas while others make their way to Mars. But what are spacecraft, and just what can they teach us about imagination, ecology, democracy, and the nature of objects? Why do...

For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, an influence each new thinker struggles to escape. As a consequence, Hegel's absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is...

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

Black--favorite color of priests and penitents, artists and ascetics, fashion designers and fascists--has always stood for powerfully opposed ideas: authority and humility, sin and holiness, rebellion and conformity, wealth and poverty, good and bad. In...

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...

There is no end of talk and of wondering about 'art' and 'the arts.' This book examines a number of questions about the arts (broadly defined to include all of the arts). Some of these questions come from philosophy. Examples include: * What makes...

A strikingly original account of Theodor Adorno's work as a critique animated by happiness. "Gordon's confidently gripping and persistently subtle interpretation brings a new tone to the debate about Adorno's negativism."-Jurgen Habermas Theodor Adorno...

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...

Take 25 of the liveliest philosophers of our time. Talk to each about one of the most intriguing topics you can think of--from ethics to aesthetics to metaphysics. The result is a Philosophy Bite--a lively, informal conversation that brings the subject...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsWinner of Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles for 2018 2018.Book InformationISBN 9780262036535Author Catherine Z. ElginFormat HardbackPage Count 352Imprint MIT...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When is the "beautiful game" at its most beautiful? How does football function as a lens through which so many view their daily lives? What's...

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...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Our sense of smell is crucial to our survival. We can smell fear, disease, food. Fragrance is also entertainment. We can smell an expensive...

The first posthumous collection from the writings of Stanley Cavell, shedding new light on the distinctive vision and intellectual trajectory of an influential American philosopher.For Stanley Cavell, philosophy was a matter of responding to the voices...

Walter Benjamin's famous "Work of Art" essay sets out his boldest thoughts-on media and on culture in general-in their most realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who reads it. In this essay the visual arts of the...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Baked potatoes, Bombay potatoes, pommes frites . . . everyone eats potatoes, but what do they mean? To the United Nations they mean global food...

A New Statesman essential non-fiction book of 2021 Featured in Book Riot's 12 best nonfiction books about Black identity and history A Times Higher Education Book of the Week 2022 Finalist for the Prose Awards (Media and Cultural Studies category) ...

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...

The #metoo movement has forced many fans to consider what they should do when they learn that a beloved artist has acted immorally. One natural thought is that fans ought to give up the artworks of immoral artists. In Why It's OK to Enjoy the Work of...

Works of fiction are works of the imagination and for the imagination. Gregory Currie energetically defends the familiar idea that fictions are guides to the imagination, a view which has come under attack in recent years. Responding to a number of...

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...

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...

A bold revision of the history of European art, told through the lens of neuroscience Ambitious and much anticipated, this book celebrates the value of recent neuroscientific discoveries as tools for art-historical analysis. Case studies ranging across...

Narcissism is the defining pathology of the twenty-first century, but what if it is not self-obsession that defines us but a need for self-transformation? Narcissus in Bloom is a short history of the self-portrait, beginning with Renaissance painters...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781945492433Author Namwali SerpellFormat PaperbackPage Count 196Imprint Transit BooksPublisher Transit Books

"Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to...

Published in its entirety for the first time, a candid conversation with Susan Sontag at the height of her brilliant career "One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all...

Join the art critic Ben Eastham on a private tour of an extraordinary museum. Let him walk you through a building constructed from memory and filled with a series of bewildering art works, while he delivers a guide comprised of personal...

This book is an exploration of how art-specifically paintings in the European manner-can be mobilized to make knowledge claims about the past. No type of human-made tangible thing makes more complex and bewildering demands in this respect than paintings...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781596380073Author Philip Graham RykenFormat PaperbackPage Count 64Imprint P & R Publishing Co (Presbyterian & Reformed)Publisher P & R Publishing Co...

During the past twenty years, the world's most renowned critical theorist-the scholar who defined the field of postcolonial studies-has experienced a radical reorientation in her thinking. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial...

Modernism is usually thought of as a shock wave of innovations hitting art, architecture, music, cinema and literature - the work of Picasso, Joyce, Schoenberg, movements like Futurism and Dada, the architecture of Le Corbusier, T.S. Eliot's The...

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...

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 *...

"Art is necessary in order that man should be able to recognize and change the world. But art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent in it."-Ernst FischerReissued with an introduction by John Berger, The Necessity of Art is a beautifully...

Rudolf Arnheim has been known, since the publication of his groundbreaking "Art and Visual Perception" in 1974, as an authority on the psychological interpretation of the visual arts. Two anniversary volumes celebrate the landmark anniversaries of his...

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...