Philosophers from different regions of the world analyed and discussed questions trying to connect the traditional aesthetic approaches with contemporary interpretation. The chapters in this volume address the following questions: (1) Is there any common essence or property which characteries an object or performance as artistic or of high quality? (2) What are the roots and characteristics of processes and artistic creativity?

Tomonubu Imamichi is professor of philosophy at the International Center of Philosophy in Tokyo.

Hans Lenk is professor emeritus at the Institute for Philosophy at the University of Karlsruhe.

This book, by one of the most challenging contemporary thinkers, begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern sustained in the four succeeding ones: Why are there several arts and not just one? This question focuses on the point of maximal tension between the philosophical tradition and contemporary thinking about the arts: the relation between the plurality of the human senses--to which the plurality of the arts has most frequently been referred--and sense or meaning in general.
Throughout the five essays, Nancy's argument hinges on the culminating formulation of this relation in Hegel's Aesthetics and The Phenomenology of Spirit--art as the sensible presentation of the Idea. Demonstrating once again his renowned ability as a reader of Hegel, Nancy scrupulously and generously restores Hegel's historical argument concerning art as a thing of the past, as that which is negated by the dialectic of Spirit in the passage from aesthetic religion to revealed religion to philosophy.

More than the persistent beat of a song or the structural frame of poetry, rhythm is a deeply imbedded force that drives our world and is also a central component of the condition of human existence. It's the pulse of the body, a power that orders matter, a strange and natural force that flows through us. Virginia Woolf describes it as a "wave in the mind" that carries us, something we can no more escape than we could stop our hearts from beating. Vincent Barletta explores rhythm through three historical moments, each addressing it as a phenomenon that transcends poetry, aesthetics, and even temporality. He reveals rhythm to be a power that holds us in place, dispossesses us, and shapes the foundations of our world. In these moments, Barletta encounters rhythm as a primordial and physical binding force that establishes order and form in the ancient world, as the anatomy of lived experience in early modern Europe, and as a subject of aesthetic and ethical questioning in the twentieth century. A wide-ranging book covering a period spanning two millennia and texts from over ten languages, Rhythm will expand the conversation around this complex and powerful phenomenon.

An interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the complex and conflicted topic of beauty in cultural, arts and medicine, looking back through the long cultural history of beauty, and asking whether it is possible to 'recover beauty'.

Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger explains how two notoriously opposed German philosophers share a rethinking of the possibility of metaphysics via notions of music and waiting. This is connected to the historical materialist project of social change by way of the radical Italian composer Luigi Nono.

What is poetry? Why do human beings produce and consume it? What effects does it have on them? Can it give them insight into truth, or is it dangerously misleading? This book is a wide-ranging study of the very varied answers which ancient philosophers gave to such questions. An extended discussion of Plato's Republic shows how the two discussions of poetry are integrated with each other and with the dialogue's central themes. Aristotle's Poetics is read in the context of his understanding of poetry as a natural human behaviour and an intrinsically valuable component of a good human life. Two chapters trace the development of the later Platonist tradition from Plutarch to Plotinus, Longinus and Porphyry, exploring its intellectual debts to Epicurean, allegorical and Stoic approaches to poetry. It will be essential reading for classicists as well as ancient philosophers and modern philosophers of art and aesthetics.

What is poetry? Why do human beings produce and consume it? What effects does it have on them? Can it give them insight into truth, or is it dangerously misleading? This book is a wide-ranging study of the very varied answers which ancient philosophers gave to such questions. An extended discussion of Plato's Republic shows how the two discussions of poetry are integrated with each other and with the dialogue's central themes. Aristotle's Poetics is read in the context of his understanding of poetry as a natural human behaviour and an intrinsically valuable component of a good human life. Two chapters trace the development of the later Platonist tradition from Plutarch to Plotinus, Longinus and Porphyry, exploring its intellectual debts to Epicurean, allegorical and Stoic approaches to poetry. It will be essential reading for classicists as well as ancient philosophers and modern philosophers of art and aesthetics.

The Dialectic of Taste examines the aesthetic economy in the context of economic crises. It explains how a new concern for aesthetics, seen in artisan markets, was born out of the ashes of McDonaldization to become a potent force today, capable of both regulating social identity and sparking social change.

How can the studio teacher teach a lesson so as to instill refined artistic sensibilities, ones often thought to elude language? How can the applied lesson be a form of aesthetic education? How can teaching performance be an artistic endeavor in its own right? These are some of the questions Teaching Performance attempts to answer, drawing on the author's several decades of experience as a studio teacher and music scholar. The architects of absolute music (Hanslick, Schopenhauer, and others) held that it is precisely because instrumental music lacks language and thus any overt connection to the non-musical world that it is able to expose essential elements of that world. More particularly, for these philosophers, it is the density of musical structure-the intricate interplay among purely musical elements-that allows music to capture the essences behind appearances. By analogy, the author contends that the more structurally intricate and aesthetically nuanced a pedagogical system is, the greater its ability to illuminate music and facilitate musical skills. The author terms this phenomenon relational autonomy. Eight chapters unfold a piano-pedagogical system pivoting on the principle of relational autonomy. In grounding piano pedagogy in the aesthetics of absolute music, each domain works on the other. On the one hand, Romantic aesthetics affords pedagogy a source of artistic value in its own right. On the other hand, pedagogy concretizes Romantic aesthetics, deflating its transcendental pretentions and showing the dichotomy of absolute/utilitarian to be specious.

This book presents a solution to the problem known in philosophical aesthetics as the paradox of ugliness, namely, how an object that is displeasing can retain our attention and be greatly appreciated. It does this by exploring and refining the most sophisticated and thoroughly worked out theoretical framework of philosophical aesthetics, Kant's theory of taste, which was put forward in part one of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The book explores the possibility of incorporating ugliness, a negative aesthetic concept, into the overall Kantian aesthetic picture. It addresses a debate of the last two decades over whether Kant's aesthetics should allow for a pure aesthetic judgment of ugliness. The book critically reviews the main interpretations of Kant's central notion of the free play of imagination and understanding and offers a new interpretation of free play, one that allows for the possibility of a disharmonious state of mind and ugliness. In addition, the book also applies an interpretation of ugliness in Kant's aesthetics to resolve certain issues that have been raised in contemporary aesthetics, namely the possibility of appreciating artistic and natural ugliness and the role of disgust in artistic representation. Offering a theoretical and practical analysis of different kinds of negative aesthetic experiences, this book will help readers acquire a better understanding of his or her own evaluative processes, which may be helpful in coping with complex aesthetic experiences. Readers will gain unique insight into how ugliness can be offensive, yet, at the same time, fascinating, interesting and captivating.

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).

Philosophers have gradually accepted axiology as one branch of philosophy. As a basic category belonging to axiology and philosophy, "value" is the general abstraction of concrete value formation in various fields including utility, ethics and appreciation of the beauty. The problem of value is essentially a problem of historical activities of practice in human society. The axiology based on the scientific practice view insists on the principle of unification between theory and practice, truth and value. In research of axiology, the relation between subjectivity and objectivity of values is a problem that must be solved in the first place. The modern conversation of value philosophy is the academic and practical demands of the value philosophy research in China. Value evaluation is an important part of the axiology. In order to deepen the research of value philosophy and to promote the development of current value philosophy, we must have scientific mode of thinking suitable for the nature of value. It is the base of value relation, the origin of value needs, the process of value creation and actualization and the fundamental way to proving ones value as a human being.

This monograph is based on archival research and close readings of James Joyce's and W. B. Yeats's poetics and political aesthetics. Georges Sorel's theory of social myth is used as a starting point for exploring the ways in which the experience of art can be seen as a form of religious experience.

This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects. Written by leading philosophers, psychologists, literary scholars and semioticians, the book addresses two intertwined issues. The first is related to the phenomenology of aesthetic experience: The understanding of how human beings respond to artworks, how we process linguistic or visual information, and what properties in artworks trigger aesthetic experiences. The examination of the properties of aesthetic experience reveals essential aspects of our perceptual, cognitive, and semiotic capacities. The second issue studied in this volume is related to the ontology of the work of art: Written or visual artworks are a specific type of objects, containing particular kinds of representation which elicit a particular kind of experience. The research question explored is: What properties in artful objects trigger this type of experience, and what characterizes representation in written and visual artworks? The volume sets the scene for state-of-the-art inquiries in the intersection between the psychology and ontology of art. The investigations of the relation between the properties of artworks and the characteristics of aesthetic experience increase our insight into what art is. In addition, they shed light on essential properties of human meaning-making in general.

Flashes of lightning, resounding thunder, gloomy fog, brilliant sunshine...these are the life manifestations of the skies. The concrete visceral experiences that living under those skies stir within us are the ground for individual impulses, emotions, sentiments that in their interaction generate their own ever-changing clouds. While our intellect concentrates on the discovery of our cosmic position, on the architecture of the universe, our imagination is informed by the gloomy vapors, the glimmers of fleeting light, and the glory of the skies. Reconnoitering from the soil of human life and striving towards the infinite, the elan of imagination gets caught up in the clouds of the skies. There in that dimness, sensory receptivity, dispositions, emotions, passionate strivings, yearnings, elevations gather and propagate. From the "Passions of the Skies" spring innermost intuitions that nourish literature and the arts.

A Critical Theory of Creativity argues that a Utopian drive is aesthetically encoded within the language of form. But coupled with this opportunity comes a very human obligation which cannot be delegated to God, to nature or to market forces. As Ernst Bloch declared: 'Life has been put into our hands.'

What is depiction? A new answer is given to this venerable question by providing a syncretistic theory of depiction that tries to combine the merits of the previous theories on the matter while dropping their defects. Thus, not only perceptual, but also both conventional and causal factors contribute in making something a picture of something else.

This book suggests that modern cultural and critical institutions have persistently associated questions of aesthetics and politics with literature, theory, technics, and Romanticism. Its first section examines aesthetic nationalism and the figure of the body, focusing on writings by Benedict Anderson, J. G. Fichte, and Matthew Arnold, and arguing that uneasy acts of aestheticization (of media technology) and abjection (of the maternal body) undergird the production of the national body as "imagined community." Subsequent chapters on Paul de Man, Friedrich Schlegel, and Percy Shelley explore the career of the gendered body in the aesthetic tradition and the relationship among aesthetics, technics, politics, and figurative language. The author accounts for the hysteria that has characterized media representations of theory, explains why and how Romanticism has remained a locus of extravagant political hopes and anxieties, and, in a sequence of close readings, uncovers the "anaesthetic" condition of possibility of the politics of aesthetics.

Postdigital Aesthetics is a contribution to questions raised by our newly computational everyday lives and the aesthetics which reflect both the postdigital nature of this age, but also critical perspectives of a post-internet world.

This is a comprehensive, integrated account of eighteenth and early nineteenth century German figurative aesthetics. The author focuses on the theologically-minded discourse on the visual arts that unfolded in Germany, circa 1754-1828, to critique the assumption that German romanticism and idealism pursued a formalist worship of beauty and of unbridled artistic autonomy. This book foregrounds what the author terms an "Aesthetics of Figurative Theo humanism". It begins with the sculptural aesthetics of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Gottfried Herder before moving on to Karl Philipp Moritz, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Friedrich Schelling. The reader will discover how this aesthetic tradition, after an initial obsession with classical sculpture, chose painting as the medium more suited to the modern self's exploration of transcendence. This paradigm-shift is traced in the aesthetic discourse of Friedrich Schlegel and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In this work, the widespread prejudice that such aesthetics initiated a so-called "Modern Grand Narrative of the Arts" is deconstructed. One accusation directed at 18th century aesthetics has been that it realised into "Art" what had previously been a living, rich tissue of meaning: this work shows how Figurative Theo humanism's attention to aesthetic values was never detached from deeper theological and humanistic considerations. Furthermore, it argues that this aesthetic discourse never forgot that it emerged from modern disenchantment-far from occluding the dimension of secularization, it draws poignant meaning from it. Anyone with an interest in the current debates about the scope and nature of aesthetics(philosophers of art, theology, or religion) will find this book of great interest and assistance.

Against the assumption that aesthetic form relates to a harmonious arrangement of parts into a beautiful whole, this book argues that reason is the real theme of the "Critique of Judgment" as of the two earlier "Critiques." Since aesthetic judgment of the beautiful becomes possible only when the mind is confronted with things of nature, for which no determined concepts of understanding are available, aesthetic judgment is involved in an epistemological or, rather, para-epistemological task.
The predicate "beautiful" indicates that something has minimal form and is cognizable. This book explores this concept of form, in particular the role of presentation ("Darstellung") in what Kant refers to as "mere form," which involves not only the understanding, but also reason as the faculty of ideas. Such a notion of form reveals why the beautiful can be related to the morally good. On the basis of this reinterpreted concept of form, most major concepts and themes of the "Critique of Judgment"--such as disinterestedness, free play, the sublime, genius, and beautiful arts--are examined by the author and shown in a new light.

"Sustaining Loss" explores the uncanny, traumatic weaving together of the living and the dead in art, and the morbid fascination it holds for modern philosophical aesthetics. Beginning with Kant, the author traces how aesthetic theory has been drawn back repeatedly to the moving power of the undead body of the work of art. He locates the most potent expressions of this philosophical compulsion in Hegel's thesis that art is a thing of the past, and in Freud's view that the work of art is the haunting of the present by the endless suffering of what is dead but still has claims over the living.
The book asserts that modern aesthetics holds the key to unlocking the tortured relation of modernity to the past it is perpetually leaving behind. As the capacity to withstand the inescapable force of a past that is dead for us becomes the supreme test for a fully modern, fully secular philosophy, aesthetics moves to the center of philosophical reflection. But, the author argues, this secular philosophical orientation can be sustained only if aesthetic theory remains oriented by intimate contact with modernist works of art.
"Sustaining Loss" examines not only Kant, Hegel, and Freud, but also the contemporary artists Gerhard Richter and Ilya Kabakov, whose art turns fruitfully against art's own past. To live as a modern, the author asserts, is to live with the dead past that modernist art ceaselessly disgorges. Overall, the book aims to articulate an aesthetic theory suitable to the task of living in a time when, in Flannery O'Connor's words, "The blind don't see and the lame don't walk, and what's dead stays that way."

Re-examining English Romanticism through Hegel's philosophy, this book outlines and expands upon Hegel's theory of recognition. Deakin critiques four canonical writers of the English Romantic tradition, Coleridge, Wordsworth, P.B. Shelley and Mary Shelley, arguing that they, as Hegel, are engaged in a struggle towards philosophical recognition.

This book looks at causative reasons behind creative acts and stylistic expressions. It explores how creativity is initiated by design cognition and explains relationships between style and creativity. The book establishes a new cognitive theory of style and creativity in design and provides designers with insights into their own cognitive processes and styles of thinking, supporting a better understanding of the qualities present in their own design. An explanation of the nature of design cognition begins this work, with a look at how design knowledge is formulated, developed, structured and utilized, and how this utilization triggers style and creativity. The author goes on to review historical studies of style, considering a series of psychological experiments relating to the operational definition, degree, measurement, and creation of style. The work conceptually summarizes the recognition of individual style in products, as well as the creation of such styles as a process before reviewing studies on creativity from various disciplines, presenting case studies and reviewing works by master architects. Readers will discover how creativity is initiated by design cognition. A summary of the correlations between creativity and style, expressed as a conceptual formula describing the cognitive phenomenon of style and creativity concludes the work. The ideas presented here are applicable to all design fields, allowing designers to comprehend and improve their design processes to produce creative, stylistically unique products.