This unique collection of essays has two main purposes. The first is to honour the pioneering work of Cora Diamond, one of the most important living moral philosophers and certainly the most important working in the tradition inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second is to develop and deepen a picture of moral philosophy by carrying out new work in what Diamond has called the realistic spirit. The contributors in this book advance a first-order moral attitude that pays close attention to actual moral life and experience. Their essays, inspired by Diamond's work, take up pressing challenges in Anglo-American moral philosophy, including Diamond's defence of the concept 'human being' in ethics, her defence of literature as a source of moral thought that does not require external sanction from philosophy, her challenge to the standard 'fact/value' dichotomy, and her exploration of non-argumentative forms of legitimate moral persuasion. There are also essays that apply this framework to new issues such as the nature of love, the connections of ethics to theology, and the implications of Wittgenstein's thought for political philosophy. Finally, the book features a new paper by Diamond in which she contests deep-rooted philosophical assumptions about language that severely limit what philosophers see as the possibilities in ethics. Morality in a Realistic Spirit offers a tribute to a great moral philosopher in the best way possible-by taking up the living ideas in her work and taking them in original and interesting directions.

Rousseau and Nietzsche: Toward an Aesthetic Morality offers a vivid depiction of the problems and potential of modernity through the words of two of its most poignant voices. The book focuses upon the modern self's desire to individuate while facing the ethical responsibility to integrate into the world. Katrin Froese elegantly juxtaposes Nietzsche's drive for extraordinary individualism with Rousseau's call for the dependable citizen, demonstrating that where Nietzsche's aestheticism embraces the limitless and irreconcilable longings of a divided being, Rousseau's approach emphasizes the imposition of limits to ensure that harmony and contentment prevail. Going beyond conventional scholarship, the work emphasizes the similarities at the heart of Rousseau's notion of morality and Nietzsche's aestheticism: the moral vision that underlies Nietzsche's notion of art and the aesthetic understanding prevalent in Rousseau's moral system. This stunning new work of political philosophy will be of great use to scholars of political thought and readers seeking to understand what made Rousseau and Nietzsche's thought so decidedly modern.

Released in 1958, Vertigo is widely regarded as Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece and one of the greatest films of all time. This is the first book devoted to exploring the philosophical aspects of Vertigo. Following an introduction by the editor that places the film in context, each chapter reflects upon Hitchcock's film from a philosophical perspective. Topics discussed include: memory, loss, memorialisation, and creativity mimetic or representational art and art as magic the nature of romantic love gender, sexual objectification, and identity looking, "the gaze", and voyeurism film and psychoanalysis fantasy, illusion, and reality the phenomenology of colour. Including annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, this collection is essential reading for anyone interested in Vertigo, and an ideal resource for students of film and philosophy.

Life as Art brings the resources of contemporary aesthetics since Nietzsche to bear on the problems of how one integrates the aesthetic emphases of meaning, liberation, and creativity into one's daily life. By linking together the aesthetic and ethical accounts of critical theorists, phenomenologists, and existentialists into a coherent view on the artful life, Life as Art shows the ways in which much of contemporary Continental theory has been concerned with alternative ways of constructing one's own life. Seen as a unified phenomenon, life as art signifies an active attempt to create a life which bears the resistance, openness, and creativity found in artworks.

From explorations of video game series to Netflix shows to Facebook timelines, Subjective Experiences of Interactive Nostalgia helps readers understand what it is actually like to be nostalgic in a world that increasingly asks us to interact with our past. Interdisciplinary authors tackle the subject from historical, philosophical, rhetorical, sociological, and economic perspectives, all the while asking big questions about what it means to be asked to be active participants in our own mediated histories. Scholars and pop culture enthusiasts alike will find something to love as this collection moves from a look at traditional interactive media, such as video games, to nostalgia within all things digital and ends with a rethinking of the potentials of nostalgia itself.

From explorations of video game series to Netflix shows to Facebook timelines, Subjective Experiences of Interactive Nostalgia helps readers understand what it is actually like to be nostalgic in a world that increasingly asks us to interact with our past. Interdisciplinary authors tackle the subject from historical, philosophical, rhetorical, sociological, and economic perspectives, all the while asking big questions about what it means to be asked to be active participants in our own mediated histories. Scholars and pop culture enthusiasts alike will find something to love as this collection moves from a look at traditional interactive media, such as video games, to nostalgia within all things digital and ends with a rethinking of the potentials of nostalgia itself.

This book is a significant re-thinking of Duchamp's importance in the twenty-first century, taking seriously the readymade as a critical exploration of object-oriented relations under the conditions of consumer capitalism. The readymade is understood as an act of accelerating art as a discourse, of pushing to the point of excess the philosophical precepts of modern aesthetics on which the notion of art in modernity is based. Julian Haladyn argues for an accelerated Duchamp that speaks to a contemporary condition of art within our era of globalized capitalist production.

The book proposes a set of original contributions in research areas shared by planning theory, architectural research, design and ethical inquiry. The contributors gathered in 2010 at the Ethics of the Built Environment seminar organized by the editors at Delft University of Technology. Both prominent and emerging scholars presented their researches in the areas of aesthetics, technological risks, planning theory and architecture. The scope of the seminar was highlighting shared lines of ethical inquiry among the themes discussed, in order to identify perspectives of innovative interdisciplinary research. After the seminar all seminar participants have elaborated their proposed contributions. Some of the most prominent international authors in the field were subsequently invited to join in with this inquiry.

Claudia Basta teaches "Network Infrastructures and Mobility" at Wageningen University. Between 2009 and 2011 she worked as Coordinator of the 3TU Centre of Excellence for Ethics and Technology of Delft University, where she completed her post-doc research on the shared areas of investigation between risk theories, planning theories and ethical inquiry. Her main research interests concern the matter of assessing and governing technological risks in relation to sustainable land use planning. She wrote a number of journal articles and contributions to collective books on these themes.

Stefano Moroni teaches Land use ethics and the law at Milan Politecnico. His main research interests concern planning theory and ethics. He is the author of a number of books and journal articles. Recent publications (as co-author): "Contractual Communities in the Self-Organizing City" (Springer 2012).

"Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement "unravels politics from theatre in order to propose a new means to politicize performance. The last human venue is the location where the sense of one's aliveness, ethical associations, and collective potential is kickstarted through the shock of theatrical affects. Performance analyses ranging from child actors, animals and objects to reflections on the innovative theatre work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Forced Entertainment and Goat Island combine to offer a radical critique of performance studies: the first social science of appearance.

Affect and emotion have come to dominate discourse on social and political life in the mobile and networked societies of the early 21st century. This volume introduces a unique collection of essential concepts for theorizing and empirically investigating societies as Affective Societies. The concepts promote insights into the affective foundations of social coexistence and are indispensable to comprehend the many areas of conflict linked to emotion such as migration, political populism, or local and global inequalities. Adhering to an instructive narrative, Affective Societies provides historical orientation; detailed explication of the concept in question, clear-cut research examples, and an outlook at the end of each chapter. Presenting interdisciplinary research from scholars within the Collaborative Research Center "Affective Societies," this insightful monograph will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as affect and emotion, anthropology, cultural studies, and media studies.

Like artists, important writers defy unequivocal interpretations. Gao Xingjian, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, is a cosmopolitan writer, deeply rooted in the Chinese past while influenced by paragons of Western Modernity. The present volume is less interested in a general discussion on the multitude of aspects in Gao's works and even less in controversies concerning their aesthetic value than in obtaining a response to the crucial issues of freedom and fate from a clearly defined angle. The very nature of the answer to the question of freedom and fate within Gao Xingjian's works can be called a polyphonic one: thereare affirmative as well as skeptical voices. But polyphony, as embodied by Gao, is an even more multifaceted phenomenon. Most important for our contention is the fact that Gao Xingjian's aesthetic experience embodies prose, theater, painting, and film. Taken together, they form a Gesamtkunstwerk whose diversity of voices characterizes every single one of them.

What is art? Can anything be art? Is there "value" or "truth" in art, or does it all come down to "how it makes us feel"? These questions have puzzled artists, curators, and connoiseurs as well as the general art-appreciating public. In Art & Philosophy author Timothy Taubes offers many insightful observations on these and other questions surrounding the objects in which we take an aesthetic interest. Art is the communication of ideas, and clearly some ideas are more important than others, just as some artists are adept at communicating their ideas and others are less capable. The language of art is learned in much the same way one becomes proficient in any language - through observation, application, adaptation, and retention. However, the datum of an aesthetic language is different from that of other communicative skills. The aesthetic vocabulary is comprised of living equivalents to common experiences that all humans share: i.e., transcendent ideals, such as love, humility, and justice, which keep works of art relevant for today. Participation in the experience of art helps us learn something about ourselves - we enter into communion with the world. This is the artwork's primary duty - to bridge the mysterious externality of existence separating the spirits of human beings one from another. Aesthetic contemplation is a learning experience: the learning of shared properties, values, and beliefs. However, such learning should never be compulsory: we should not feel obliged to study and memorize definitions, explanations, and symbols. Instead, learning acquired through art is without conscious effort; the psyche searches through conscious reality for its spiritual roots. Art is a livedexperience best exemplified by Greek civilization, wherein every facet of life was an expression of the aesthetic. Tragically, we have lost much of that lived quality in our own aesthetic experiences. Having become rationalized and narrowly defined, they only serve as limitations to a fuller experience of art. But we imposed these limitations on ourselves, and only we can remove them. Art & Philosophy assimilates the development of Western culture (and many Eastern views as well) into our collective lived experience as humanity approaches the twenty-first century. How does modern art compare with its primitive predecessors? In what sense are we still living according to the words of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and how might modern philosophers be leading us astray? Instead of dictating answers to these important aesthetic questions, Taubes suggests that an exploration of the communicative experience of art provides the means by which we can reach our own independent conclusions.

In this thought-provoking book Lambert Wiesing asks simply: What is luxury? Drawing on a fascinating range of examples, he argues that luxury is an aesthetic experience. Unlike experience gained via the senses, such as seeing, hearing or tasting, he argues that luxury is achieved by possessing something - an aspect of philosophy that has been largely neglected. As such, luxury becomes a gesture of individual defiance and a refusal to conform to social expectations of restraint. An increasingly rational and goal-oriented ethos in society makes the appeal of luxury grow even stronger. Drawing on the ideas of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Martin Heidegger and the novelist Ernst Junger, as well as sociologists such as Thorstein Veblen and Theodor Adorno, A Philosophy of Luxury will be of great interest to those in philosophy, art, cultural studies and literature as well as sociology.

This book offers a diverse understanding and practical approach towards the growing area of atmosphere research, in the context of philosophy, geography and architecture. It begins by tracing back to the model of experience called the "pathic". Drawing on the phenomenology of theorists Hermann Schmitz and Gernot Boehme, introductory chapters offer a grounding for the beginnings of pathic research. The chapters go on to apply pathic framework to a range of practical cases from theatre studies to education. Atmospheres are often defined as affects one feels in a "lived space" and researchers are becoming more interested in the emotions we feel in natural and artificial environments across day to day life. By providing a critical re-evaluation of phenomenology and aesthetics, the book brings a series of unexplored and controversial subjects to light, opening up a new context for thinking about our everyday life and experiences inscribed within aesthetics, politics, literature, spatial practices and pedagogy and effectively merging abstract philosophy and concrete practice. This book is particularly poignant in the emerging field of Atmosphere and New Aesthetics research. Practitioners, academics and researchers working within Cultural Geography, Aesthetics, Art and Philosophy will find this book extremely valuable.

Margaret Boden presents a series of essays in which she explores the nature of creativity in a wide range of art forms. Creativity in general is the generation of novel, surprising, and valuable ideas (conceptual, theoretical, musical, literary, or visual). Boden identifies three forms of creativity: combinational, exploratory, and transformational. These elicit differing forms of surprise, and are defined by the different kinds of psychological process that generate the new ideas. Boden examines creativity not only in traditional fine art, but also in craftworks, and some less orthodox approaches--namely, conceptual art and several types of computer art. Her Introduction draws out the conceptual links between the various case-studies, showing how they express a coherent view of creativity in art.

This compelling book defends realism concerning the aesthetic-in particular, concerning the aesthetic properties of works of art (including works of literature). Morais lucidly argues that art criticism, when referring to aesthetic properties, is referring not ultimately to the critic's subjective reactions, but to genuine properties of the works. With a focus on contemporary discussion conducted in the analytic tradition, as well as on arguments by Hume and Kant, this book characterizes the debate in aesthetics and the philosophy of art concerning aesthetic realism, examining attacks on the objectivity of values, the 'autonomy thesis', and Hume's sentimentalism. Considering and defusing scepticism concerning the significance of the ontological debate about aesthetic realism, Morais discusses two powerful attacks on aesthetic realism before defending the doctrine against them and providing a positive realist account of aesthetic properties.

Art develops its effect through contemplation. Even before we interpret it, we grasp it by means of inspired seeing, by "feeling our way," thus giving rise to an opinion. It precedes an interpretation of the content-and the interplay of form and content becomes the experience of art. Unlike classic guidebooks, this publication is dedicated to the aesthetic experience, which the comparative contemplation and presentation of masterpieces from the Gemaldegalerie and Bode Museum focuses on beyond the boundaries of art forms. The sensual experience of art via forms, surfaces, materiality, movement, and their significance is curated for readers based on some fifty selected works over various epochs and clearly communicated in numerous close-up photographs.

The Collective Imagination explores the social foundations of the human imagination. In a lucid and wide-ranging discussion, Peter Murphy looks at the collective expression of the imagination in our economies, universities, cities, and political systems, providing a tour-de-force account of the power of the imagination to unite opposites and find similarities among things that we ordinarily think of as different. It is not only individuals who possess the power to imagine; societies do as well. A compelling journey through various peak moments of creation, this book examines the cities and nations, institutions and individuals who ply the paraphernalia of paradoxes and dialogues, wry dramaturgy and witty expression that set the act of creation in motion. Whilst exploring the manner in which, through the media of pattern, figure, and shape, and the miracles of metaphor, things come into being, Murphy recognises that creative periods never last: creative forms invariably tire; inventive centres inevitably fade. The Collective Imagination explores the contemporary dilemmas and historic pathos caused by this-as cities and societies, periods and generations slip behind in the race for economic and social discovery. Left bewildered and bothered, and struggling to catch up, they substitute empty bombast, faded glory, chronic dullness or stolid glumness for initiative, irony, and inventiveness. A comprehensive audit of the creativity claims of the post-modern age - that finds them badly wanting and looks to the future - The Collective Imagination will appeal to sociologists and philosophers concerned with cultural theory, cultural and media studies and aesthetics.

Archaeology of Play: The Re-Discovery of Platonic-Aristotelian Tripartivism in Interdisciplinary Discourses proposes that play's antithesis is not seriousness but rather one-dimensionality. This book argues that the rediscovery of Platonic-Aristotelian tripartivism lends to a more expansive appreciation of play in terms of three rhetorical registers-namely, skhole, agon, and paidia. Scholastic play resides in leisure and contemplation. Agonistics is realmed in competition, contests, and power-play, while paidiatics is expressed in lowly ruses, trickeries, recreation, and amusement of the low-bred and the subaltern. By subjecting play to the tripartite lens, Archaeology of Play highlights vital surpluses and lacunae in the treatment of the subject matter and therefore yields a refreshing, re-politicized understanding of play dynamics in the different fields of human endeavor. Furthermore, Bourdieu's and Ranciere's lusory discourses redeem play from the pitfalls of triadic over-schematization by thinking beyond tripartivism. The lively interlocution with other play theorists-Pieper, Kant, Schiller, Marcuse, Gadamer, Veblen, Arendt, Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Bakhtin, de Certeau, among others-adds substance to the mix where play becomes a critical resource for politics, aesthetics, and the democratic reordering of sociality.

This volume addresses key questions related to how content in thought is derived from perceptual experience. It includes chapters that focus on single issues on perception and cognition, as well as others that relate these issues to an important social construct that involves both perceptual experience and cognitive activities: aesthetics. While the volume includes many diverse views, several prominent themes unite the individual essays: a challenge to the notion of the discreet, and non-temporal, unit of perception, a challenge to the traditional divide between perception and cognition, and a challenge to the traditional divide between unconscious and conscious intentionality. Additionally, the chapters discuss the content of perceptual experience, the value of traditional notions of content, disjunctivism, adverbialism, and phenomenal experience. The final section of essays dealing with perception and cognition in aesthetics features work in experimental aesthetics and unique perspectives from artists and gallerists working outside of philosophy. Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics is a timely volume that offers a range of unique perspectives on debates in philosophy of mind surrounding perception and cognition. It will also appeal to scholars working in aesthetics and art theory who are interested in the ways these debates influence our understanding of art.

Object-Oriented Cartography provides an innovative perspective on the changing nature of maps and cartographic study. Through a renewed theoretical reading of contemporary cartography, this book acknowledges the shifted interest from cartographic representation to mapping practice and proposes an alternative consideration of the 'thingness' of maps. Rather than asking how maps map onto reality, it explores the possibilities of a speculative-realist map theory by bringing cartographic objects to the foreground. Through a pragmatic perspective, this book focuses on both digital and nondigital maps and establishes an unprecedented dialogue between the field of map studies and object-oriented ontology. This dialogue is carried out through a series of reflections and case studies involving aesthetics and technology, ethnography and image theory, and narrative and photography. Proposing methods to further develop this kind of cartographic research, this book will be invaluable reading for researchers and graduate students in the fields of Cartography and Geohumanities.

There are as many meanings to drawing and painting as there are cultural contexts for them to exist in. But this is not the end of the story. Drawings and paintings are made, and in their making embody unique meanings that transform our perception of space-time and sense of finitude. These meanings have not been addressed by art history or visual studies hitherto, and have only been considered indirectly by philosophers (mainly in the phenomenological tradition). If these intrinsic meanings are explained and further developed, then the philosophy of art practice is significantly enhanced. The present work, accordingly, is a phenomenology of how the gestural and digital creation of visual imagery generates self-transformation through aesthetic space.

The Intertwining of Aesthetics and Ethics: Exceeding of Expectations, Ecstasy, Sublimity analyzes the common experiential ground for both aesthetics and ethics by considering experiential environment (both nature and art), the precedents to desire, the notion of experience incorporating a break, and the reverberations of surprise leading to the intertwining of aesthetics and ethics. Jadranka Skorin-Kapov discusses different philosophical positions on the relationship between nature and art, in conversation with Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Gadamer, and Adorno. She argues that Kantian sublimity can carry over from nature to art. As part of the discussions of expectations and authenticity, the author interprets Husserl's view on expectations, Heidegger's view on death and authenticity, Blanchot's view on death, and Arendt's view on natality. As for understanding the aesthetic experience as the paradigmatic experience, Skorin-Kapov is informed by Dewey's work on art as experience, Gadamer's work on experience of art, and Jauss's work on the aesthetics of reception and the horizon of expectations. After our sensibility and representational capability are broken, recuperation then leads to sublimity and the subsequent feelings of admiration and/or responsibility, allowing for the intertwining of aesthetics and ethics. Additionally, elements of Kantian morality, Foucault's ethics, and Kierkegaard's work on interactions between aesthetics and ethics together help to characterize the relation between aesthetics and ethics. Since we often encounter surprise due to unexpectedness in comedy, Skorin-Kapov also interprets philosophical views on the comedy and laughter (including Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Meredith, and Bergson), using the theatrical work of Dario Fo as an example. The novel analysis in The Intertwining of Aesthetics and Ethics will be of particular interest to students and scholars working or teaching in aesthetics, phenomenology, art history, cultural studies, and ethics.