The Contracts of Fiction reconnects our fictional worlds to the rest of our lives. Countering the contemporary tendency to dismiss works of imagination as enjoyable but epistemologically inert, the book considers how various kinds of fictions construct, guide, and challenge institutional relationships within social groups. The contracts of fiction, like the contracts of language, law, kinship, and money, describe the rules by which members of a group toggle between tokens and types, between their material surroundings - the stuff of daily life - and the abstractions that give it value. Rethinking some familiar literary concepts such as genre and style from the perspective of recent work in the biological, cognitive, and brain sciences, the book displays how fictions engage bodies and minds in ways that help societies balance continuity and adaptability. Being part of a community means sharing the ways its members use stories, pictures, plays and movies, poems and songs, icons and relics, to generate usable knowledge about the people, objects, beliefs and values in their environment. Exposing the underlying structural and processing homologies among works of imagination and life processes such as metabolism and memory, Ellen Spolsky demonstrates the seamless connection of life to art by revealing the surprising dependence of both on disorder, imbalance, and uncertainty. In early modern London, for example, reformed religion, expanding trade, and changed demographics made the obsolescent courts a source of serious inequities. Just at that time, however, a flood of wildly popular revenge tragedies, such as Hamlet, by their very form, by their outrageous theatrical grotesques, were shouting the need for change in the justice system. A sustained discussion of the genre illustrates how biological homeostasis underpins the social balance that we maintain with difficulty, and how disorder itself incubates new understanding.

Rohmer is one of the most popular French directors of the second half of the 20th century, one of the members of the famous Nouvelle Vague that reconstituted French cinema based on the theoretical principles articulated in the Cahiers du Cinema - from whose editorship he was fired when the conservative Catholic opposed its turn toward politicization. Like some of his colleagues, Rohmer is extremely interested in both the history and the philosophy of film: Brother of the noted French philosopher Rene Scherer, he begins his career as a film critic In his films, deep moral conflicts as well as the search for one's own identity emerge from the intricacies of seemingly superficial everyday life interactions, particularly between a man and a woman. Hoesle's book puts Rohmer in the context of a long French tradition of reflected eroticism, with Marivaux, Musset, Stendhal, and Jean Renoir as crucial figures, and shows how Rohmer both recognizes the inner logic of eroticism and subjects it to moral demands that he inherits from his Catholic background. For Rohmer, the tension between the two can usually only be solved by some unexpected event that can be interpreted as an equivalent of grace.

Theology as Performance breaks new ground in the growing conversation between modern theology and philosophical aesthetics. Stoltzfus proposes that significant moments in the Western development of the concept of God, in particular as represented in the figures of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Barth, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, have been deeply influenced by concepts and approaches borrowed from the discipline of musical aesthetics. Each thinker develops fundamentally different ways of writing about God that have in significant respects been derived from each one's reading and writing about music. The aesthetic implications of Schleiermacher's so-called subjectivist turn, Barth's objectivist reaction, and Wittgenstein's language-game pragmatism can thus be fully understood only by attending to the musical culture and distinctly musicological discourses that gave rise to them. Stoltzfus constructs two trajectories of thought with which to trace theological reflection upon music throughout the pre-modern period: the traditions of Orpheus and Pythagoras. Schleiermacher's aesthetic approach, then, becomes a modern representative of the Orpheus trajectory, and Barth's approach a representative of the Pythagoras trajectory. Stoltzfus interprets Wittgenstein as putting forward a radical critique of these trajectories and pointing toward a third, "performative" theological-aesthetic method. Theology as Performance offers a provocative rethinking of the aesthetic roots of modern theology.

This volume advances a comprehensive transdisciplinary approach to the affective lives of institutions - theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and critical. With this approach, the volume foregrounds the role of affect in sustaining as well as transforming institutional arrangements that are deeply problematic. As part of its analysis, this book develops a novel understanding of institutional affect. It explores how institutions produce, frame, and condition affective dynamics and emotional repertoires, in ways that engender conformance or resistance to institutional requirements. This collection of works will be important for scholars and students of interdisciplinary affect and emotion studies from a wide range of disciplines, including social sciences, cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, organizational and institution studies, media studies, social philosophy, aesthetics, and critical theory.

This book explores environments where art, imagination, and creative practice meet urban spaces at the point where they connect to the digital world. It investigates relationships between urban visualizations, aesthetics, and politics in the context of new technologies, and social and urban challenges toward the Sustainable Development Goals. Responding to questions stemming from critical theory, the book focuses on an interdisciplinary actualization of technological developments and social challenges. It demonstrates how art, architecture, and design can transform culture, society, and nature through artistic and cultural achievements, integration, and new developments. The book begins with the theoretical framework of social aesthetics theories before discussing global contemporary visual culture and technological evolution. Across the 12 chapters, it looks at how architecture and design play significant roles in causing and solving complex environmental transformations in the digital turn. By fostering transdisciplinary encounters between architecture, design, visual arts, and cinematography, this book presents different theoretical approaches to how the arts' interplay with the environment responds to the logic of the constructions of reality. This book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and upper-level students in aesthetics, philosophy, visual cultural studies, communication studies, and media studies with a particular interest in sociopolitical and environmental discussions.

The articles in this collection focus attention on the concept of literature and on the relationship between this concept and the concepts of a literary work and a literary text. Adopting an analytic approach, the articles attempt to clarify how these concepts govern our thinking about the phenomenon of literature in various ways, exploring the issues which arise when these concepts are employed as theoretical instruments for describing and analyzing the phenomenon of literature.

Enea Bianchi provides the first in-depth introduction to the pioneering thought of 20th-century Italian philosopher, Mario Perniola. Examining Perniola's entire oeuvre, this book also pushes his philosophy into new directions by investigating the connection between his aesthetics and the philosophical underpinnings of dandyism. Rich in influences, from ancient Stoicism to Roman ritualism, Baroque literature and avant-garde revolutionary movements, Perniola's philosophy is wide-ranging. This book highlights and explores numerous notions pivotal to understanding Perniola's thought, including: the "sex appeal of the inorganic", the "enigma", "strategic beauty" and the "artistic shadow". Combining these concepts with three exemplar dandies - George Brummell, Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde - Bianchi demonstrates not only the close relationship between their principles and Perniola's aesthetics, but their shared, and timely, opposition to the status quo. A dandy philosophy emerges, which challenges the individual not only to refute the ongoing commodification of tastes, emotions and lifestyles, but also to develop a welcoming and loving disposition with respect to the enigma of our prismatic world.

The trilogy Forms of Representation in the Aristotelian Tradition investigates how Aristotle and his ancient and medieval successors understood the relation between the external world and the human mind. It gives an equal footing to the three most influential linguistic traditions - Greek, Latin, and Arabic - and offers insightful interpretations of historical theories of perception, dreaming, and thinking. This first volume focuses on sense perception and discusses philosophical questions concerning the external senses, their classification, and their functioning, from Aristotle to Brentano.

Arguing on recent cognitive evidence that reading a Bible is much more difficult for human brains than seeing images, this book exposes the depth and breadth of Protestant theologians' misunderstandings about how people could reform their spiritual lives - how they could literally change their minds. Shakespeare's achievement, accomplished for the English stage by a translation of the Italian grotesque, was to display for audiences battered by years of religious chaos and dread that a loving God was not only in heaven but in full control on earth: His providence was embodied and visible: you didn't have to read it.

Kanta (TM)s Critique of Judgment is one of the most important texts in the history of modern aesthetics. This GuideBook discusses the Third Critique section by section, and introduces and assesses:

• Kant's life and the background of the Critique of Judgment
• the ideas and text of the Critique of Judgment, including a critical explanation of Kanta (TM)s theories of natural beauty
• the continuing relevance of Kanta (TM)s work to contemporary philosophy and aesthetics.

This GuideBook is an accessible introduction to a notoriously difficult work and will be essential reading for students of Kant and aesthetics.

With the COVID-19 crisis forcing us to reflect in a dramatic way on the limits of the human and the implications of the Anthropocene Age, this timely volume addresses these concerns through an exploration of post-humanism as represented in philosophy, politics and aesthetics. Global pandemics bring into sharp focus the bankruptcy of the neoliberal economic paradigm, the future of the arts sector in society, and our dependence upon political forces outside our control. In response to the recent state of emergency, The Posthuman Pandemic highlights the urgent need to rethink our anthropocentrism and develop new political models, aesthetic practices and ways of living. Central to these discussions is the idea of post-humanism, a philosophy that can help us grapple with the crisis, as it takes seriously the unstable ecosystems on which we depend and the precarious nature of our long-cherished notions of agency and sovereignty. Bringing together international philosophers, political theorists and media and art theorists, all of whom engage with the posthuman, this volume explores a range of vital subjects, from the inequality revealed by COVID-19 survival rates to museums' role in spreading human-centric understandings of a world struck by human fragility. Facing up to the realities that the coronavirus outbreak has uncovered, The Posthuman Pandemic combines both breadth and depth of analysis to take on the posthuman challenges confronting us today.

Art or Porn? The popular media will often choose this heading when reviewing the latest sexually explicit novel, film, or art exhibition. The underlying assumption seems to be that the work under discussion has to be one or the other, and cannot be both. But is this not a false dilemma? Can one really draw a sharp line between the pornographic and the artistic? Isn't it time to make room for pornographic art and for an aesthetic investigation of pornography? In answering these questions this book will draw on insights from many different disciplines, including philosophy, feminist theory, aesthetics, art history, film studies, theatre studies, as well as on the experience of people who are actually operating in the art world and porn industry. By offering a variety of theoretical approaches and examples taken from a wide range of art forms and historical periods, the reader will gain a fuller and deeper comprehension of the relations and frictions between art and pornography.

This title offers an introduction to aesthetics for the student encountering this key philosophical subdiscipline for the first time.Aesthetics is the branch of philosophical thought that arises from engagement with the arts. It is about larger issues, such as meaning, identity, and medium that arise in the exploration of art, music, film and literature."Aesthetics: Key Concepts in Philosophy" offers a thorough, lucid and stimulating account of the central theories and ideas encountered in aesthetics. The text is thematically structured, covering the discipline's principal concepts: taste, aesthetic judgment, aesthetic experience and the definition of art.Ideal for students across the arts and humanities, the book stresses distinctively modern and contemporary problems, including the divergence between theories of aesthetics and theories of art and the problem of new media. Daniel Herwitz introduces students to aesthetic traditions, while also demonstrating their forward movement into the present.The book guides the reader through the work of philosophers who have engaged with aesthetics, including Hume, Kant, Hegel, Derrida, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. It also provides an invaluable aid for philosophy undergraduates, introducing them to the history of aesthetics and stressing the importance of understanding the subject within its historical context."Key Concepts in Philosophy" is a series of concise, accessible and engaging introductions to the core ideas and subjects encountered in the study of philosophy. Specially written to meet the needs of students and those with an interest in, but little prior knowledge of, philosophy, these books open up fascinating, yet sometimes difficult ideas. The series builds to give a solid grounding in philosophy and each book is also ideal as a companion to further study.

The Continuum Aesthetics Series looks at the aesthetic questions and issues raised by all major art forms. Stimulating, engaging and accessible, the series offers food for thought not only for students of aesthetics, but also for anyone with an interest in philosophy and the arts. Aesthetics and Music is a fresh and often provocative exploration of the key concepts and arguments in musical aesthetics. It draws on the rich heritage of the subject, while proposing distinctive new ways of thinking about music as an art form. The book looks at: The experience of listening Rhythm and musical movement What modernism has meant for musical aesthetics The relation of music to other 'sound arts' Improvisation and composition as well as more traditional issues in musical aesthetics such as absolute versus programme music and the question of musical formalism. Thinkers discussed range from Pythagoras and Plato to Kant, Nietzsche and Adorno. Areas of music covered include classical, popular and traditional music, and jazz. Aesthetics and Music makes an eloquent case for a humanistic, democratic and genuinely aesthetic conception of music and musical understanding. Anyone interested in what contemporary philosophy has to say about music as an art form will find this thought-provoking and highly enjoyable book required reading.

The present work addresses itself to the question of the nature of appraisive concepts such as were the subject of investigation in The Concepts of Value* and The Concepts of Criticism. ** Many problems of prime importance in the theory of value could not be adequately treated there without diminishing the basic purpose of those studies which was above all to identify, classify and provide a general theoretical framework for the host of concepts with which we characterize and commend subjects of appraisal in all of the principal areas of human interest. The author might have forestalled the disappointment of some of his critics had he then explicitly promised to consider those problems at a later time. But his reluctance to promise what he might not be in a position to produce outweighed a keen awareness of what the problems are and of their evident seriousness. Although my treatment of such problems has only now been undertaken, in point of time my concern with them antedates by far the em pirical explorations of the two texts mentioned. Anyone who undertakes such a study is likely to have come under the in fluence of Professor Frank Sibley's 'Aesthetic Concepts't and of later develop ments in his analysis of certain appraisive concepts. What do such concepts mean and how do they mean9 These are the questions he treated in such a stimulating fashion."

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

Gilles Deleuze was one of the most influential and revolutionary philosophers of the twentieth century. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is his long-awaited work on Bacon, widely regarded as one of the most radical painters of the twentieth century.The book presents a deep engagement with Bacon's work and the nature of art. Deleuze analyzes the distinctive innovations that came to mark Bacon's style: the isolation of the figure, the violation deformations of the flesh, the complex use of color, the method of chance, and the use of the triptych form. Along the way, Deleuze introduces a number of his own famous concepts, such as the 'body without organs' and the 'diagram, ' and contrasts his own approach to painting with that of both the phenomenological and the art historical traditions.Deleuze links Bacon's work to CTzanne's notion of a 'logic' of sensation, which reaches its summit in color and the 'coloring sensation.' Investigating this logic, Deleuze explores Bacon's crucial relation to past painters such as Velasquez, CTzanne, and Soutine, as well as Bacon's rejection of expressionism and abstract painting.Long awaited in translation, Francis Bacon is destined to become a classic philosophical reflection on the nature of painting.

Aesthetics is one of the most vital and wide-ranging fields of philosophical inquiry.

This four volume set brings together both classic and contemporary writings to provide a comprehensive collection of the most important essays on the subject. All of the various artistic genres are addressed, with sections on film, dance and architecture as well as music, literature and the visual arts.

With a new introduction by the editor to guide the reader through the volumes, this major new work will provide student and researcher alike with key writings on aesthetics in one convenient, unique resource.

In "Eighteenth Century British Aesthetics", editor Dabney Townsend has brought together the work of such well-known writers as John Dryden, Joshua Reynolds, David Hume, and Samuel Johnson with the more obscure works of aestheticians such as Uvedale Price, Daniel Webb, John Baillie, and James Harris, whose work is difficult to find, but is nonetheless important, informative, and interesting. These twenty-two selections, accompanied by Dabney Townsend's historical essay on the development of eighteenth century aesthetics, make the history of aesthetics accessible to both students and specialists alike.

This lively and lucid introduction to the philosophy of music concentrates on the issues that illuminate musical listening and practice. It examines the conceptual debates relevant to the understanding and performing of music and grounds the philosophy to practical matters throughout. Ideal for a beginning readership with little philosophical background, the author provides an overview of the central debates enlivened by a real sense of enthusiasm for the subject and why it matters. The book begins by filling in the historical background and offers readers a succinct summary of philosophical thinking on music from the Ancient Greeks to Eduard Hanslick and Edmund Gurney. Chapter 2 explores two central questions: what is it that makes music, or, to be precise, some pieces of music, works of art? And, what is the work of music per se? Is it just what we hear, the performance, or is it something over and above that, something we invent or discover? Chapter 3 discusses a problem pecullar to music and one at the heart of philosophical discussion of it, can music have a meaning? And if so, what can it be? Chapter 4 considers whether music can have value. Are there features about music that make it good, features which can be specified in criteria? Is a work good if and only if it meets with the approval of an ideally qualified listener? How do we explain differences of opinion? Indeed, why do we need to make judgements of the relative value of pieces of music at all? This engaging and stimulating book will be of interest to students of aesthetics, musical practitioners and the general reader looking for a non-technical treatment of the subject.

Philosophy of Music is for anyone who has ever wondered whether or not music means anything or why some music is thought to be more significant than other music. It is a lively and lucid introduction to the aesthetics of music and to the issues that illuminate musical listening, understanding and practice. The book assumes no philosophical training on the part of its readers, only an interest in music and our reactions to it. It provides an authoritative analysis of the central issues, enlivened with a real sense of enthusiasm for the subject and its importance. At the heart of the book lie three key questions: What is the work of music? Can it have meaning? Can music have value? R. A. Sharpe guides the reader through the philosophical arguments and conceptual debates surrounding these questions while anchoring the discussion throughout to instances and examples from Western classical music and jazz. Unlike some other accounts of the philosophy of music, which view music as a branch of metaphysics, raising questions about sounds, tones and musical movement, Sharpe's approach is problem-orientated and the questions he raises are predominantly questions about the value of music, about the individuality of our assessments and about the way in which we prize music for its power to move us. He argues persuasively, and controversially for a philosopher, that when it comes to music philosophical analysis has its limitations and that one should not be surprised that the aesthetics of music can harbour contradictions and that our judgement of the value of music may be impossible to make internally consistent. This engaging and stimulating book will be of wide interest to music-lovers, critics, practitioners alike as well as students of aesthetics looking for a non-technical treatment of the subject.

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

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