At first sight, tattoos, nudity, and veils do not seem to have much in common except for the fact that all three have become more frequent, more visible, and more dominant in connection with aesthetic presentations of women over the past thirty years. No longer restricted to biker and sailor culture, tattoos have been sanctioned by the mainstream of liberal societies. Nudity has become more visible than ever on European beaches or on the internet. The increased use of the veil by women in Muslim and non-Muslim countries has developed in parallel with the aforementioned phenomena and is just as striking. Through the means of conceptual analysis, Veils, Nudity, and Tattoos: The New Feminine Aesthetics reveals that these three phenomena can be both private and public, humiliating and empowering, and backward and progressive. This unorthodox approach is traced by the three's similar social and psychological patterns, and by doing so, Veils, Nudity, and Tattoos hopes to sketch the image of a woman who is not only sexually emancipated and confident, but also more and more aware of her cultural heritage.

Sarah A. Mattice explores contemporary philosophical activity and the way in which one aspect of language-metaphor-gives shape and boundary to the landscape of the discipline. The book examines metaphors of combat, play, and aesthetic experience and emphasizes how the choices we make in philosophical language are deeply intertwined with what we think philosophy is and how it should be practiced. Drawing on a broad range of resources, from cognitive linguistics and hermeneutics to aesthetics and Chinese philosophy, Mattice's argument provides insight into the evolution and future of philosophy itself.

The 'end of the world' opens up philosophical questions concerning the very notion of the world, which is a fundamental element of all existential, phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy. Is the 'end of the world' for us 'somebody's' death (the end of 'being-in-the-world') or the extinction of many or of all (the end of the world itself)? Is the erosion of the 'world' a phenomenon that does not in fact affect the notion of the world as a fundamental feature of all existential-ontological inquiry? This volume examines the present state of these concerns in philosophy, film and literature. It presents a philosophical hermeneutics of the present state of the world and explores the principal questions of the philosophical accounts of the end of the world, such as finality and finitude. It also shows how literature and cinema have ventured to express the end of the world while asking if a consequent expression of the end of the world is also an end of its expression.

The First and Second Comings of capitalism are conceptual shorthands used to capture the radical changes in global geopolitics from the Opium War to the end of the Cold War and beyond. Centring the role of capitalism in the Chinese everyday, the framework can be employed to comprehend contemporary Chinese culture in general and, as in this study, Chinese cinema in particular. This book investigates major Chinese-language films from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in order to unpack a hyper-compressed capitalist modernity with distinctive Chinese characteristics. As a dialogue between the film genre as a mediation of microscopic social life, and the narrative of economic development as a macroscopic political abstraction, it engages the two otherwise remotely related worlds, illustrating how the State and the Subject are reconstituted cinematically in late capitalism. A deeply cultural, determinedly historical, and deliberately interdisciplinary study, it approaches "culture" anthropologically, as a way of life emanating from the everyday, and aesthetically, as imaginative forms and creative expressions. Economy, Emotion, and Ethics in Chinese Cinema will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese cinema, cultural studies, Asian studies, and interdisciplinary studies of politics and culture.

`The aestheticization of everyday life' has become a commonplace term, one which often merely scratches the surface of contemporary culture. This study illuminates the deeper dynamics of aesthetic reality from a philosophical perspective. Wolfgang Welsch, author of the influential Aesthetic Thinking, develops an important analysis of contemporary culture with philosophical bite. He examines global aestheticization phenomena, probes the relationship of aesthetics and ethics, and considers the broad relevance of aesthetics for contemporary thinking. He argues that modes of thought familiar from the aesthetic realm comprise fundamental paradigms for understanding today's reality. The implications for specific and everyday issues are demonstrated in studies of architecture, advertising, the Internet and our perception of the life world.

Addressing the essential question of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Deleuze's philosophy this book provides clear indications of the practical implications of Deleuze's approach to the arts through detailed analyses of the ethical dimension of artistic activity in literature, music, and film. Bogue examines Deleuze's "transverse way" of interrelating the ethical and the aesthetic, the transverse way being both a mode of thought and a practice of living. Among the issues examined are those of the relationship of music to literature, the political vocation of the arts, violence in popular music, the ethics and aesthetics of education, the use of music and sound in film, the role of the visual in literary invention, the function of the arts in cross cultural interactions, and the future of Deleuzian analysis as a means of forming an open, reciprocally self-constituting, transcultural global culture.

Addressing Jean Rhys's composition and positioning of her fiction, this book invites and challenges us to read the tacit, silent and explicit textual bearings she offers and reveals new insights about the formation, scope and complexity of Rhys's experimental aesthetics. Tracing the distinctive and shifting evolution of Rhys's experimental aesthetics over her career, Sue Thomas explores Rhys's practices of composition in her fiction and drafts, as well as her self-reflective comment on her writing. The author examines patterns of interrelation, intertextuality, intermediality and allusion, both diachronic and synchronic, as well as the cultural histories entwined within them. Through close analysis of these, this book reveals new experimental, thematic, generic and political reaches of Rhys's fiction and sharpens our insight into her complex writerly affiliations and lineages.

This study examines how hunger narratives and performances contribute to a reconsideration of neglected or prohibited domains of thinking which only a full confrontation with the body's heterogeneity and plasticity can reveal. From literary motif or psychosomatic symptom to revolutionary gesture or existential malady, the double crux of hunger and disgust is a powerful force which can define the experience of embodiment. Kafka's fable of the "Hunger Artist" offers a matrix for the fast, while its surprising last-page revelation introduces disgust as a correlative of abstinence, conscious or otherwise. Grounded in Kristeva's theory of abjection, the figure of the fraught body lurking at the heart of the negative grotesque gathers precision throughout this study, where it is employed in a widening series of contexts: suicide through overeating, starvation as self-performance or political resistance, the teratological versus the totalitarian, the anorexic harboring of death. In the process, writers and artists as diverse as Herman Melville, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Christina Rossetti, George Orwell, Knut Hamsun, J.M. Coetzee, Cindy Sherman, Pieter Breughel, Marina Abramovic, David Nebreda, Paul McCarthy, and others are brought into the discussion. By looking at the different acts of visceral, affective, and ideological resistance performed by the starving body, this book intensifies the relationship between hunger and disgust studies while offering insight into the modalities of the "dark grotesque" which inform the aesthetics and politics of hunger. It will be of value to anyone interested in the culture, politics, and subjectivity of embodiment, and scholars working within the fields of disgust studies, food studies, literary studies, cultural theory, and media studies.

This highly original new book highlights the importance and significance of Heidegger's engagement with the Greeks, the ways in which his views are commensurate with ecofeminism, and the insights that a study of that intersection provides for both the diagnoses of our world's ills and possible curative prescriptions. Susanne Claxton defends the thesis that a proper return to myth and art as a means by which the transcendental realities that constitute the phenomenology of our embodied existence may be better understood is also the means by which we may come to truly dwell in the Heideggerian sense and thus find solutions to the myriad global and personal crises that plague us. By examining key concepts in Heidegger's thinking and their role in ancient philosophy, Claxton establishes an alternative conception of truth and explores what that concept reveals. Employing the ecofeminist critique, Claxton highlights the relevant intersections with Heidegger, and lays out criticisms raised by Nietzsche, comparing the differences in thought between Nietzsche and Heidegger in order to demonstrate the supremacy of the ecophenomenological approach and show the ways in which Nietzsche falls short. The book also explores the mythological figure of Lilith and how the thought of Giorgio Agamben, especially in regard to his concept of the state of exception, provides further insight and an undeniable co-incidence of relevant concepts which further solidify the common goals and projects of both Heidegger and Ecofeminism.

This book examines the work of Ernst Junger and its effect on the development of Martin Heidegger's influential philosophy of technology. Vincent Blok offers a unique treatment of Junger's philosophy and his conception of the age of technology, in which both world and man appear in terms of their functionality and efficiency. The primary objective of Junger's novels and essays is to make the transition from the totally mobilized world of the 20th century toward a world in which a new type of man represents the gestalt of the worker and is responsive to this new age. Blok proceeds to demonstrate Junger's influence on Heidegger's analysis of the technological age in his later work, as well as Heidegger's conceptions of will, work and gestalt at the beginning of the 1930s. At the same time, Blok evaluates Heidegger's criticism of Junger and provides a novel interpretation of the Junger-Heidegger connection: that Junger's work in fact testifies to a transformation of our relationship to language and conceptualizes the future in terms of the Anthropocene. This book, which arrives alongside several new English-language translations of Junger's work, will interest scholars of 20th-century continental philosophy, Heidegger, and the history of philosophy of technology.

Katya Mandoki advances in this book the thesis that it is not only possible but crucial to open up the field of aesthetics (traditionally confined to the study of art and beauty) toward the richness and complexity of everyday life. She argues that in every process of communication, whether face to face or through the media, fashion, and political propaganda, there is always an excess beyond the informative and functional value of a message. This excess is the aesthetic. Following Huizinga's view of play as an ingredient of any social environment, Mandoki explores how various cultural practices are in fact forms of playing since, for the author, aesthetics and play are Siamese twins. One of the unique contributions of this book is the elaboration and application of a semiotic model for the simultaneous analysis of social interactions in the four registers, namely visual, auditory, verbal and body language, to detect the aesthetic strategies deployed in specific situations. She argues that since the presentation of the self is targeted towards participants' sensibilities, aesthetics plays a key role in these modes of exchange. Consequently, the author updates important debates in this field to clear the way for a socio-aesthetic inquiry through contexts such as the family, school, medical, artistic or religious traditions from which social identities emerge.

This book connects Schopenhauer's philosophy with transcendental idealism by exploring the distinctly Kantian roots of his pessimism. By clearly discerning four types of coming to knowledge, it demonstrates how Schopenhauer's epistemology can enlighten this connection with other areas of his philosophy. The individual chapters in this book discuss how these knowledge types-immediate or mediate, representational or non-representational-relate to Schopenhauer's metaphysics, ethics and action, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and asceticism. In each of these areas, a specific sense of pessimism serves to disarm a number of paradoxes and inconsistencies typically associated with Schopenhauer's philosophy. The Kantian Foundation of Schopenhauer's Pessismism shows how Schopenhauer's claim that he is a true successor to Kant can be justified.

Praised in its original edition for its up-to-date, rigorous presentation of current debates and for the clarity of its presentation, Robert Stecker's new edition of Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art preserves the major themes and conclusions of the original, while expanding its content, providing new features, and enhancing accessibility. Stecker introduces students to the history and evolution of aesthetics, and also makes an important distinction between aesthetics and philosophy of art. While aesthetics is the study of value, philosophy of art deals with a much wider array of questions including issues in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, as well value theory. Described as a "remarkably unified introduction to many contemporary debates in aesthetics and the philosophy of art," Stecker specializes in sympathetically laying bear the play of argument that emerges as competing views on a topic engage each other. This book does not simply present a controversy in its current state of play, but instead demonstrates a philosophical mind at work helping to advance the issue toward a solution.

Why should we read? We assume that reading is good for us, but often we cannot articulate exactly what it does for us. In this fascinating book, Sarah Worth addresses from a philosophical perspective the many ways in which reading benefits us morally, socially, and cognitively. Worth leads her readers through the subtle questions of the ways in which we understand fiction, nonfiction, and the overlap and blending of other genre distinctions. Ultimately she argues that reading, hearing, and telling well-told stories is of the utmost importance in developing a healthy sense of personal identity, a greater sense of narrative coherence, and an increased ability to make different kinds of inferences. Engaging classical philosophical questions in the contemporary landscape of educational literacy and the inclusion of fiction in a classroom curriculum, Worth demonstrates how our hyper-focus on genre distinctions moves us away from a real engagement with narrative understanding and narrative comprehension.

The belief held by Aboriginal people that their art is ultimately related to their identity, and to the continued existence of their culture, has made the protection of indigenous peoples' art a pressing matter in many postcolonial countries. The issue has prompted calls for stronger copyright legislation to protect Aboriginal art. Although this claim is not particular to Australian Aboriginal people, the Australian experience clearly illustrates this debate. In this work, Elizabeth Burns Coleman analyses art from an Australian Aboriginal community to interpret Aboriginal claims about the relationship between their art, identity and culture, and how the art should be protected in law. Through her study of Yolngu art, Coleman finds Aboriginal claims to be substantially true. This is an issue equally relevant to North American debates about the appropriation of indigenous art, and the book additionally engages with this literature.

Aesthetic Transcendentalism is a philosophy endorsing the qualitative and creative aspects of nature. Theoretically it argues for a metaphysical dimension of nature that is aesthetically real, pluralistic, and prolific. It directs our attention to the rich complexity of immediate experience, the possibility of discovering new aesthetic features about the world, and the transformative potential of art as an organic expression. This book presents the philosophy in its relationship to its historical roots in the philosophic and artistic traditions of nineteenth-century North America. In this multidisciplinary study, Nicholas L. Guardiano brings together a philosophic and literary figure in Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientifically minded philosopher Charles S. Peirce, and the plastic arts in the form of American landscape painting. Guardiano evaluates this constellation of philosophers and artists in global perspective as it relates to other historical theories of metaphysics and aesthetics, while simultaneously performing a cultural analysis that identifies an essential feature of the American mind. Aesthetic Transcendentalism thus possesses abiding significance for our vital interactions with nature, daily experiences, and contemplations of great works of art. Aesthetic Transcendentalism in Emerson, Peirce, and Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting will be of interest to scholars of American philosophy and American art history, especially specialists of Charles S. Peirce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Hudson River School painters. It will also appeal to philosophers working on systematic metaphysical theories of nature.

Two crucial moments in the formation and disintegration of musical modernity and the musical canon occurred at the turn of the seventeenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Dr Ljubica Ilic provides a fresh and close look at these moments, exploring the ways musical compositions shift to and away from ideological structures identified with modernity. The focus is on European art music whose grand narrative, defined by tonality and teleological development, begins in the seventeenth century and ends with twentieth-century modernisms. This particular musical "language game" coincides with historical changes in the phenomenological understanding of space and selfhood. A key concept of the book concerns musical compositions that remain without proper conclusions: if the wholesome (musical) work is a manifestation of wholesome subjectivity, the pieces Ilic explores deny it, reflecting conflict of the individual with previous beliefs, with contexts, and even within the self as the basic modern condition. The musical work is, in this case, still bounded and well-defined, but fractured by the incapability or refusal to satisfactorily conclude: the implicit cut forced upon it changes the expected musical flow or - speaking in spatial terms - it influences the musical form. By using the metaphor of space, Ilic explores: how the existence of a separate self as a primary feature of Western modernity becomes negotiated through awareness of the subject's own independence and individuality; innerness as something entirely separate from its surroundings; and the collective space of social interaction. Seeing musical storytelling as a metaphoric representation of selfhood, and modernity as a historical continuum, Ilic examines the boundaries and relationships between the musical work, the subject, and modern European history.

This book argues that an attentive encounter with nature is of key importance for the development of an environmentally appropriate culture. The fundamental idea is that the environmental degradation that we are increasingly experiencing is best conceived as the consequence of a cultural mismatch: our cultures seem not to be appropriate to the natural environment in which we move and on which we depend in thoroughgoing ways. In addressing this problem, Thomas Heyd weaves together a rich tapestry of perspectives on human interactions with the natural world, ranging from traditional modes of managing human communities that include the natural environment, to the consideration of poetic travelogues, ecological restoration and botanic gardens. The volume is divided into three parts, which respectively consider the relation of human beings to nature in terms of ethics, aesthetics and culture. It engages the current literature in each of these areas with the help of inter-disciplinary approaches, as well as on the basis of personal encounters with natural spaces and processes. The ultimate aim of this book is to make a contribution to the development of a cultural fabric that is suitable to the natural spaces and processes in which we may thrive, and on which we all depend as individuals and as a species.

In this third edition of The Triadic Structure of the Mind, Francesco Belfiore begins from the basic ontological conception of the structure and functioning of the "mind" or "spirit" as an evolving, conscious triad composed of intellect, sensitiveness, and power, each exerting a selfish and a moral activity. Based on this original concept of the triadic, bidirectional and evolving mind, Belfiore has developed a coherent philosophical system, through which he offers fresh solutions in the fields of ontology, knowledge, language, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and law. The present third edition, like the previous one, includes an extensive treatment of the topics addressed as well as the quotation of the views of the major thinkers, whose thought has been discussed and reinterpreted. In addition, new concepts have been introduced, some passages have been clarified, and the style has been improved in several points. The result is an original and exhaustive book, which will be of interest to all philosophy scholars.

Aquinas on Beauty explores the nature and role of beauty in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with a standard definition of beauty provided by Aquinas, it explores each of the components of that definition. The result is a comprehensive account of Aquinas's formal view on the subject, supplemented by an exploration into Aquinas's commentary on Dionysius's Divine Names, including a comparison of his views with those of both Dionysius and those of Aquinas's mentor, Albert the Great. The book also highlights the tight connection in Aquinas's thought between aesthetics and ethics, and illustrates how Aquinas preserves what is best about aesthetic traditions preceding him, and anticipates what is best about aesthetic traditions that would follow, marrying objective and subjective aesthetic intuitions and charting a kind of via media between the common extremes.

The essays, collected by Berleant in this volume all express the impulse to reject the received wisdom of modern aesthetics: that art demands a mode of experience sharply different from others and unique to the aesthetic situation, and that the identity of the aesthetic lies in keeping it distinct from other kinds of human experience, such as the moral, the practical, and the social. Berleant shows, on the contrary, that the value, the insight, the force of art and the aesthetic are all enhanced and enlarged by recognizing their social and human role, and that this recognition contributes both to the significance of art and to its humanizing influence on what we like to call civilization.

Originally published in Italian in 2010, this book is the first to address the theory of atmospheres in a thorough and systematic way. It examines the role of atmospheres in daily life, and defines their main characteristics. Outlining the typical phenomenological situations in which we experience atmospheres, it assesses their impact on contemporary aesthetics. It puts forward a philosophical approach which systematises a constellation of affects and climates, finds patterns in the emotional tones of different spaces (affordances) and assesses their impact on the felt body. It also critically discusses the spatial turn invoked by several of the social sciences, and argues that there is a need for a non-psychologistic rethinking of the philosophy of emotions. It provides a history of the term 'atmosphere' and of the concepts anticipating its meaning (genius loci, aura, Stimmung, numinous, emotional design and ambiance), and examines the main ontological characteristics of atmospheres and their principal phenomenological characteristics. It concludes by showing how atmospheres affect our emotions, our bodies' reactions, our state of mind and, as a result, our behaviour and judgments. Griffero assesses how atmospheres are more effective than we have been rationally willing to admit, and to what extent traditional aesthetics, unilaterally oriented towards art, has underestimated this truth.

What does it mean to think of Western Art music - and the Austro-German contribution to that repertory - as a tradition? How are men and masculinities implicated in the shaping of that tradition? And how is the writing of the history (or histories) of that tradition shaped by men and masculinities? This book seeks to answer these and other questions by drawing both on a wide range of German-language writings on music, sound and listening from the so-called long nineteenth century (circa 1800-1918), and a range of critical-theoretical texts from the post-war continental philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions, including Lacan, Zizek, Serres, Derrida and Kittler. The book is focussed in particular on bringing the object of historical writing itself into scrutiny by engaging in what Zizek has called a 'historicity' or a way of writing about the past that not merely acknowledges the ahistorical kernel of historical writing, but brings that kernel into the light of day, takes account of it and puts it into play. The book is thus committed to a kind of historical writing that is open-ended - though not ideologically naA-ve - and that does not fix or stabilize the nature of the relationship between so-called 'primary' and 'secondary' texts. The book consists of an introduction, which places the study of classical music and the Austro-German tradition within broader debates about the value of that tradition, and four extensive case studies: an analysis of the cultural-historical category of listening around 1800; a close reading of A. B. Marx's Beethoven monograph of 1859; a consideration of Heinrich Schenker's attitudes to the mob and the vernacular more broadly and an examination, through Franz Kafka, of the figure of Mahler's body.