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).

Despite numerous publications on the philosophy of technology, little attention has been paid to the relationship between being and value in technology, two aspects which are usually treated separately. This volume addresses this issue by drawing connections between the ontology of technology on the one hand and technology's ethical and aesthetic significance on the other. The book first considers what technology is and what kind of entities it produces. Then it examines the moral implications of technology. Finally, it explores the connections between technology and the arts.

Most philosophy has rejected the theater, denouncing it as a place of illusion or moral decay; the theater in turn has rejected philosophy, insisting that drama deals in actions, not ideas. Challenging both views, The Drama of Ideas shows that theater and philosophy have been crucially intertwined from the start.
Plato is the presiding genius of this alternative history. The Drama of Ideas presents Plato not only as a theorist of drama, but also as a dramatist himself, one who developed a dialogue-based dramaturgy that differs markedly from the standard, Aristotelian view of theater. Puchner discovers scores of dramatic adaptations of Platonic dialogues, the most immediate proof of Plato's hitherto unrecognized influence on theater history. Drawing on these adaptations, Puchner shows that Plato was central to modern drama as well, with figures such as Wilde, Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht, and Stoppard using Plato to create a new drama of ideas. Puchner then considers complementary developments in philosophy, offering a theatrical history of philosophy that includes Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Burke, Sartre, Camus, and Deleuze. These philosophers proceed with constant reference to theater, using theatrical terms, concepts, and even dramatic techniques in their writings.
The Drama of Ideas mobilizes this double history of philosophical theater and theatrical philosophy to subject current habits of thought to critical scrutiny. In dialogue with contemporary thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, and Alain Badiou, Puchner formulates the contours of a "dramatic Platonism." This new Platonism does not seek to return to an idealist theory of forms, but it does point beyond the reigning philosophies of the body, of materialism and of cultural relativism.

Drawing on the culture's history before and after the birth of rap music, this book argues that the values attributed to Hip Hop by 'postmodern' scholars stand in stark contrast with those that not only implicitly guided its aesthetic elements, but are explicitly voiced by Hip Hop's pioneers and rap music's most consequential artists. It argues that the structural evacuation of the voices of its founders and organic intellectuals in the postmodern theorization of Hip Hop has foreclosed the culture's ethical values and political goals from scholarly view, undermining its unity and progress. Through a historically informed critique of the hegemonic theoretical framework in Hip Hop Studies, and a re-centering of the culture's fundamental proscription against 'biting,' this book articulates and defends the aesthetic and ethical values of Hip Hop against their concealment and subversion by an academic discourse that merely 'samples' the culture for its own reactionary ends.

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:
* to develop the main composition principles pertinent to the visual commmunication medium of television;
* to establish the field of television aesthetics as an extension of the broader field of visual literacy; and
* to promote television aesthetics to both students and consumers of television.
Based on effective empirical research from three axes -- perception, cognition, and composition -- the aesthetic principles of television images presented are drawn from converging research in academic disciplines such as psychology (perceptual, cognitive, and experimental), neurophysiology, and the fine arts (painting, photography, film, theater, music, and more). Although the aesthetics of the fine arts were traditionally built on contextual theories that relied heavily on subjective evaluation, on critical analyses, and on descriptive research methods, the aesthetics of today's visual communication media consider equally valuable empirical methodologies found in all sciences. Investigations in these different academic disciplines have provided the constructs and strengthened the foundations of the theory of television aesthetics offered in this book.
Special features include:
* a great variety of pictures supporting the topics discussed;
* a thorough, up-to-date, and specifically related bibliography for each of the major parts of the book;
* computer drawings illustrating the concepts examined in the text;
* scientific data -- tables and charts -- documenting the research findings cited;
* simplified explanations of the processes of visual, auditory, and motion perceptions of images, enhanced by specific diagrams;
* detailed analyses of the threefold process of stimulation, perception, and recognition of televised images; and
* workable, easy-to-understand and use rules of picture composition, visual image evaluations, and television program appreciation.

This book examines the conceptual, existential, and logical conditions under which the philosophical novel can be treated as a literary genre on a par with generally recognized literary genres, such as mystery, romantic, adventure, religious, or historical novel. Michael H. Mitias argues that the philosophical novel meets these conditions. He advances a detailed analysis of the concept of literary genre, and discusses the reasons which justify the claim that philosophical novel is a distinct literary genre. This is based on the assumption that philosophical ideas can be communicated metaphorically. An analysis of this assumption necessarily leads to a detailed discussion of the concept of metaphor and the extent to which it can be the vehicle of communicating philosophical truth.

This book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is at work in a substantial section of contemporary philosophical thought and cultural representations. Spectres of pessimism can be found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives-from ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noe, Denis Villeneuve and Lars von Trier.

Aesthetics and the philosophy of art are about things in the world - things like the Mona Lisa, but also things like horror movies, things like the ugliest dog in the world, and things like wallpaper. There's a surprising amount of philosophical content to be found in wallpaper. Using a case-driven approach, Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art is grounded in real-world examples that propel thought, debate, and discussion about the nature of art and beauty. Now in its third edition, this tried-and-tested text features fresh cases and new activities. Hands-on Do Aesthetics! activities pepper the text, and Challenge Cases appear at the end of each chapter to test intuitions, to complicate the field of discussion, and to set a path forward. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" serves as a recurring case throughout, and this edition includes the full text of this classic short story. From classical debates that continue to bother philosophers today, to emerging problems of identity, appropriation, and morality, this introduction is designed to engage you in a field that itself engages with so much of the world around you. Here is everything you need to know about the history, themes, thinkers and theories to get you started on aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

This book evaluates the potential of the pragmatist notion of habit possesses to influence current debates at the crossroads between philosophy, cognitive sciences, neurosciences, and social theory. It deals with the different aspects of the pragmatic turn involved in 4E cognitive science and traces back the roots of such a pragmatic turn to both classical and contemporary pragmatism. Written by renowned philosophers, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and social theorists, this volume fills the need for an interdisciplinary account of the role of 'habit'. Researchers interested in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, social theory, and social ontology will need this book to fully understand the pragmatist turn in current research on mind, action and society.

In contemporary film theory, body and mind have been central to explorations of film form, representation, and spectatorship. While the soul may seem to have no place here, the history of film theory and its legacy to the present suggest otherwise. From the origins of film theory - from Hugo Munsterberg through French Impressionism to writings of the Weimar Republic - to the mid-twentieth century work of Henri Agel and Amedee Ayfre, as well as Edgar Morin, the soul emerges as a multi-faceted, if contested, concept. By revisiting such key moments in the history of film theory, and tracing the survival of this concept through to a range of cutting-edge debates today, from the work of Vivian Sobchack to Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze to Torben Grodal, The Soul of Film Theory tells the heretofore tacit tale of the relation between cinema and the soul, from classical to contemporary times, in dialogue with philosophy, religion, and science.

This book explores the notion of affective space in relation to architecture. It helps to clarify the first-person, direct experience of the environment and how it impacts a person's emotional states, influencing their perception of the world around them. Affective space has become a central notion in several discussions across philosophy, geography, anthropology, architecture and so on. However, only a limited selection of its key features finds resonance in architectural and urban theory, especially the idea of atmospheres, through the work of German phenomenologist Gernot Boehme. This book brings to light a wider range of issues bound to lived corporeal experience. These further issues have only received minor attention in architecture, where the discourse on affective space mostly remains superficial. The theory of atmospheres, in particular, is often criticized as being a surface-level, shallow theory as it is introduced in an unsystematic and fragmented fashion, and is a mere "easy to use" segment of what is a wider and all but impressionistic analytical method. This book provides a broader outlook on the topic and creates an entry point into a hitherto underexplored field. The book's theoretical foundation rests on a wide range of non-architectural sources, primarily from philosophy, anthropology and the cognitive sciences, and is strengthened through cases drawn from actual architectural and urban space. These cases make the book more comprehensible for readers not versed in contemporary philosophical trends.

This book explores the lived experience of being at home as well as being homeless. Being at home or not is typically a matter of being at a place or not, where such a place is carved out of space and designated as such. It is a place that is both empirical and trans-empirical. When one is at home or not at home, one typically has in mind an inhabited place. To inhabit or not to inhabit it is to find oneself in a place that has an affective presence or absence. In either case, affectivity points to a lived place where lived experience is constituted and displayed. Thus, in this context, affectivity becomes more than the subject of empirical psychology. If psychology were to have access, it would be in the context of phenomenological or existential psychology - a psychology that has its roots in the sensible world and, hence, a psychology that expresses an aesthetic dimension. Each of the contributors in this book extends an invitation to the readers to participate in constituting, extending, and sharing with others the sense of either being at home or of being homeless. This book appeals to students, researchers as well as general interest readers.

Georg Simmel predicted that he would have no followers after his death. However he is now widely recognized as the father of the sociology of Modernity. His ideas on the metropolis, consumer culture, social space and aesthetics are at the crux of contemporary debate in sociology. This collection brings together the essential secondary literature on Simmel. It is selected and edited by David Frisby - a scholar who has perhaps done more than anyone else to rehabilitate Simmel's reputation in the English speaking world. What emerges is the most concise yet comprehensive view of this astonishingly prescient and penetrating sociologist. The volumes will be of interest to graduate students and anyone with a serious interest in Simmel.

Literature and Understanding investigates the cognitive gain from literature by focussing on a reader's close analysis of a literary text. It examines the meaning of 'literature', outlines the most prominent positions in the literary cognitivism debate, explores the practice of close reading from a philosophical perspective, provides a fresh account of what we mean by 'understanding' and in so doing opens up a new area of research in the philosophy of literature. This book provides a different reply to the challenge that we can't learn anything worthwhile from reading literary fiction. It makes the innovative case that reading literary fiction as literature rather than as fiction stimulates five relevant senses of understanding. The book uses examples of irony, metaphor, play with perspective and ambiguity to illustrate this contention. Before arguing that these five senses of understanding bridge the gap between our understanding of a literary text and our understanding of the world beyond that text. The book will be of great interest for researchers, scholars and post-graduate students in the fields of aesthetics, literary theory, literature in education and pedagogy.

This book engages artistic interventions in the aerial elements to investigate the aesthetics and politics of atmosphere. Sensing Art in the Atmosphere: Elemental Lures and Aerosolar Practices traces the potential of artistic, community-driven experiments to amplify our sensing of atmosphere, marrying attentions to atmospheric affect with visceral awareness of the materials, institutions and processes hovering in the air. Drawing on six years of practice-led research with artistic and activist initiatives Museo Aero Solar and Aerocene, initiated by artist Tomas Saraceno, each chapter develops creative relations to atmosphere from the studio to stratospheric currents. Through narrative-led writing, the voices of artists and collaborators are situated and central. In dialogue with these aerographic stories and sites, the book develops a notion of elemental lures: the sensual and imaginative propositions of aerial, atmospheric and meteorological phenomena. The promise of elemental lures, Engelmann suggests, is to reconcile our sensing of atmosphere with the myriad social, cultural and political forces suspended in it. Through tales of floating journeys, shared envelopes of breath and surreal levitations, the book foregrounds the role of art in crafting alternative modes of perceiving, moving and imagining (in) the air. The book ends with a call for elemental experiments in the geohumanities. It makes an important and original contribution to elemental geographies, the geohumanities and interdisciplinary scholarship on air and atmosphere.

In the first book to examine the overlooked relationship between musical improvisation and philosophical hermeneutics, Sam McAuliffe asks: what exactly is improvisation? And how does it relate to our being-in-the-world? Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics answers these questions by investigating the underlying structure of improvisation. McAuliffe argues that improvising is best understood as attending and responding to the situation in which one find itself and, as such, is essential to how we engage with the world. Working within the hermeneutic philosophical tradition - drawing primarily on the work of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jeff Malpas - this book provides a rich and detailed account of the ways in which we are all already experienced improvisers. Given the dominance of music in discussions of improvisation, Part I of this book uses improvised musical performance as a case study to uncover the ontological structure of improvisation: a structure that McAuliffe demonstrates is identical to the structure of hermeneutic engagement. Exploring this relationship between improvisation and hermeneutics, Part II offers a new reading of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, examining the way in which Gadamer's accounts of truth and understanding, language, and ethics each possess an essentially improvisational character. Working between philosophy and music theory, Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics unveils the hermeneutic character of musical performance, the musicality of hermeneutic engagement, and the universality of improvisation.

This monograph brings three branches of philosophy together: epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. It assesses the built environment as a case study from a phenomenological perspective. Under the notion of phenomenology, this study understands the built environment as the hermeneutical phenomenon of being in the life-world that is experienced by people within the socio-cultural and historical context of habitation. Hermeneutically, the built environment as a phenomenon is contextually interwoven with other phenomena within the socio-cultural, historical, and environmental network. Phenomenologically speaking, the task of the study is to excavate, listen to, unfold, divulge, and reconstruct the socio-culturally, environmentally, and historically constructed relationship between people and their built environment that build, develop, and elaborate the system of knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics. By and large, its nature and findings are theoretical and interdisciplinary, so it will be of interest not only for philosophers, but also to scholars studying urban development and anthropology.

Being of Two Minds examines the place that early modern literature held in Modernist literary criticism. For T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Empson, the early modern period helps model a literary future. At stake in their engagements across time were ontological questions about literature and its ability to mediate between the one and the many, the particular and the general, life and death, the past and the present. If reading and writing literature enables the mind to be in two places at once, creative experience serves as a way to participate in an expanded field of consciousness alongside mortality. Goldberg reads the readings that these modernists performed on texts that Eliot claimed for the canon like the metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists, but also Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, and Margaret Cavendish. Ontological concerns are reflected in Eliot's engagement with Aristotle's theory of the soul and Empson's Buddhism. These arguments about being affect minds and bodies and call into question sexual normativity: Eliot glances at a sodomitical male-male mode of literary transmission; Woolf produces a Judith Shakespeare to model androgynous being; Empson refuses to distinguish activity from passivity to rewrite gender difference. The work of one of our leading literary and cultural critics, Being of Two Minds spans centuries to show how the most compelling and surprising ideas about mind, experience, and existence not only move between early modernity, high modernism, and our own moment, but are also constituted through that very movement between times and minds.

Serendipity and creativity are both broad, widely disputed, and yet consistently popular concepts which are relevant to understanding the positive aspects of our daily lives and even human progress in the arts and sciences. The chapters in this book reflects a variety of theoretical and practical approaches to serendipity in various domains, including creative problem solving, sculpture, writing, theatre and design. Chapter authors address issues such as the nature of the 'prepared mind', the role of accidents, serendipity as a skill or way of engaging with the world and, indeed, how serendipity works as a concept and practice in relation to the dynamic flow of the creative system. Those who wish to explore the nature of chance in art and creativity, as well as in their daily lives, will find much to ponder in these pages.

This volume examines the great varieties of artistic experience from first hand phenomenological descriptions. It features detailed and concrete analyses which provides readers with in-depth insights into each specific domain of artistic experience. Coverage includes phenomenological elucidation of the aesthetic attitude, the power of imagination, and the logic of sensibility. The essays also detail concrete phenomenological analyses of aesthetic experiences in poetry, painting, photography, drama, architecture, and urban aesthetics. The book contains essays from "Logos and Aisthesis: Phenomenology and the Arts," an international conference held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. It brings together a team of top scholars from both the East and the West and offers readers a global perspective on this interesting topic. These innovative, yet accessible, essays, will benefit students and researchers in philosophy, aesthetics, the arts, and the humanities. They will also be of interest to specialists in phenomenology.

"In his Phenomenology of Cognition, Cassirer provides a comprehensive and systematic account of the dynamic process involved in the whole of human culture as it progresses from the world of myth and its feeling of social belonging to the highest abstractions of mathematics, logic and theoretical physics. Cassirer engages with the most sophisticated and cutting-edge work in fields ranging from ethnology to classics, egyptology and assyriology to ethology, brain science and psychology to logic, mathematics and theoretical physics. His command of philosophy, literature, and the arts is superb. Echoing his work on Kant, Cassirer begins The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms with the problem posed by the meaning of being for philosophy since Plato. But Cassirer also shows that this problem gains new significance with Kant and with the development of modern culture. Cassirer weaves his conception of the development of knowledge into a broadly Kantian and German idealist dynamic-historical conception of significance and of experience that refuses to accept a fundamental opposition between literary, philosophical and scientific culture. In consequence of his great vision grounded in careful reflection and argument, Cassirer's systematic conception of the Copernican cosmopolitan-cosmological revolution is still philosophically and scientifically unmatched in contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic and of the Pacific." Pierre Keller, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside, USA. This new translation makes Cassirer's seminal work available to a new generation of scholars. Each volume includes a translator's introduction by Steve G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter E. Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and an index.

Empathy has for a long time, at least since the eighteenth century, been seen as centrally important in relation to our capacity to gain a grasp of the content of other people's minds, and predict and explain what they will think, feel, and do; and in relation to our capacity to respond to others ethically. In addition, empathy is seen as having a central role in aesthetics, in the understanding of our engagement with works of art and with fictional characters. A fuller understanding of empathy is now offered by the interaction of research in science and the humanities. Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives draws together nineteen original chapters by leading researchers across several disciplines, together with an extensive Introduction by the editors. The individual chapters reveal how important it is, in a wide range of fields of enquiry, to bring to bear an understanding of the role of empathy in its various guises. This volume offers the ideal starting-point for the exploration of this intriguing aspect of human life.