"The Move Beyond Form" focuses on works of art, music, literature, and film since 1960 that convey meaning through a creative undoing of form. Mary Joe Hughes suggests that cultural production of this time period conceived the world not so much as a series of separate entities, including art objects, but as an endless maze of relations and interconnections. By focusing attention on the in-between spaces, these works were able to provide nuance and meaning to a way of thinking that is difficult to demonstrate through language alone. This original study exposes the interrelationships in postmodernism, a perspective that is particularly relevant to contemporary culture, including globalization, electronic technology, and the echo chambers of the media.

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.

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.

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.

Kant announces that the Critique of the Power of Judgment will bring his entire critical enterprise to an end. But it is by no means agreed upon that it in fact does so and, if it does, how. In this book, Ido Geiger argues that a principal concern of the third Critique is completing the account of the transcendental conditions of empirical experience and knowledge. This includes both Kant's analysis of natural beauty and his discussion of teleological judgments of organisms and of nature generally. Geiger's original reading of the third Critique shows that it forms a unified whole - and that it does in fact deliver the final part of Kant's transcendental undertaking. His book will be valuable to all who are interested in Kant's theory of the aesthetic and conceptual purposiveness of nature.

Amajor shift in critical attitudes toward the arts took place in the eighteenth century. The fine arts were now looked upon as a group, divorced from the sciences and governed by their own rules. The century abounded with treatises that sought to establish the overriding principles that differentiate art from other walks of life as well as the principles that differentiate them from each other. This burst of scholarly activity resulted in the incorporation of aesthetics among the classic branches of philosophy, heralding the cognitive turn in epistemology. Among the writings that initiated this turn, none were more important than the British contribution. "The Arts in Mind" brings together an annotated selection of these key texts.

A companion volume to the editors' "Tuning the Mind," which analyzed this major shift in world view and its historical context, "The Arts in Mind" is the first representative sampling of what constitutes an important school of British thought. The texts are neither obscure nor forgotten, although most histories of eighteenth-century thought treat them in a partial or incomplete way. Here they are made available complete or through representative extracts together with an editor's introduction to each selection providing essential biographical and intellectual background. The treatises included are representative of the changed climate of opinion which entailed new issues such as those of perception, symbolic function, and the role of history and culture in shaping the world.

Contents include: Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, "Characteristics"; Francis Hutcheson, "Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Harmony and Design"; Hildebrand Jacob, "Of the Sister Arts: An Essay"; James Harris, "On Music, Painting and Poetry"; Charles Avison, "An Essay on Musical Expression"; James Beattie, "Essay on Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind"; Daniel Webb, "Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music"; Thomas Twining, "On Poetry Considered as an Imitative Art," "On the Different Senses of the Word Imitative as Applied to Music by the Ancients and by the Moderns"; Adam Smith, "Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in What are Called the Imaginative Arts."

This study provides an overview of philosophical questions relating to sight and vision. It discusses the intertwinement of seeing and ways of seeing against the background of an entirely different theoretical framework. Seeing is both a proven means of acquiring information and a personality-specific way of disclosing the apparent, perceptible world, conditioned by individual and cultural variations. In a peculiar way, the eye holds a middle position between inside and outside of the self and its relations towards itself and others. This book provides a way out of false alternatives by offering a third way with reference to concrete cases of aesthetical and ethical experiences. It will be of particular interest to scholars of the phenomenology and philosophy of perception and it will be valuable to students of philosophy, cultural studies and art.

Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century brings together a range of international scholars for a reexamination of Ivan Goncharov's life and work through a twenty-first century critical lens. Contributions to the volume highlight Goncharov's service career, the complex and understudied manifestation of Realism in his work, the diverse philosophical threads that shape his novels, and the often colliding contexts of writer and imperial bureaucrat in the 1858 travel text Frigate Pallada. Chapters engage with approaches from post-colonial and queer studies, theories of genre and the novel, desire, laughter, technology, and mobility and travel.