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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Aesthetics
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.
This innovative volume explores the idea that while photographs are images, they are also objects, and this materiality is integral to their meaning and use. The case studies presented focus on photographs active in different institutional, political, religious and domestic spheres, where physical properties, the nature of their use and the cultural formations in which they function make their 'objectness' central to how we should understand them. The international contributors are drawn from disciplines including the history of photogarphy, visual anthropology and art history, and their pieces focus on areas ranging from the Netherlands, North America and Australia to Japan, Romania and Tibet. Each shows the methodological strategies they have developed in order to fully exploit the idea of the materiality of photographic images. Inspiring and instructive, the book can be used either as an overview of this exciting new area of investigation, or as a practical guide to the student or academic on how to understand photographs as objects in diverse contexts.
History and memory rank as central themes in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. As one of the last philosophers of the 19th century, Nietzsche naturally belongs to the so-called 'historical century'. The contentious exchange with the past and with antiquity - as much as the mechanisms, the dangers, and the lessons of memory and tradition - are continually examined and stand in close relationship with Nietzsche's vision of life and his project of human development. As Jacob Burckhardt once wrote of the cultural critique to his Basel colleague: "Fundamentally, you are always teaching history" (9/13/1882). Following Burckhardt's judgment, the contributors focus on the analysis of core questions in the philosophies of history and memory, and their respective convergence in the thought of Nietzsche. The epistemological relevance of these central concepts will be thematized alongside those concerning tradition, and education. The discussion of these rich themes unifies a broad spectrum of questions, ranging from cultural memory to contemporary philosophy of mind. The contributions are revised versions of selected papers presented at the 2018 conference of the annual meeting of the Nietzsche Society in Naumburg.
In this highly ambitious, wide ranging, immensely impressive and ground-breaking work Fabian Dorsch surveys just about every account of the imagination that has ever been proposed. He identifies five central types of imagining that any unifying theory must accommodate and sets himself the task of determining whether any theory of what imagining consists in covers these five paradigms. Focussing on what he takes to be the three main theories, and giving them each equal consideration, he faults the first two and embraces the third. The scholarship is immaculate, the writing crystal clear and the argumentation always powerful. Malcolm Budd, FBA, Emeritus Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College London Excerpt Open publication
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.
When viewing the picture of a beautiful sunset, how many of us realise that, while we admire it as a work of art, we have just taken the very first step toward pornography? And that both the beauty in the sunset and the senses that recognise such beauty are very likely to be anti-art? Making a radical departure from the conventional wisdom on art and beauty, this book presents the startling thesis that things of beauty are not only unrelated to art but often responsible for pornography.
This is a scholarly study of cinematic emotions, highlighting the relationship between spectator and film, and thematically divided into chapters including Love, Hate, Shame and Fear. There is an upsurge of interest in contemporary film theory towards cinematic emotions. Tarja Laine's innovative study proposes a methodology for interpreting affective encounters with films, not as objectively readable texts, but as emotionally salient events. Laine argues convincingly that film is not an immutable system of representation that is meant for (one-way) communication, but an active, dynamic participant in the becoming of the cinematic experience. Through a range of chapters that include Horror, Hope, Shame and Love - and through close readings of films such as "The Shining", "American Beauty" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", Laine demonstrates that cinematic emotions are more than mere indicators of the properties of their objects. They are processes that are intentional in a phenomenological sense, supporting the continuous, shifting, and reciprocal exchange between the film's world and the spectator's world. Grounded in continental philosophy, this provocative book explores the affective dynamics of cinema as an interchange between the film and the spectator in a manner that transcends traditional generic patterns.
Wittgenstein has written a great number of remarks relevant to aesthetical issues: he has questioned the relation between aesthetics and psychology as well as the status of our norms of judgment; he has drawn philosophers' attention to such topics as aspect-seeing and aspect-dawning, and has brought insights into the nature of our aesthetic reactions. The examination of this wide range of topics is far from being completed, and the purpose of this book is to contribute to such completion. It gathers both papers discussing some of Wittgenstein's most provocative and intriguing statements on aesthetics, and papers bringing out their implications for art critic and art history, as well as their significance to epistemology and to the study of human mind.
and the one in the middle which judges as he enjoys and enjoys as he judges. This latter kind really reproduces the work of art anew. The division of our Symposium into three sections is justified by the fact that phenomenology, from Husserl, Heidegger, Moritz Geiger, Ingarden, in Germany and Poland, Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, E. Levinas in France, Unamuno in Spain, and Tymieniecka, in the United States, have revealed striking coincidences in trying to answer the following questions: What is the philosophical vocation of literature? Does literature have any significance for our lives? Why does the lyric moment, present in all creative endeavors, in myth, dance, plastic art, ritual, poetry, lift the human life to a higher and authentically human level of the existential experience of man? Our investigations answer our fundamental inquiry: What makes a literary work a work of art? What makes a literary work a literary work, if not aesthetic enjoyment? As much as the formation of an aesthetic language culminates in artistic creation, the formation of a philosophical language lives within the orbit of creative imagination.
How can the studio teacher teach a lesson so as to instill refined artistic sensibilities, ones often thought to elude language? How can the applied lesson be a form of aesthetic education? How can teaching performance be an artistic endeavor in its own right? These are some of the questions Teaching Performance attempts to answer, drawing on the author's several decades of experience as a studio teacher and music scholar. The architects of absolute music (Hanslick, Schopenhauer, and others) held that it is precisely because instrumental music lacks language and thus any overt connection to the non-musical world that it is able to expose essential elements of that world. More particularly, for these philosophers, it is the density of musical structure-the intricate interplay among purely musical elements-that allows music to capture the essences behind appearances. By analogy, the author contends that the more structurally intricate and aesthetically nuanced a pedagogical system is, the greater its ability to illuminate music and facilitate musical skills. The author terms this phenomenon relational autonomy. Eight chapters unfold a piano-pedagogical system pivoting on the principle of relational autonomy. In grounding piano pedagogy in the aesthetics of absolute music, each domain works on the other. On the one hand, Romantic aesthetics affords pedagogy a source of artistic value in its own right. On the other hand, pedagogy concretizes Romantic aesthetics, deflating its transcendental pretentions and showing the dichotomy of absolute/utilitarian to be specious.
In Against Transmission Barker rethinks the history of audio-visual media as a history of analytical instruments. Rather than viewing media history as the commonly told story of synthetic media (media that make a new whole from connecting separate parts), by focusing on the analytical function of mediation Against Transmission is able to focus on the way that media that have historically been used to count, measure and analyse experience still continue to provide the condition for contemporary life. By studying the engineering of transmission, transduction and storage through the prism of process philosophy, the book interrogates how the understanding of media-as-machine may offer new ways to describe a particular phenomenological relationship to the world, asking: what can the hardware of machines that segment information into very small elements tell us about experiences of time, memory and history? This book investigates the technical architecture of media such as television, computers, cameras, and cinematography. It achieves this through in-depth archive research into the history of the development of media technology, including innovative readings of key concepts from philosophers of media such as Harold A. Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski and Wolfgang Ernst. Teaming philosophical inquiry with thorough technical and historical analysis, in a broad range of international case studies, from early experimental cinema and television to contemporary media art and innovative hardware developments, Barker shows how the technical discoveries made in these contexts have engineered the experiences of time in contemporary media culture.
Richard Wagner has come to be seen as the quintessential artist of the nineteenth-century, whose work embraces all the arts of the period. Dieter Borchmeyer here provides the first systematic and comprehensive account of Wagner's aesthetic theory, examining his hitherto neglected prose writings and his ideas on music drama from the various standpoints of literature, the linking of ideas, and the sociology of art. The pre-eminent importance for Wagner of classical Greek art and mythology emerges with particular clarity, while his links with the great figures and forms of world theatre - Shakespeare, the commedia dell'arte, the popular theatre, and the puppet theatre - are traced in detail. The influence on Wagner of the historical and social novel is also discussed. The author provides the first comprehensive analysis of Cosima Wagner's Diaries, and throws unexpected sidelights on Wagner's relationship with Nietzsche. First published in German in 1982, this book has become established as a standard work of Wagner scholarship, and now appears for the first time in English in a completely revised edition incorporating a number of new chapters on the music dramas.
This book covers the field of and points to the intersections between politics, art and philosophy. Its hero, the late Sir Roger Scruton had a longstanding interest in all fields, acquiring professional knowledge in both the practice and theory of politics, art and philosophy. The claim of the book is, therefore, that contrary to a superficial prejudice, it is possible to address the philosophical issues of art and politics in the same oeuvre, as the example of this Cambridge-educated analytical philosopher proves. Accordingly, the book has a bold thesis on the general, theoretical level, mapping the connections between politics, art and philosophy. However, it also has a pioneering commitment on the level of the particular, offering the first full-length study into the philosophical legacy of Roger Scruton, probably the most important British conservative philosopher of the late 20th and the first decades of the 21st century. It also allows reader to look into the philosopher's fascination with Central European art and culture. Finally, it also provides a daring analysis of the late Scruton's metaphysical inspirations, connecting the arts, and especially music, with religion and the bonds of love.
Beauty fulfils human existence. As it registers in our aesthetic experience, beauty enhances naturea (TM)s enchantment around us and our inward experience lifting our soul toward moral elevation. Carried by creative imagination (Imaginatio Creatrix), beauty participates in the moulding of the forms of the intellective constitution of the mind in tandem with praxis and seeks deeper enigmas of the real in the labyrinth of the cosmos. Yet with the evolution of human development and in technological inventions, beauty, while suffusing all modalities of experience, seems to undergo transformations and expansion. Are there perduring norms and modalities of beauty or are we carried along blindly by human development? Is there a measure intrinsic to our human ontopoietic unfolding and the growth of human life that we may follow instead of the whim of fancy and excess? The present collection of art-explorations seeks the elemental ties of Human Condition. Together, the authors aim to answer the questions posed above. Papers by: Brian Grassom, Lawrence Kimmel, Gabriel Hindin, John Baldachino, Piero Trupia, Maria Golaszewska, Mariola Sulkowska, Valerie Reed, Max Statkiewicz, Victor Gerald Rivas, Robert D. Sweeney, Raymond J. Wilson III, Tsung-I Dow, Vladimir Marchenkov, Maciej Kaluza, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Diane G. Scillia, Bruce Ross, James Werner, Elena Stylianou, Arthur Piper, Christopher Wallace, Matti Itkonen, Munir Beken, Andrew J. Svedlow.
John Dewey was the foremost philosophical figure and public intellectual in early to mid-twentieth century America. He is still the most academically cited Anglophone philosopher of the past century, and is among the most cited Americans of any century. In this comprehensive volume spanning thirty-five chapters, leading scholars help researchers access particular aspects of Dewey's thought, navigate the enormous and rapidly developing literature, and participate in current scholarship in light of prospects in key topical areas. Beginning with a framing essay by Philip Kitcher calling for a transformation of philosophical research inspired by Dewey, contributors interpret, appraise, and critique Dewey's philosophy under the following headings: Metaphysics; Epistemology, Science, Language, and Mind; Ethics, Law, and the Starting Point; Social and Political Philosophy, Race, and Feminist Philosophy; Philosophy of Education; Aesthetics; Instrumental Logic, Philosophy of Technology, and the Unfinished Project of Modernity; Dewey in Cross-Cultural Dialogue; The American Philosophical Tradition, the Social Sciences, and Religion; and Public Philosophy and Practical Ethics.
According to the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, a world that has lost sight of beauty is a world riddled with skepticism, moral and aesthetic relativism, conflicting religious worldviews, and escalating ecological crises. In The Eclipse and Recovery of Beauty, John D. Dadosky uses Kierkegaard and Nietzsche's negative aesthetics to outline the context of that loss, and presents an argument for reclaiming beauty as a metaphysical property of being. Inspired by Bernard Lonergan's philosophy of consciousness, Dadosky presents a philosophy of beauty that is grounded in contemporary Thomistic thought. Responding to Balthasar, he argues for a concept of beauty that can be experienced, understood, judged, created, contemplated, and even loved. Deeply engaged with the work of Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kant, among others, The Eclipse and Recovery of Beauty will be essential reading for those interested in contemporary philosophy and theology.
This book explores how speculative thinking is shaping how we relate to our entangled social, mental, and environmental ecologies. It examines how speculative philosophies and concepts are changing geographical research methods and techniques, whilst also developing how speculative thinking transforms the way human, non-human, and more-than-human things are conceptualised in research practices across the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Offering the first dedicated compendium of geographical engagements with speculation and speculative thinking, the chapters in this edited collection advance debates about how affective, imperceptible, and infra-sensible qualities of environments might be written about through alternative registers and ontologies of experience. Organised around the themes of Ethics, Technologies, and Aesthetics, the book will appeal to those engaging with architecture, Black political theory, fiction, cinema, children's geographies, biotechnologies, philosophy, rural studies, arts practice, and nuclear waste studies as speculative research practices appropriate for addressing contemporary ecological problems. Chapters 1, 3 and 4 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
In this book, ten leading commentators explore the interfaces between art and aesthetics in dialogue with a philosophical text (Theodor Adorno's draft introduction to "Aesthetic Theory"), a piece of literary writing (Franz Kafka's "A Report to an Academy"), and a major contemporary painting (Gerhard Richter's "Betty," 1988).
This integrated study of the emerging interdisciplinary field of environmental aesthetics takes the reader through a brief history of both aesthetics and taste, then discusses the psychology of human-environment relations, the influences of literary, artistic and legal activism on city, countryside and wilderness, and concludes with an analysis of the roles of public policy and of planning. Clearly written and illustrated, the book brings together the ideas, method and practices of a range of academic and professional disciplines. The book should be a useful introduction to those interested in how the experience of city (and country) life can and should be improved.
USE FIRST TWO PARAGRAPHS ONLY FOR GENERAL CATALOGS... This volume
offers a response to three ongoing needs:
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