In this first English translation of one of his most important works, " Statues: The Second Book of Foundations, "Michel Henry""presents a statue as more than a static entity. A statue for Serres is the basis for knowledge, society, the subject and object, the world and experience. Through his prescient analysis of statues and how we create and respond to art, Henry demonstrates how sacrificial art founded society and through this reflects on the centrality of death and the dead body to the human condition.Approaching the problem from multiple angles, Serres comments on Verne's "Around the Moon," Rodin's "The Gates of Hell," the Eiffel Tower, cemeteries, short stories by Maupassant, fables by La Fontaine, clothing and the paintings of Carpaccio, the Challenger disaster and Baal. Each section covers a different time period and statuary topic, ranging from four thousand years ago to 1986. Expository, lyrical, fictionalized and hallucinatory, "Statues" does not follow a linear time sequence but rather plays with time and place, history and story in order to provoke us into thinking in entirely new ways.Through mythic and poetic meditations on various kinds of descent into the underworld and new insights into the relation of the subject and object and their foundation in death, "Statues" contains great treasures and provocations for philosophers, literary critics, art historians and sociologists.

This book proposes that the highest expression of ethics is an aesthetic. It suggests that the quintessential performance of any field of practice is an art that captures an ethic beyond any literal statement of values. This is to advocate for a shift in emphasis, away from current juridical approaches to ethics (ethicalcodes or regulation), toward ethics as an aesthetic practice-away from ethics as a minimal requirement, toward ethics as an aspiration. The book explores the relationship between art and ethics: a subject that has fascinated philosophers from ancient Greece to the present. It explores this relationship in all the arts: literature, the visual arts, film, the performing arts, and music. It also examines current issues raised by 'hybrid' artists who are working at the ambiguous intersections between art, bioart and bioethics and challenging ethical limits in working with living materials. In considering these issues the book investigates the potential for art and ethics to be mutually challenged and changed in this meeting.

The book is aimed at artists and students of the arts, who may be interested in approaching ethics and the arts in a new way. It is also aimed at students and teachers of ethics and philosophy, as well as those working in bioethics and the health professions. It will have appeal to the 'general educated reader' as being current, of considerable interest, and offering a perspective on ethics that goes beyond a professional context to include questions about how one approaches ethics in one's own life and practices.

"Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics" is an innovative attempt to reconceive the key concepts of religious studies through a reading with, and against, Walter Benjamin. Brent Plate deftly sifts through Benjamin's voluminous writings showing how his concepts of art, allegory, and experience undo traditional religious concepts such as myth, symbol, memory, narrative, creation, and redemption. Recasting religion as religious practice, as process and movement, Plate locates a Benjaminian materialist aesthetics, what the author calls an "allegorical aesthetics," in order to uncover sources and establish a new locus for the study of religion.
Placing the concept of an allegorical aesthetics into practice, Plate offers examinations of aesthetic productions such as Daniel Libeskind's architecture and Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades alongside religious developments such as the Hindu Bhakti movement and Jewish Kabbalistic thought.
"Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics" will be necessary reading for those interested in religion and the arts, aesthetics, and material culture.

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.

This book of expert essays explores the concept of the whole as it operates within the psychology of Jung, the philosophy of Deleuze, and selected areas of wider twentieth-century Western culture, which provided the context within which these two seminal thinkers worked. Addressing this topic from a variety of perspectives and disciplines and with an eye to contemporary social, political, and environmental crises, the contributors aim to clarify some of the epistemological and ethical issues surrounding attempts, such as those of Jung and Deleuze, to think in terms of the whole, whether the whole in question is a particular bounded system (such as an organism, person, society, or ecosystem) or, most broadly, reality as a whole. Jung, Deleuze, and the Problematic Whole will contribute to enhancing critical self-reflection among the many contemporary theorists and practitioners in whose work thinking in terms of the whole plays a significant role.

In German Romanticism, the imagination is the site of the encounter between the subject and its environment; this book examines that encounter. Dealing with both literary and philosophical texts, it argues that the Romantic imagination performs a critique of rationalism. In reflecting on the fragmentary, the Romantics require the reader to both imagine and to question this as a hermeneutic process. As such, they understand writing to be an experiment in memory, both individual and cultural. This book is a study of the writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Novalis, Tieck and also of the utopian project of Romanticism itself. Methodologically, it is informed by what Foucault termed the archaeological approach to discourse as well as by psychoanalysis and literary theory. Examining points of contact as well of divergence between Kantian epistemology and Romantic nature philosophy, it also highlights the correspondences between literature, philosophy and science. Above all, it treats Romanticism as an experiment in the portrayal of ambivalent modern identity.

Walter Benjamin, Religion and Aesthetics is an innovative attempt to reconceive the key concepts of religious studies through a reading with, and against, Walter Benjamin. Brent Plate deftly sifts through Benjamin's voluminous writings showing how his concepts of art, allegory, and experience undo traditional religious concepts such as myth, symbol, memory, narrative, creation, and redemption. Recasting religion as religious practice, as process and movement, Plate locates a Benjaminian materialist aesthetics, what the author calls an "allegorical aesthetics," in order to uncover sources and establish a new locus for the study of religion. Placing the concept of an allegorical aesthetics into practice, Plate offers examinations of aesthetic productions such as Daniel Libeskind's architecture and Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades alongside religious developments such as the Hindu Bhakti movement and Jewish Kabbalistic thought. Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics will be necessary reading for those interested in religion and the arts, aesthetics, and material culture.

On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements comprises eleven essays that explore the myriad ways in which popular music is entwined within social, cultural, musical, historical, and media networks. The authors discuss genres as diverse as mainstream pop, hip hop, classic rock, instrumental synthwave, video game music, amateur ukelele groups, and audiovisual remixes, while also considering the music's relationship to technological developments, various media and material(itie)s, and personal and social identity. The collection presents a range of different methodologies and theoretical positions, which results in an eclecticism that aptly demonstrates the breadth of contemporary popular music research. The chapters are divided into three major sections that address: wider theoretical and analytical issues ("Broad Strokes"), familiar repertoire or concepts from a new perspective ("Second Takes"), and the meanings to arise from music's connections with other media forms ("Audiovisual Entanglements").

This book uncovers how we make meaning of abstraction, both historically and in present times, and examines abstract images as a visual language. The contributors demonstrate that abstraction is not primarily an artistic phenomenon, but rather arises from human beings' desire to imagine, understand and communicate complex, ineffable concepts in fields ranging from fine art and philosophy to technologies of data visualization, from cartography and medicine to astronomy. The book will be of interest to scholars working in image studies, visual studies, art history, philosophy and aesthetics.

Organised around the theme of beauty, this innovative collection offers insight into the development of anthropological thinking on art, aesthetics and creativity in recent years. The volume incorporates current work on perception and generative processes, and seeks to move beyond a purely aesthetic and relativist stance. The chapters invite readers to consider how people sense and seek out beauty, whether through acts of human creativity and production; through sensory experience of sound, light or touch, or experiencing architecture; visiting heritage sites or ancient buildings; experiencing the environment through 'places of outstanding natural beauty'; or through cooperative action, machine-engineering or designing for the future.

Viewers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were encouraged to forge connections between their physical and affective states when they experienced works of art. They believed that their bodies served a critical function in coming to know and make sense of the world around them, and intimately engaged themselves with works of art and architecture on a daily basis. This book examines how viewers in Medicean Florence were self-consciously cultivated to enhance their sensory appreciation of works of art and creatively self-fashion through somaesthetics. Mobilized as a technology for the production of knowledge with and through their bodies, viewers contributed to the essential meaning of Renaissance art and, in the process, bound themselves to others. By investigating the framework and practice of somaesthetic experience of works by Benozzo Gozzoli, Donatello, Benedetto Buglioni, Giorgio Vasari, and others in fifteenth- and sixteenth century Florence, the book approaches the viewer as a powerful tool that was used by patrons to shape identity and power in the Renaissance.

Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and other analytic philosophers of the early 20th century claimed to depart from the British idealists who dominated philosophical debate from the 1870s onwards. The nature and extent of this departure is now widely questioned as philosophers return to the writings of Bernard Bosanquet, F. H. Bradley, R. G. Collingwood, T. H. Green, J. M. E. McTaggart, and others. Nowadays, the British idealist movement is mostly remembered for its seminal contributions to metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy. The contributors to this volume explore some of the movement's other, equally-insightful, contributions to the philosophies of language, aesthetics and emotions. These chapters cover core philosophical issues including the relationship between the speech communities and the general will; the role of emotions in the Absolute; key differences between leading British idealists on the relationships between emotions and relations; the nature of love; the historical re-enactment of imagination and creativity; expressivism in art; and the actual idealism of the British idealists' Italian counterparts. This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of the History of Philosophy.

This book is based on the comprehensive investigations of the literary forms of philosophy around 1800 conducted within research project 'Heuristics between Science and Poetry'. It presents new research on the debates on the concept of the symbol from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century.

By contextualizing Walter Pater's aestheticism alongside Alexandre Kojeve's and Georges Bataille's readings of Hegelianism, this book shows that Pater's aestheticism constitutes both a philosophy of death and at the same time a philosophy of the impossibility of death.

Although universally recognised as one of the greatest of modern philosophers, Wittgenstein's work in aesthetics has been unjustly neglected. This is the first book exclusively devoted to Wittgenstein's aesthetics, exploring the themes developed by Wittgenstein in his own writing on aesthetics as well as the implications of Wittgenstein's wider philosophical views for understanding central issues in aesthetics. Drawing together original contributions from leading international scholars, this book will be an important addition to studies of Wittgenstein's thought, but its discussion of issues in literature, music and performing art, and criticism will also be of interest to many students of literary and cultural studies. Exploring three key themes - the capacity of the arts to illuminate our lives; the nature of the particular responses involved in understanding and appreciating works of art; the role of theory and principle in artistic and critical practice - the contributors address issues raised by contemporary philosophers of art, and seek to make connections between Wittgenstein's work and that of other significant philosophies of art in the Western tradition. Displaying the best practice of modern philosophical writing - clarity, cogency, respect for but not blind obedience to common sense, argument illustrated with detailed examples, rejection of speculation and pretension - this book demonstrates how philosophy can make a valuable contribution to understanding the arts.

In his Enquiry --which has been described as "certainly on of the most important aesthetic documents that eighteenth -century England produced" --the young Burke provided a systematic analysis of the 'sublime' and the 'beautiful,' together with a distinctive terminology which served to express certain facets of the changing sensibility of his time. The introduction traces the main sources of Burke's ideas and establishes the nature of his originality. The largest section of the editor's introduction, however, examines the influence of the Enquiry. Major writers like Johnson, Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy, painters such as Fuseli and Mortimer, and critics such as Diderot, Lessing and Kant, as well as many other minor figures, recognized Burke's new insights, and in varying degrees assimilated them. The second edition, revised by Burke himself, provides the copy-text, including changes between the first and second editions.

Neoplatonic Aesthetics: Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts explores the idea of a Neoplatonic aesthetic, a philosophy of the arts based on the writings of Plato and the Neoplatonists - principally Plotinus, Proclucs, Pseudo-Dionysius, Nicolas Cusanus, and Marsilio Ficino - and more contemporary philosophers - Stephen MacKenna, Iris Murdoch, Denman Ross, Jacques Derrida, and Hans Georg Gadamer. This book examines the artistic production of figures such as Gioseffe Zarlino, Fra Angelico, Leon Battista Alberti, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Giorgio Vasari, and it formulates theoretical approaches to contemporary production based in the Neoplatonic philosophies.

Feminist approaches to art are extremely influential and widely studied across a variety of disciplines, including art theory, cultural and visual studies, and philosophy. "Gender and Aesthetics" is an introduction to the major theories and thinkers within art and aesthetics from a philosophical perspective, carefully introducing and examining the role that gender plays in forming ideas about art. It is ideal for anyone coming to the topic for the first time.
Organized thematically, the book introduces in clear language the most important topics within feminist aesthetics:
* Who is an artist and why are there so few women painters?
* Art, pleasure and beauty
* Music, literature and painting
* The role of gender in taste and food
* What is art and who is an artist?
* Disgust and the sublime
Each chapter discusses important topics and thinkers within art and examines the role gender plays in our understanding of them. These topics include creativity, genius and the appreciation of art, and thinkers from Plato, Kant, and Hume to Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Also included in the book are illustrations from Gauguin and Hogarth to Cindy Sherman and Nancy Spero to clarify and help introduce often difficult concepts. Each chapter concludes with a summary and further reading and there is an extensive annotated bibliography.
Carolyn Korsmeyer's style is refreshing and accessible, making the book suitable for students of philosophy, gender studies, visual studies and art theory, as well as anyone interested in the impact of gender on theories of art.

This book presents a new interpretation of the principle of utility in moral and political theory based on the writings of the classical utilitarians from Hume to J.S. Mill. Discussion of utility in writers such as Adam Smith, William Paley and Jeremy Bentham are considered.

"Public Education and the Imagination-Intellect argues for re-thinking the thinking process and for urban education reform. Weems's work lives in the moment of creation. Her imagination-intellect theory chapters frame this book; she posits that the imagination and intellect are inextricably linked; that like Freire's architect all ideas are first imagined, then intellectually developed in an interconnected process that mirrors the blood's circulation through the body. The two plays and the collection of poems are rich, layered landscapes of African American culture and meanings. They lend themselves to multi-interpretation, co-performance, and co-ownership by each audience member who engages the work.

Architectural Forms and Philosophical Structures examines architectural and architectonic forms as products of philosophical and epistemological structures in selected cultures and time periods, and analyzes architecture as a text of its culture. Relations between architectural forms and philosophical structures are explored in Western civilization, beginning in Egypt and Greece and culminating in twentieth-century Europe and America. Architecture, like all forms of artistic expression, is interwoven with the beliefs and the structures of knowledge of its culture.

It is only worth examining the experience of aesthetic pleasure if there are grounds for believing that there are objective truths underpinning the subjective experience of beauty. This book explores the roots of aesthetic perception within the framework of individual taste and collective fashion.

Its aim is to offer mental tools for the critical analysis of buildings and urban configurations with the purpose of enhancing appreciation of the built environment. It is some of the recent branches of science and biomathematics which provide a platform for a theory of aesthetics which transcends the subjective without undermining subjectivity.

Beauty is not arbitrary; there is a logic which informs its infinite variety of manifestations. It is not enough just to know what we like; the experience of beauty is that much richer when we know why we like it.

David Wang's Architecture and Sacrament considers architectural theory from a Christian theological perspective, specifically, the analogy of being (analogia entis). The book tracks social and cultural reasons why the theological literature tends to be separate from contemporary architecture theory. Wang argues that retrieval of the sacramental outlook embedded within the analogy of being, which informed centuries of art and architecture in the West, can shed light on current architectural issues such as "big box stores," the environmental crisis and the loss of sense of community. The book critiques the materialist basis of current architectural discourse, subsumed largely under the banner of critical theory. This volume on how European ideas inform architectural theory complements Wang's previous book, A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture: Past, Present, Future, and will appeal to architecture students and academics, as well as those grappling with the philosophical moorings of all built environments.

Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts is the first comprehensive collection of papers by philosophers examining the nature of imagination and its role in understanding and making art.

Imagination is a central concept in aesthetics with close ties to issues in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, yet it has not received the kind of sustained, critical attention it deserves. This collection of seventeen brand new essays critically examines just how and in what form the notion of imagination illuminates fundamental problems in the philosophy of art.

eBook available with sample pages: 020349864X

Aesthetics: A Reader provides centrally important texts that explore the current state of the debate on twelve major topics within aesthetics and the philosophy of art. With the exception of excerpts from classic texts by Hume, Kant, Hanslick, and Collingwood, all the readings are by contemporary authors. Most of these essays have been abridged by the editors to enhance their accessibility and to maximize our ability to present a variety of positions on a given topic. Aesthetics provides a wide-ranging introduction to aesthetic theory and philosophy of art for readers, particularly university students who seek an overview of major controversies, theories, and writers. Each chapter features three to four contrasting views of each topic introduced by an original introductory essay that outlines the chapter's central issues, concepts, and controversies.