Uniquely bridges the aesthetics of imperfection with areas of philosophy, music, literature, urban environment, architecture, art theory, and cultural studies. Divided into seven thematic sections to offer a comprehensive study of how imperfectionist aesthetics connect to art and everyday life. As an interdisciplinary study, this book will appeal to a broad range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophical aesthetics, cultural studies, and across the humanities.

Politics as Public Art presents a keystone collection that pursues new frameworks for a critical understanding of the relationship between public art and protest movements through the utilization of socially engaged and choreopolitical approaches. This anthology draws from a unique combination of interdisciplinary scholarship and activism where it integrates geographically rich perspectives from political and grassroots community contexts spanning the United States, Europe, Australia, and Southeastern Africa. The volume questions, and reimagines, not only how public art practice can be integral to politics, including forms of surveillance and control of bodily movement. It also probes into how political participation itself can be construed as a form of public artmaking for radical social change and just worlds. This collection advocates for scholar-activist inquiry into how socially engaged public art practices can pave the way for thinking through-and working toward-championing more inclusive futures and, as such, choreographing greater intersectional justice. This book provides a wide appeal to audiences across humanities and social science scholarship, arts practice, and activism seeking conceptual and empirically informed tools for moving from public art and choreopolitical theory into modes of praxis: critical reflection and action.

This book explores the transformation of ideas of the material in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century musical composition. New music of this era is argued to reflect a historical moment when the idea of materiality itself is in flux. Engaging with thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Sara Ahmed, Zygmunt Bauman, Rosi Braidotti, and Timothy Morton, the author considers music's relationship with changing material conditions, from the rise of neo-liberalisms and information technologies to new concepts of the natural world. Drawing on musicology, cultural theory, and philosophy, the author develops a critical understanding of musical bodies, objects, and the environments of their interaction. Music is grasped as something that both registers material changes in society whilst also enabling us to practice materiality differently.

This volume brings together an international array of scholars to reconsider the meaning and place of poststructuralism historically and demonstrate some of the ways in which it continues to be relevant, especially for debates in aesthetics, ethics, and politics. The book's chapters focus on the works of Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan, and Lyotard-in combination with those of Agamben, Luhman, Nancy, and Nietzsche-and examine issues including biopolitics, culture, embodiment, epistemology, history, music, temporality, political resistance, psychoanalysis, revolt, and the visual arts. The contributors use poststructuralism as a hermeneutical strategy that rejects the traditional affirmation of unity, totality, transparency, and representation to instead focus on the foundational importance of open-ended becoming, difference, the unknowable, and expression. This approach allows for a more expansive definition of poststructuralism and helps demonstrate how it has contributed to debates across philosophy and other disciplines. Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism will be of particular interest to researchers in philosophy, politics, political theory, critical theory, aesthetics, feminist theory, cultural studies, intellectual history, psychoanalysis, and sociology.

In Philosophy through Film, Amy Karofsky and Mary M. Litch use recently released, well-received films to explore answers to classic questions in philosophy in an approachable yet philosophically rigorous manner. Each chapter incorporates one or more films to examine one longstanding philosophical question or problem and assess some of the best solutions that have been offered to it. The authors fully integrate the films into their discussion of the issues, using them to help students become familiar with key topics in all major areas of Western philosophy and master the techniques of philosophical argumentation. Revised and expanded, changes to the Fourth Edition include: A brand new chapter on the mind-body problem (chapter 4), which includes discussions of substance dualism, physicalism, eliminativism, functionalism, and other relevant theories. The replacement of older movies with nine new focus films: Ad Astra, Arrival, Beautiful Boy, Divergent, Ex Machina, Her, Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow, A Serious Man, and Silence. The addition of two new primary readings to the appendix of source materials: excerpts from Patricia Smith Churchland's, "Can Neurobiology Teach Us Anything about Consciousness?" and Frank Jackson's "What Mary Didn't Know." The inclusion of a Website, with a Story Lines of Films by Elapsed Time for each focus film. The films examined in depth are: Ad Astra, Arrival, Beautiful Boy, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Divergent, Equilibrium, Ex Machina, Gone Baby Gone, Her, Inception, Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow, The Matrix, Memento, Minority Report, Moon, A Serious Man, Silence

Drawing extensively upon archival resources and manuscript evidence, Wordsworth Before Coleridge rewrites the early history of Wordsworth's intellectual development and thereby overturns a century-old consensus that derives his most important philosophical ideas from Coleridge. Beginning with Wordsworth's mathematical and poetic studies at Hawkshead Grammar School and Cambridge University, both of which tutored the young poet in mind-matter dualism, the book charts the process by which Wordsworth came, not to reject this philosophical foundation, but to reevaluate the indispensable role of passion within it. Prompted by his reading in 1793 or early 1794 of Dugald Stewart's Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Wordsworth rejected the exclusive rationality of William Godwin's political philosophy and the anti-passionate morality of Alexander Pope's philosophical poetics. Subsequent exposure, between 1795 and 1797, to Cambridge Platonism and English Kantianism supplied the key ideas of mind-nature fitness and multilevel psychological activity that, along with Stewart's analysis of imaginative association, animate Wordsworth's signature philosophy of "feeling intellect," from the initial drafts of The Pedlar and The Prelude in 1798 to the "Prospectus" to The Recluse and The Excursion, published together in 1814. By presenting for the first time a fully nuanced account of Wordsworth's intellectual formation prior to the advent of Coleridge as his close companion and creative collaborator, Wordsworth Before Coleridge reveals at long last the true sources and abiding originality of the poet's philosophical mind.

In this book, Christine Tappolet offers readers a thorough, wide-ranging, and highly accessible introduction to the philosophy of emotions. It covers recent interdisciplinary debates on the nature of emotions as well as standard theories of emotions, such as feeling theories, motivational theories, and evaluative theories. The book includes discussions of the alleged irrationality of emotions, and looks into the question of whether emotions could not, in some cases, contribute positively to theoretical and practical rationality. In addition, the role of emotions in the theory of virtues and the theory of values receives a detailed treatment. Finally, the book turns to the question of how we can regulate and even educate our emotions by engaging with music and with narrative art. The overall picture of emotions that emerges is one that does justice to the central role that emotions play in our lives, conceiving of emotions as crucial to our grasp of values. As an opinionated introduction, the book doesn't pretend to be neutral but aims to engage readers in contemporary debates. Each chapter closes with questions for further discussion and suggestions for further reading. Key Features: Written for advanced undergraduates, suitable as the main text in a philosophy of emotion course or as a complement to a set of primary readings Includes useful features for student readers like introductions, study questions, and suggestions for further reading in each chapter Considers whether emotions interfere with our reasoning or whether they can, in some cases, help us to be more rational Argues against basic emotion theory and social constructionism that emotions are both shaped by biological forces and social forces Discusses a variety of subjectivist and objectivist approaches, which share the assumption that emotions and values are closely connected.

Why do painters paint? Obviously, there are numerous possible reasons. They paint to create images for others' enjoyment, to solve visual problems, to convey ideas, and to contribute to a rich artistic tradition. This book argues that there is yet another, crucially important but often overlooked reason. Painters paint to feel. They paint because it enables them to experience special feelings, such as being absorbed in creative play and connected to something vitally significant. Painting may even transform the painter's whole sense of being. Thus, painting is not only about producing art, communicating content, and so on, but also about setting up and inhabiting an experiential space wherein highly valued feelings are interactively enabled and supported. This book investigates how and why this happens by combining psychoanalytical theorization on creativity with philosophical thinking on affectivity. It focuses on creative experience itself, and illuminates the psychological mechanisms and dynamics that underlie the affects at stake. Painters' own descriptions of how they feel at work are used throughout to give an accurate, true-to-life portrayal of the experience of painting. The strength of the book lies in its open-minded yet critical integration of contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking, and in its truthfulness to painters' experiential descriptions of the painterly process. On the whole, it enriches our understanding of artistic creativity and sheds more light on how and why we come to feel the things we do. As such, the book will appeal to philosophers, psychoanalysts, and art researchers alike.

"The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is one of the landmarks of twentieth century philosophy. Drawing from the influential work of Wilhelm Dilthey, it transformed neo-Kantianism into a new robust philosophy of culture. The second volume, on Mythical Thinking, analyzes the fundamental layers of perception and expression as well as the articulations with religion and the dialectic with other forms, essentially language and art. The intellectual breadth of the volume is remarkable. It initiated the debate with Martin Heidegger and prompted a long-lasting meditation by Hans Blumenberg. We are only beginning to recognize its importance for our understanding of the power of images in the construction of aesthetics, the self, and the socio-political world. It initiated a discussion within French sociology (Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss) that ultimately resurfaced in Pierre Bourdieu, while today it is considered as a resourceful path for cultural and critical theory (Drucilla Cornell and Kenneth M. Panfilio). Finally, this volume also offers solid grounds for a political critique of Nazism - specifically: Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the 20th Century and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf - as well as the new emerging totalitarian ideologies." Fabien Capeilleres, Professor of Philosophy, editor of the French edition of Cassirer's Works. This new translation makes Cassirer's seminal work available to a new generation of scholars. Each volume includes a translator's introduction by Steve G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter E. Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and an index.

This volume investigates the role of the arts in character education. Bringing together insights from esteemed philosophers and educationalists, it looks to the arts for insight into human character and explores the arts' relationship to human flourishing and the development of the virtues. Focusing on the moral value of art and considering questions of whether there can be educational value in imaginative and non-narrative art, the nine chapters herein critically examine whether poetry, music, literature, films, television series, videogames, and even gardening may improve our understanding of human character, sharpen our moral judgement, inculcate or refine certain skills required for virtue, or perhaps cultivate certain virtues (or vices) themselves. Bringing together research on aesthetics, ethics, moral and character education, this book will appeal to students, researchers and academics of philosophy, arts, and education as well as philosophers of education, morality, aesthetics, and teachers of the arts.

1. The first handbook to be published in the burgeoning field of Neuroaesthetics 2. Brings together leading academics from the field to present their cutting-edge research

This book investigates a group of exceptional films that single-mindedly consider one particular emotion - be it pity, lust, grief, or anxiety - to examine cinematic emotion in depth. Drawing on philosophical and psychological approaches, Fischer's unique analysis offers unparalleled case studies for comprehending emotion in the movies. The book provides the reader with an opportunity to contemplate what notion of a particular emotion is advanced onscreen; to describe how the unique tools and aesthetics of cinema are utilized to do so; to place such representations in dialogue with film theory as well as philosophical and psychological commentary; and to illustrate the important dichotomy between filmic portrayals and audience response. Beyond film and media scholars and students, this book will have resonance for academics and practitioners in several fields of psychology, including social work, psychiatry, and therapy.

This study offers the first comprehensive account of Emerson's philosophy since his philosophical rehabilitation began in the late 1970s. It builds on the historical reconstruction proposed in the author's previous book, Emerson's Metaphysics, and like that study draws on the entire Emerson corpus-the poetry and sermons included. The aim here is expository. The overall though not exclusive emphasis is on identity, as the first term of Emerson's metaphysics of identity and flowing or metamorphosis. This metaphysics, or general conception of the nature of reality, is what grounds his epistemology and ethics, as well as his esthetic, religious, and political thought. Acknowledging its primacy enables a general account like this to avoid the anti-realist overemphasis on epistemology and language that has often characterized rehabilitation readings of his philosophy. After an initial chapter on Emerson's metaphysics, the subsequent chapters devoted to the other branches of his thought also begin with their "necessary foundation" in identity, which is the law of things and the law of mind alike. Perception of identity in metamorphosis is what characterizes the philosopher, the poet, the scientist, the reformer, and the man of faith and virtue. Identity of mind and world is felt in what Emerson calls the moral sentiment. Identity is Emerson's answer to the Sphinx-riddle of life experienced as a puzzling succession of facts and events.

The Routledge Companion to Pragmatism offers 44 cutting-edge chapters-written specifically for this volume by an international team of distinguished researchers-that assess the past, present, and future of pragmatism. Going beyond the exposition of canonical texts and figures, the collection presents pragmatism as a living philosophical idiom that continues to devise promising theses in contemporary debates. The chapters are organized into four major parts: Pragmatism's history and figures Pragmatism and plural traditions Pragmatism's reach Pragmatism's relevance Each chapter provides up-to-date research tools for philosophers, students, and others who wish to locate pragmatist options in their contemporary research fields. As a whole, the volume demonstrates that the vitality of pragmatism lies in its ability to build upon, and transcend, the ideas and arguments of its founders. When seen in its full diversity, pragmatism emerges as one of the most successful and influential philosophical movements in Western philosophy.

This book presents new research on the crucial role that imagination plays in contemporary philosophy of fiction. It will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and literary studies.

This bookoffers a sustained scholarly analysis of Gadamer's reflections on art and our experience of art. It examines fundamental themes in Gadamer's hermeneutical aesthetics such as play, festival, symbol, contemporaneity, enactment, art's performative ontology, and hermeneutical identity.

This book presents a counter-history to the relentless critique of the humanist subject and authorial agency that has taken place over the past fifty years. It is both an interrogation of that critique and the tracing of an alternative narrative from Romanticism to the twenty-first century which celebrates the agency of the artist as a powerful contribution to the wellbeing of the community. It does so through arguments based on philosophical aesthetics and cultural theory interspersed with case histories of particular artists. It also engages with a second issue that cannot be separated from the first. This is the question of what the role and purpose of art is in society. This has become particularly important since the 1990s because of the "social turn" in art in which it is claimed that the only valid role for art was one that had explicit social consequences. This book argues that a political role for art is valuable, but not the only one that can be envisaged nor indeed is it the most obvious or most important. Art has other social roles both as a means to engender empathy and community, and to re-enchant a world bereft of meaning and reduced to material values. The book will appeal to practising artists as well as scholars working in art history, philosophy, aesthetics, and curatorial studies.

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Friendship is a superb compilation of chapters that explore the history, major topics, and controversies in philosophical work on friendship. It gives both the advanced scholar and the novice in the field an overview and also an in-depth exploration of the connections between friendship and the history of philosophy, morality, practical rationality, value theory, and interpersonal relationships more generally. The Handbook consists of 31 newly commissioned chapters by an international slate of contributors, and is divided into six sections: I. Historical Perspectives II. Who Can Be Our Friends? III. Friendship and Other Relationships IV. The Value and Rationality of Friendship V. Friendship, Morality, and Virtue VI. New Issues in Philosophy of Friendship This volume is essential reading not only for anyone interested in the philosophical questions involving friendship, but also for anyone interested in related topics such as love, sex, moral duties, the good life, the nature of rationality, interpersonal and interspecies relationships, and the nature of the person.

- The book uses globally recognized films as a basis for analysis. - Studies on digital culture and digital spaces are becoming increasingly relevant in today's world (particularly in light of the pandemic), so demand for books exploring this subject is growing for both research and teaching markets. - Includes examples from a diverse range of film genres: science fiction, horror, comedy, European art films.

Thirteen essays in the book explore and investigate diverse contemporary philosophically current themes and issues. The title is derived from Wittgenstein's statement that 'anguage is a labyrinth of paths,' and it studiously avoids any conclusive claim on its central motif. What people, both users and theorists, do with language, rather than what it is, is the running theme. The book critically presents the views of a wide range of philosophically and analytically oriented authors including, de Saussure, Levinas, Levi-Strauss, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Kafka, Heidegger, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, Barthes and Deleuze. Only two essays diverge from the main concern with language: the one on the discourse of death, and another on the philosophy of image. One essay involves an analysis of the cultural and political discourse in a contemporary Malayalam novel. The concluding essay attempts to develop a postcolonial field of language studies, with reference to the works of the 18th century British jurist and linguist Sir William Jones and the subsequent philological tradition, whose political consequences are only beginning to be understood.

This book explores the ethical and psychological dilemmas connected to the lived experiences of love, uniquely proposing an ethical framework that can be applied in loving relationships. The book provides an introduction to the study of ethics, moral psychology, and ancient philosophy. Examining key themes of love, such as unconditional love, romantic love, anger, desperation, and fairness, this book offers the reader a way to exercise and strengthen their personal critical thinking on ethical dilemmas, especially in relation to loving feelings. The author believes that ethics is the heart of love in the same way as logic is the brain of reasoning; we do not need ethics to love but we can love in a much healthier way if we train our ethical skills to love. After laying the theoretical framework for the book, chapters are organized into themes relating to ethical problems and begin with an exemplary piece from Greek and Latin literature. Using these writings as a starting point, Susi Ferrarello discusses whether it is possible to have a sound ethical theory of love, especially in cases relating to justice, despair, and rage, and demonstrates how this framework can be applied in new and established relationships. Filled with case studies throughout, spiritual exercises are listed at the end of chapters to help the reader increase their understanding of love and their ethical choices surrounding emotional dilemmas. This interdisciplinary book is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students who take classes on ethics, marriage and family therapy, psychology, philosophy, classics, ancient philosophy, and politics, as well as those interested in the ethics of love and emotional decision-making.

This book addresses how our revisionary practices account for relations between texts and how they are read. It offers an overarching philosophy of revision concerning works of fiction, fact, and faith, revealing unexpected insights about the philosophy of language, the metaphysics of fact and fiction, and the history and philosophy of science and religion. Using the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien as exemplars, the authors introduce a fundamental distinction between the purely physical and the linguistic aspects of texts. They then demonstrate how two competing theories of reference-descriptivism and referentialism-are instead constitutive of a single semantic account needed to explain all kinds of revision. The authors also propose their own metaphysical foundations of fiction and fact. The next part of the book brings the authors' philosophy of revision into dialogue with Thomas Kuhn's famous analysis of factual, and specifically scientific, change. It also discusses a complex episode in the history of paleontology, demonstrating how scientific and popular texts can diverge over time. Finally, the authors expand their philosophy of revision to religious texts, arguing that, rather than being distinct, such texts are always read as other kinds, that faith tends to be more important as evidence for religious texts than for others, and that the latter explains why religious communities tend to have remarkable historical longevity. Revising Fiction, Fact, and Faith offers a unique and comprehensive account of the philosophy of revision. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of literature, literary theory and criticism, and history and philosophy of science and religion.

This book unveils the concept of social love as a kind of "Karst River" that flows through the history of sociology, reassessing it as a form criticism by people in everyday life. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, this book offers both theoretical and empirical reflections on social love. It shows that love is not only central to the human experience, but that it can also help to interpret and intervene in social problems such as climate change, poverty, xenophobia, and the (post-)Covid crisis, recognizing people as actors in social change. It explores the idea of love as a key element in the promotion of solidarity and recognition in today's plural and unequal societies. Based on empirical research on social love conducted through both qualitative and quantitative methods, especially in Europe and Latin America, this book explores the social dimension of love. Providing overviews on key questions and studies on current issues, the book is essential reference and resource for researchers, students, social workers, and professionals in social sciences, social philosophy, anthropology, social psychology, sociology of emotions and postmodern literature.

The Dardenne Brothers' Cinematic Parables examines the work of Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who have been celebrated for their powerfully affecting social realist films. Though the Dardenne brothers' films rarely mention religion or God, they have received wide recognition for their moral complexity and spiritual resonance. This book brings the Dardennes' filmography into consideration with theological aesthetics, Christian ethics, phenomenological film theory, and continental philosophy. The author explores the brothers' nine major films-beginning with The Promise (1996) and culminating in Young Ahmed (2019)-through the hermeneutics of philosopher Paul Ricoeur. By using Ricoeur's description of "parable" as a "narrative-metaphor" which generates an existential limit-experience, Joel Mayward crafts an innovative Ricoeurian hermeneutic for making theological interpretations of cinema. Drawing upon resources from three disciplinary spheres-theology, philosophy, and film studies-in a dynamic interweaving approach, Mayward proposes that the Dardennes create postsecular cinematic parables which evoke theological and ethical responses in audiences' imaginations through the brothers' distinctive filmmaking style, what is termed "transcendent realism." The book ultimately demonstrates how the Dardenne brothers are truly doing, not merely depicting, theology and ethics through the cinematic form-it presents film as theology, what Mayward refers to as "theocinematics." This is valuable reading for scholars of theology, philosophy, and film studies, as well as film critics and cinephiles interested in the cinema of the Dardenne brothers.

A sequel to Essays in Monetary Economics, this book develops the ideas on domestic and international monetary issues, with reference to specific events and crises of the 1960s and 70s. These essays are distinguished by the author's expert grasp of the analytical techniques and contemporaneous policy problems of both domestic and international monetary economics.