This title offers a concise, but comprehensive introduction to the history of aesthetics, designed specifically to meet the needs of undergraduate students. "Aesthetics: The Key Thinkers" offers a comprehensive historical overview of the field of aesthetics. Sixteen specially commissioned essays introduce and explore the contributions of those philosophers who have shaped the subject, from its origins in the work of the ancient Greeks to contemporary developments in the 21st Century. This book reconstructs the history of aesthetics, clearly illustrating the most important attempts to address such crucial issues as the nature of aesthetic judgment, the status of art, and the place of the arts within society. It covers thinkers that include: Plato, Aristotle, the main Medieval thinkers, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Croce, Collingwood, Bell, Fry, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Dewey, Beardsley, Goodman, Wollheim, Danto, and Walton. This book concludes with a concise survey of contemporary developments within aesthetics, outlining the issues that are most relevant to current debates in the field. Ideal for undergraduate students, the book lays the necessary foundations for a complete and thorough understanding of this fascinating subject.

Black is Beautiful identifies and explores the most significant philosophical issues that emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of black life, providing a long-overdue synthesis and the first extended philosophical treatment of this crucial subject. * The first extended philosophical treatment of an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art * Takes an important step in assembling black aesthetics as an object of philosophical study * Unites two areas of scholarship for the first time philosophical aesthetics and black cultural theory, dissolving the dilemma of either studying philosophy, or studying black expressive culture * Brings a wide range of fields into conversation with one another from visual culture studies and art history to analytic philosophy to musicology producing mutually illuminating approaches that challenge some of the basic suppositions of each * Well-balanced, up-to-date, and beautifully written as well as inventive and insightful

This is the first volume devoted to the topic of dance and quality of life. Thirty-one chapters illuminate dance in relation to singular and overlapping themes of nature, philosophy, spirituality, religion, life span, learning, love, family, teaching, creativity, ability, socio-cultural identity, politics and change, sex and gender, wellbeing, and more. With contributions from a multi-generational group of artists, community workers, educators, philosophers, researchers, students and health professionals, this volume presents a thoughtful, expansive-yet-focused, and nuanced discussion of dance's contribution to human life. The volume will interest dance specialists, quality of life researchers, and anyone interested in exploring dance's contribution to quality of living and being.

Musical Understandings presents an engaging collection of essays on the philosophy of music, written by Stephen Davies--one of the most distinguished philosophers in the field. He explores a range of topics in the philosophy of music, including how music expresses emotion and what is distinctive to the listener's response to this expressiveness; the modes of perception and understanding that can be expected of skilled listeners, performers, analysts, and composers and the various manners in which these understandings can be manifest; the manner in which musical works exist and their relation to their instances or performances; and musical profundity. As well as reviewing the work of philosophers of music, a number of the chapters both draw on and critically reflect on current work by psychologists concerning music. The collection includes new material, a number of adapted articles which allow for a more comprehensive, unified treatment of the issues at stake, and work published in English for the first time.

This book offers the first complete examination of Foucault's reflections on visual art, leading to new readings of his major texts."Foucault's Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity" tells the story of how art shed the tasks with which it had traditionally been charged in order to become modern. Joseph J. Tanke offers the first complete examination of Michel Foucault's reflections on visual art, tracing his thought as it engages with the work of visual artists from the seventeenth century to the contemporary period.The book offers a concise and accessible introduction to Foucault's frequently anthologized, but rarely understood, analysis of Diego Velazquez's "Las Meninas" and Rene Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe". On the basis of unpublished lecture courses and several un-translated analysis of visual art, Tanke reveals the uniquely genealogical character of Foucault's writings on visual culture, allowing for new readings of his major texts in the context of contemporary Continental philosophy, aesthetic and cultural theory. Ultimately Tanke demonstrates how Foucault provides philosophy and contemporary criticism with the means for determining a conception of modern art." The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Theory" series examines the encounter between contemporary Continental philosophy and aesthetic and cultural theory. Each book in the series explores an exciting new direction in philosophical aesthetics or cultural theory, identifying the most important and pressing issues in Continental philosophy today.

Visual art has a ubiquitous political cast today. But which politics? Daniel Herwitz seeks clarity on the various things meant by politics, and how we can evaluate their presumptions or aspirations in contemporary art. Drawing on the work of William Kentridge, drenched in violence, race, and power, and the artworld immolations of Banksy, Herwitz's examples range from the NEA 4 and the question of offense-as-dissent, to the community driven work of George Gittoes, the identity politics of contemporary American art and (for contrast with the power of visual media) literature written in dialogue with truth commissions. He is interested in understanding art practices today in the light of two opposing inheritances: the avant-gardes and their politicization of the experimental art object, and 18th-century aesthetics, preaching the autonomy of the art object, which he interprets as the cultural compliment to modern liberalism. His historically-informed approach reveals how crucial this pair of legacies is to reading the tensions in voice and character of art today. Driven by questions about the capacity of the visual medium to speak politically or acquire political agency, this book is for anyone working in aesthetics or the art world concerned with the fate of cultural politics in a world spinning out of control, yet within reach of emancipation.

Music education thrives on philosophical inquiry, the systematic and critical examination of beliefs and assumptions. Yet philosophy, often considered abstract and irrelevant, is often absent from the daily life of music instructors. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education, editors Wayne D. Bowman and Ana Lucia Frega have drawn together a variety of philosophical perspectives from the profession's most exciting scholars. Rather than relegating philosophical inquiry to moot questions and abstract situations, the contributors to this volume address everyday concerns faced by music educators everywhere, demonstrating that philosophy offers a way of navigating the daily professional life of music education and proving that critical inquiry improves, enriches, and transforms instructional practice for the better. Questioning every musical practice, instructional aim, assumption, and conviction in music education, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education presents new and provocative approaches to the practice of teaching music.
Bowman and Frega go deeper than mere advocacy or a single point of view, but rather conceive of philosophy as a dynamic process of debate and reflection that must constantly evolve to meet the shifting landscapes of music education. In place of the definitive answers often associated with philosophical work, Bowman and Frega offer a fascinating cross-section of often-contradictory approaches and viewpoints. By bringing together essays by both established and up-and-coming scholars from six continents, Bowman and Frega go beyond the Western monopoly of philosophical practice and acknowledge the diversity of cultures, instructors, and students who take part in music education. This range of perspectives invites broader participation in music instruction, and presents alternative answers to many of the fields most pressing questions and issues. By acknowledging the inherent plurality of music educational practices, the Handbook opens up the field in new and important ways. Emphasizing clarify, fairness, rigor, and utility above all, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education challenges music educators around the world to make their own decisions and ultimately contribute to the conversation themselves."

Georg Lukcs stands as a towering figure in the areas of critical theory, literary criticism, aesthetics, ethical theory and the philosophy of Marxism and German Idealism. Yet, despite his influence throughout the twentieth century, his contributions to the humanities and theoretical social sciences are marked by neglect. What has been lost is a crucial thinker in the tradition of critical theory, but also, by extension, a crucial set of ideas that can be used to shed new light on the major problems of contemporary society. This book reconsiders Lukcs intellectual contributions in the light of recent intellectual developments in political theory, aesthetics, ethical theory, and social and cultural theory. An international team of contributors contend that Luk ideas and theoretical contributions have much to offer the theoretical paucity of the present. Ultimately the book reintegrates Lukcs as a central thinker, not only in the tradition of critical theory, but also as a major theorist and critic of modernity, of capitalism, and of new trends in political theory, cultural criticism and legal theory.

Typically philosophers have either viewed beauty as objective and judgments of beauty as universally valid, or else they have viewed beauty as subjective and regarded judgments of beauty as merely private preferences. Immanuel Kant is famous for his unique third path. Kant argues that beauty is subjective, but the judgment of taste about beauty is capable of universal validity. In his view, the beautiful is not a feature of objects themselves, but merely represents the way we respond to objects. Furthermore, the judgment of taste about beauty is a merely "aesthetic" judgment - i.e., one based on a feeling of pleasure we take in the object. The judgment of taste, on the other hand, possesses "universal validity": to call something beautiful is implicitly to "demand" that all others find it beautiful as well. Kant's views about the taste for the beautiful have long been the subject of controversy. Scholars have differed over the interpretation of the demand contained in a judgment of taste and whether Kant's attempt to legitimate this demand is successful. Brent Kalar argues that the demands of taste should be understood as involving a uniquely aesthetic normativity rooted in Kant's cognitive psychology. If the basis of aesthetic pleasure in the activity of the cognitive faculties is properly understood, then Kant's attempt to legitimate the demands of taste may be regarded as a success. This leads Kalar to give a new interpretation of the nature of the beautiful according to Kant that re-examines the relationship between "free play" and the "form of purposiveness" in Kant's aesthetics, and restores the "aesthetic ideas" to their rightful centrality in Kant's theory.

This collection builds on the growing recognition and critical acclaim of Volumes 1 and 2 of "Violence, Desire, and the Sacred "with a distinct focus on media, film and television. It showcases the work of outstanding scholars in mimetic theory and how they are applying and developing Rene Girard's insights. Consistent with the previous volumes, "Mimesis, Movies, and Media" presents the most up-to-date interdisciplinary work being developed with the ground-breaking insights of Girard. This volume has a more popular focus with the contributors analyzing well-known films and television series. It brings together major Australian and international scholars working in this area.

What is the purpose of a work of art? What drives us to make art? Why do we value art and consume it? Nick Zangwill argues that we cannot understand the nature of art without first having answers to these fundamental questions. On his view, which he dubs "the Aesthetic Creation Theory," a work of art is something created for a particular aesthetic purpose. More specifically, the function of art is to have certain aesthetic properties in virtue of its non-aesthetic properties, and this function arises because of the artist's insight into the nature of these dependence relations and her intention to bring them about. In defending this view, Zangwill provides an account of aesthetic action and aesthetic creative thought and shows how the Aesthetic Creation Theory can accommodate two kinds of seeming counterexamples to aesthetic theories of art: narrative art and twentieth-century avant-garde art. Aesthetic Creation also contains a detailed exposition and critique of a range of rival views, including Dickie's institutional theory of art, accounts of art that make essential reference to an audience, and sociological theories which purport to explain the nature of art without recourse to the notion of the aesthetic.

Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler frames the intertwined relationship between artistic endeavours and scientific fields and their sociopolitical implications. Each chapter is either an explication of, or a critique of, some aspect of Bernard Stiegler's technological philosophy; as it is his technological-political-aesthetical-ethical theorisations which form the philosophical foundation of the volume. Emerging scholars bring critical new reflections to the subject area, while more established academics, researchers and practitioners outline the mutating nature of aesthetics within historical and theoretical frameworks. Not only is interdisciplinarity a prevailing topic at work within this collection, but so too is there a delineation of the mutating, hybrid role inhabited by the arts practitioner - at once engineer, scientist and artist - in the changing landscape of digital cultural production.

This is an important new monograph on an overlooked aspect of Kant's aesthetic theory, presenting an innovative approach to one of modern philosophy's greatest works. Taste is ordinarily thought of in terms of two very different idioms - a normative idiom of taste as a standard of appraisal and a non-normative idiom of taste as a purely personal matter. Kant attempts to capture this twofold conception of taste within the terms of his mature critical philosophy by distinguishing between the beautiful and the agreeable. Scholars have largely taken Kant's distinction for granted, but David Berger argues that it is both far richer and far more problematic than it may appear. Berger examines in detail Kant's various attempts to distinguish beauty from agreeableness. This approach reveals the complex interplay between Kant's substantive aesthetic theory and his broader views on metaphysics and epistemology. Indeed, Berger argues that the real interest of Kant's distinction between beauty and agreeableness is ultimately epistemological. His interpretation brings Kant's aesthetic theory into dialogue with questions at the heart of contemporary analytic philosophy and shows how philosophical aesthetics can offer fresh insights into contemporary philosophical debates.

This book is a unique contribution to scholarship of the poetics of Wallace Stevens, offering an analysis of the entire oeuvre of Stevens's poetry using the philosophical framework of Martin Heidegger. Marking the first book-length engagement with a philosophical reading of Stevens, it uses Heidegger's theories as a framework through which Stevens's poetry can be read and shows how philosophy and literature can enter into a productive dialogue. It also makes a case for a Heideggerian reading of poetry, exploring his later philosophy with respect to his writing on art, language, and poetry. Taking Stevens's repeated emphasis on the terms "being", "consciousness", "reality" and "truth" as its starting point, the book provides a new reading of Stevens with a philosopher who aligns poetic insight with a reconceptualization of the metaphysical significance of these concepts. It pursues the link between philosophy, American poetry as reflected through Stevens, and modernist poetics, looking from Stevens's modernist techniques to broader European philosophical movements of the twentieth century.

"Anonymous: Contemporary Tibetan Art" reflects upon the complex relationship between ancient Tibet s artistic tradition of anonymity and contemporary artists search for a voice in the present. This fully illustrated catalogue, designed by Philipp Hubert and copublished by "ArtAsiaPacific" and Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York at New Paltz, includes texts by exhibition curator Rachel Perera Weingeist, curator and writer David Elliott and Tibetan cultural activist Jamyang Norbu. Participating artists Penba Wangdu, Tenzing Rigdol and Tsherin Sherpa also contribute essays sharing personal insight into their artistic practice.
This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition Anonymous: Contemporary Tibetan Art at Samuel Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, which features more than fifty works of painting, sculpture, installation, and video art by twenty-seven Tibetan artists. The exhibition runs from July 20 through December 15, 2013, and will later travel to the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont and the Queens Museum of Art, New York."

Frank Sibley (1923-1996) was one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics of the last fifty years, whose published papers are required reading for serious students of the subject. Approach to Aesthetics will be welcomed both for bringing together these well known papers, and for its inclusion of new, previously unpublished papers. This timeless body of work will continue to demand and reward the attention of scholars and students.

Intersections of Value investigates the universal human need for aesthetic experience. It examines three appreciative contexts where aesthetic value plays a central role: art, nature, and the everyday. However, no important appreciative context or practice is completely centered on a single value. Hence, the book explores the way the aesthetic interacts with moral, cognitive, and functional values in these contexts. The account of aesthetic appreciation is complemented by analyses of the cognitive and ethical value of art, the connection between environmental ethics and aesthetics, and the degree to which the aesthetic value of everyday artefacts derives from their basic practical functions. Robert Stecker devotes special attention to art as an appreciative context because it is an especially rich arena where different values interact. There is an important connection between artistic value and aesthetic value, but it is a mistake to reduce the former to the latter. Rather, artistic value should be seen as complex and pluralistic, composed not only of aesthetic but also ethical, cognitive, and art-historical values.

The concept of schizoanalysis is Deleuze and Guattari's fusion of psychoanalytic-inspired theories of the self, the libido and desire with Marx-inspired theories of the economy, history and society. Schizoanalysis holds that art's function is both political and aesthetic - it changes perception. If one cannot change perception, then, one cannot change anything politically. This is why Deleuze and Guattari always insist that artists operate at the level of the real (not the imaginary or the symbolic). Ultimately, they argue, there is no necessary distinction to be made between aesthetics and politics. They are simply two sides of the same coin, both concerned with the formation and transformation of social and cultural norms. Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art explores how every artist, good or bad, contributes to the structure and nature of society because their work either reinforces social norms, or challenges them. From this point of view we are all artists, we all have the potential to exercise what might be called a 'aesthetico-political function' and change the world around us; or, conversely, we can not only let the status quo endure, but fight to preserve it as though it were freedom itself. Edited by one of the world's leading scholars in Deleuze Studies and an accomplished artist, curator and critic, this impressive collection of writings by both academics and practicing artists is an exciting imaginative tool for a upper level students and academics researching and studying visual arts, critical theory, continental philosophy, and media.

This book explores in detail the issues of ecological civilization development, ecological philosophy, ecological criticism, environmental aesthetics, and the ecological wisdom of traditional Chinese culture related to ecological aesthetics. Drawing on Western philosophy and aesthetics, it proposes and demonstrates a unique aesthetic view of ecological ontology in the field of aesthetics under the direct influence of Marxism, which is based on the modern economic, social cultural development and the modern values of traditional Chinese culture.This book embodies the innovative interpretation of Chinese traditional culture in the Chinese academic community. The author discusses the philosophical and cultural resources that can be used for reference in Chinese and Western cultural tradition, focusing on traditional Chinese Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and painting art, Western modern ecological philosophy, Heidegger's ontology ecological aesthetics, and British and American environmental aesthetics.In short, the book comprehensively discusses the author's concept of ecological ontology aesthetics as an integration and unification of ontology aesthetics and ecological aesthetics. This generalized ecological aesthetics explores the relationship between humans and nature, society and itself, guided by the brand-new ecological worldview in the post-modern context. It also changes the non-beauty state of human existence and establishes an aesthetic existence state that conforms to ecological laws.

Analysing the reception of contemporary French philosophy in architecture over the last four decades, Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy discusses the problematic nature of importing philosophical categories into architecture. Focusing particularly on the philosophical notion of the Baroque in Gilles Deleuze, this study examines traditional interpretations of the concept in contemporary architecture theory, throwing up specific problems such as the aestheticization of building theory and practice. Identifying these and other issues, Nadir Lahiji constructs a concept of the baroque in contrast to the contemporary understanding in architecture discourse. Challenging the contemporary dominance of the Neo-Baroque as a phenomenon related to postmodernism and late capitalism, he establishes the Baroque as a name for the paradoxical unity of 'kitsch' and 'high' art and argues that the digital turn has enhanced the return of the Baroque in contemporary culture and architectural practice that he brands a pseudo-event in the term 'neobaroque'. Lahiji's original critique expands on the misadventure of architecture with French Philosophy and explains why the category of the Baroque, if it is still useful to keep in architecture criticism, must be tied to the notion of Post-Rationalism. Within this latter notion, he draws on the work of Alain Badiou to theorize a new concept of the Baroque as Event. Alongside close readings of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault related to the criticism of the Baroque and Modernity and discussions of the work of Frank Gehry, in particular, this study draws on Jacque Lacan's concept of the baroque and presents the first comprehensive treatment of the psychoanalytical theory of the Baroque in the work of Lacan.