This collection of essays is devoted to the philosophical examination of the aesthetics of videogames. Videogames represent one of the most significant developments in the modern popular arts, and it is a topic that is attracting much attention among philosophers of art and aestheticians. As a burgeoning medium of artistic expression, videogames raise entirely new aesthetic concerns, particularly concerning their ontology, interactivity, and aesthetic value. The essays in this volume address a number of pressing theoretical issues related to these areas, including but not limited to: the nature of performance and identity in videogames; their status as an interactive form of art; the ethical problems raised by violence in videogames; and the representation of women in videogames and the gaming community. The Aesthetics of Videogames is an important contribution to analytic aesthetics that deals with an important and growing art form.

Do aesthetic appeals to senses and emotions in political debate necessarily marginalise political reason and reduce citizens to consumers - thus dangerously undermining democracy? Or is sensuous-emotional engagement, on the contrary, a basic fact of the political process and a crucial precondition for revitalising democracy? Aesthetics and Political Culture in Modern Society investigates the current interrelationship between aesthetic practice and political practice in Western democracies, focusing on its impact on democratic political culture. Henrik Kaare Nielsen argues that aesthetic interventions in the political process do not by definition undermine politics' content of reason. Instead, a differentiation must be made between a multiplicity of aesthetic forms of intervention - some of which tend to weaken the political judgement of citizens while other forms tend to stimulate competent judgement. This book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of political science, sociology, media studies, and cultural studies.

Isn't That Clever provides a new account of the nature of humor - the cleverness account - according to which humor is intentional conspicuous acts of playful cleverness. By defining humor in this way, answers can be found to longstanding questions about humor ethics (Are there jokes that are wrong to tell? Are there jokes that can only be told by certain people?) and humor aesthetics (What makes for a good joke? Is humor subjective?). In addition to humor in general, Isn't That Clever asks questions about comedy as an art form such as whether there are limits to what can be said in dealing with a heckler and how do we determine whether one comedian has stolen jokes from another.

Why do painters paint? Obviously, there are numerous possible reasons. They paint to create images for others' enjoyment, to solve visual problems, to convey ideas, and to contribute to a rich artistic tradition. This book argues that there is yet another, crucially important but often overlooked reason. Painters paint to feel. They paint because it enables them to experience special feelings, such as being absorbed in creative play and connected to something vitally significant. Painting may even transform the painter's whole sense of being. Thus, painting is not only about producing art, communicating content, and so on, but also about setting up and inhabiting an experiential space wherein highly valued feelings are interactively enabled and supported. This book investigates how and why this happens by combining psychoanalytical theorization on creativity with philosophical thinking on affectivity. It focuses on creative experience itself, and illuminates the psychological mechanisms and dynamics that underlie the affects at stake. Painters' own descriptions of how they feel at work are used throughout to give an accurate, true-to-life portrayal of the experience of painting. The strength of the book lies in its open-minded yet critical integration of contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking, and in its truthfulness to painters' experiential descriptions of the painterly process. On the whole, it enriches our understanding of artistic creativity and sheds more light on how and why we come to feel the things we do. As such, the book will appeal to philosophers, psychoanalysts, and art researchers alike.

Why do painters paint? Obviously, there are numerous possible reasons. They paint to create images for others' enjoyment, to solve visual problems, to convey ideas, and to contribute to a rich artistic tradition. This book argues that there is yet another, crucially important but often overlooked reason. Painters paint to feel. They paint because it enables them to experience special feelings, such as being absorbed in creative play and connected to something vitally significant. Painting may even transform the painter's whole sense of being. Thus, painting is not only about producing art, communicating content, and so on, but also about setting up and inhabiting an experiential space wherein highly valued feelings are interactively enabled and supported. This book investigates how and why this happens by combining psychoanalytical theorization on creativity with philosophical thinking on affectivity. It focuses on creative experience itself, and illuminates the psychological mechanisms and dynamics that underlie the affects at stake. Painters' own descriptions of how they feel at work are used throughout to give an accurate, true-to-life portrayal of the experience of painting. The strength of the book lies in its open-minded yet critical integration of contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking, and in its truthfulness to painters' experiential descriptions of the painterly process. On the whole, it enriches our understanding of artistic creativity and sheds more light on how and why we come to feel the things we do. As such, the book will appeal to philosophers, psychoanalysts, and art researchers alike.

Dance and the Corporeal Uncanny takes the philosophy of the body into the field of dance, through the lens of subjectivity and via its critique. It draws on dance and performance as its dedicated field of practice to articulate a philosophy of agency and movement. It is organized around two conceptual paradigms - one phenomenological (via Merleau-Ponty), the other an interpretation of Nietzschean philosophy, mediated through the work of Deleuze. The book draws on dance studies, cultural critique, ethnography and postcolonial theory, seeking an interdisciplinary audience in philosophy, dance and cultural studies.

Originally published in 1989. This is the first history of modern France to explore the long-term origins of the libertarian revolt. It traces the moral history from the eighteenth century to the 1960s, examining the questions of marriage and divorce, homosexuality, and sexual morality. It includes detailed chapters on the Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, Andre Gide, and Daniel Guerin in order to illustrate the changing legislation, popular thought and public opinion. The result is an enlightening and provocative account which will be of interest to students of modern French history, moral thought and the history of sexual attitudes.

Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this book breaks new ground by considering how Robert Motherwell's abstract expressionist art is indebted to Alfred North Whitehead's highly original process metaphysics. Motherwell first encountered Whitehead and his work as a philosophy graduate student at Harvard University, and he continued to espouse Whitehead's processist theories as germane to his art throughout his life. This book examines how Whitehead's process philosophy-inspired by quantum theory and focusing on the ongoing ingenuity of dynamic forces of energy rather than traditional views of inert substances-set the stage for Motherwell's future art. This book will be of interest to scholars in twentieth-century modern art, philosophy of art and aesthetics, and art history.

The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy collects 39 original chapters from prominent philosophers on the nature, meaning, value, and predicaments of love, presented in a unique framework that highlights the rich variety of methods and traditions used to engage with these subjects. This volume is structured around important realms of human life and activity, each of which receives its own section: I. Family and Friendship II. Romance and Sex III. Politics and Society IV. Animals, Nature, and the Environment V. Art, Faith, and Meaning VI. Rationality and Morality VII. Traditions: Historical and Contemporary. This last section includes chapters treating love as a subject in both Western and non-Western philosophical traditions. The contributions, all appearing in print here for the first time, are written to be accessible and compelling to non-philosophers and philosophers alike; and the volume as a whole encourages professional philosophers, teachers, students, and lay readers to rethink standard constructions of philosophical canons.

Identifying quickly illusion with deception, we tend to oppose it to the reality of life. However, investigating in this collection of essays illusion's functions in the Arts, which thrives upon illusion and yet maintains its existential roots and meaningfullness in the real, we might wonder about the nature of reality itself.

Does not illusion open the seeming confines of factual reality into horizons of imagination which transform it? Does it not, like art, belong essentially to the makeup of human reality?

Papers by: Lanfranco Aceti, John Baldacchino, Maria Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, Jo Ann Circosta, Madalina Diaconu, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Brian Grassom, Marguerite Harris, Andrew E. Hershberger, James Carlton Hughes, Lawrence Kimmel, Jung In Kwon, Ruth Ronen, Scott A. Sherer, Joanne Snow-Smith, Max Statkiewicz, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Daniel Unger, James Werner.

This book provides a stylistic and cognitive poetic account of ekphrastic poetry (poetry whose subject matter is predominantly artworks and images), examining the linguistic processes through which works of art can become literary objects. The author sheds light on the workings of ekphrasis at a textual level, while also considering the cognitive and psychological effects of reading ekphrastic poems, developing cognitive and stylistic analytical frameworks grounded on the four principles that govern ekphrasis: representation, narrativization, transposition, and collaboration. This book will be of interest to academics and practitioners in various fields, including literary critics, art critics, rhetoricians, poets, visual artists, and stylisticians.

In this volume, Baz offers a wide-ranging discussion of Wittgenstein's remarks on aspect-perception, with special focus on Wittgenstein's method. Baz starts out with an interpretation of Wittgenstein's remarks on aspects and continues with attempts to characterize and defend Wittgenstein's approach to the understanding and dissolution of philosophical difficulties. Baz ends with attempts to articulate-under the inspiration of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology-certain dissatisfactions, both with Wittgenstein's remarks on aspect perception, and with his philosophical approach more generally. On the way, Baz explores connections between Wittgenstein's remarks on aspects and Kant's aesthetics. He examines ways in which the remarks on aspects may be brought to bear on contemporary philosophical work on perception. He discusses some of the implications of Wittgenstein's work on aspect perception for issues in moral philosophy and the philosophy of action.

Originally published in 2004. Thanks to computer simulations science is beginning to understand complex natural processes such as the weather, earthquakes and the evolution of life. The Significance of Complexity deals with the importance of the sciences of complexity - for the humanities and theology. First, three scientists explain the science of complexity and illustrate it with concrete examples. Second, two scholars consider the concept of complexity and possible applications of complexity theory within the humanities, e.g. as a tool to understand the interplay between the artist, the work of art and the user in interactive art. Finally, three theologians ask what can be learned from the science of complexity for a religious understanding of humankind and the world. The Significance of Complexity is a pioneering work exploring the import of a fascinating new branch of science for human self-understanding. It caters for all those who are interested in relating science to the quest for the meaning of life.

Supposition is frequently invoked in many fields within philosophy, including aesthetics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and epistemology. However, there is a striking lack of consensus about the nature of supposition. What is supposition? Is supposition a sui generis type of mental state or is it reducible to some other type of mental state? These are the main questions Margherita Arcangeli explores in this book. She examines the characteristic features of supposition, along the dimensions of phenomenology and emotionality, among others, in a journey through the imaginative realm. An informed answer to the question "What is supposition?" must involve an analysis of imagination, since supposition is so often defined in opposition to the latter. She assesses rival explanations of supposition putting forward a novel view, according to which the proper way of seeing supposition is as a primitive type of imaginative state. Supposition and the Imaginative Realm: A Philosophical Inquiry will be of great interest to students of philosophy of psychology, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and epistemology.

This book addresses how our revisionary practices account for relations between texts and how they are read. It offers an overarching philosophy of revision concerning works of fiction, fact, and faith, revealing unexpected insights about the philosophy of language, the metaphysics of fact and fiction, and the history and philosophy of science and religion. Using the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien as exemplars, the authors introduce a fundamental distinction between the purely physical and the linguistic aspects of texts. They then demonstrate how two competing theories of reference-descriptivism and referentialism-are instead constitutive of a single semantic account needed to explain all kinds of revision. The authors also propose their own metaphysical foundations of fiction and fact. The next part of the book brings the authors' philosophy of revision into dialogue with Thomas Kuhn's famous analysis of factual, and specifically scientific, change. It also discusses a complex episode in the history of paleontology, demonstrating how scientific and popular texts can diverge over time. Finally, the authors expand their philosophy of revision to religious texts, arguing that, rather than being distinct, such texts are always read as other kinds, that faith tends to be more important as evidence for religious texts than for others, and that the latter explains why religious communities tend to have remarkable historical longevity. Revising Fiction, Fact, and Faith offers a unique and comprehensive account of the philosophy of revision. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of literature, literary theory and criticism, and history and philosophy of science and religion.

Across sociology and cultural studies in particular, the concept of authenticity has begun to occupy a central role, yet in spite of its popularity as an ideal and philosophical value authenticity notably suffers from a certain vagueness, with work in this area tending to borrow ideas from outside of sociology, whilst failing to present empirical studies which centre on the concept itself. Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society addresses the problems surrounding this concept, offering a sociological analysis of it for the first time in order to provide readers in the social and cultural sciences with a clear conceptualization of authenticity and with a survey of original empirical studies focused on its experience, negotiation, and social relevance at the levels of self, culture and specific social settings.

New Waves in Philosophy of Science captures the diverse array of issues in the rapidly developing area of philosophy of science by bringing together a pool of talented young philosophers from across the globe to debate the field and show where it's heading.

Theory has been an embattled discourse in the academy for decades. But now it faces a serious challenge from those who want to model the analytical methods of all scholarly disciplines on the natural sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique"character of humanistic understanding.

Philosophy s Artful Conversation" is a timely and searching examination of theory s role in the arts and humanities today. Expanding the insights of his earlier book, Elegy for Theory," and drawing on the diverse thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. H. von Wright, P. M. S. Hacker, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Rodowick provides a blueprint of what he calls a philosophy of the humanities. In a surprising and illuminating turn, he views the historical emergence of theory through the lens of film theory, arguing that aesthetics, literary studies, and cinema studies cannot be separated where questions of theory are concerned. These discourses comprise a conceptual whole, providing an overarching model of critique that resembles, in embryonic form, what a new philosophy of the humanities might look like.

Rodowick offers original readings of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, bringing forward unexamined points of contact between two thinkers who associate philosophical expression with film and the arts. A major contribution to cross-disciplinary intellectual history, Philosophy s Artful Conversation" reveals the many threads connecting the arts and humanities with the history of philosophy."

This is the first comprehensive book-length introduction to the philosophy of Western music that fully integrates consideration of popular music and hybrid musical forms, especially song. Its author, Andrew Kania, begins by asking whether Bob Dylan should even have been eligible for the Nobel Prize in Literature, given that he is a musician. This motivates a discussion of music as an artistic medium, and what philosophy has to contribute to our thinking about music. Chapters 2-5 investigate the most commonly defended sources of musical value: its emotional power, its form, and specifically musical features (such as pitch, rhythm, and harmony). In chapters 6-9, Kania explores issues arising from different musical practices, particularly work-performance (with a focus on classical music), improvisation (with a focus on jazz), and recording (with a focus on rock and pop). Chapter 10 examines the intersection of music and morality. The book ends with a consideration of what, ultimately, music is. Key Features Uses popular-song examples throughout, but also discusses a range of musical traditions (notably, rock, pop, classical, and jazz) Explains both philosophical and musical terms when they are first introduced Provides publicly accessible Spotify playlists of the musical examples discussed in the book Each chapter begins with an overview and ends with questions for testing comprehension and stimulating further thought, along with suggestions for further reading

Many philosophical accounts of reason are geared toward providing rational justifications ex post facto rather than accounting for the role reason plays in actu in the process of creative work. Moreover, when in actu accounts of reason are given, they are usually too narrow to describe the sort of high-level creative work that is involved in the composition of poetry or the creation of a scientific theory. This book suggests that the rudiments of a broader account are found in various German Idealist figures, most notably the philosopher-novelist-critic Friedrich Schlegel and the philosophical poet and novelist Friedrich Hoelderlin. However, German Idealism generally is subject to Hans Blumenberg 's secularization critique which provides a strong prima facie argument that the accounts of poetic reason suggested by Schlegel and Hoelderlin are indefensible. This book argues that confronting Blumenberg's secularization critique and his associated legitimation of modernity with a romantic conception of poetic reason requires revisions on both sides, and that the work of Lacan is especially well-suited to provide the conditions upon which a legitimation of poetic reason can be provided.

Aesthetics in Present Future: The Arts and the Technological Horizon collects essays by specialized scholars and a few artists, who focus on the issue of how deeply the arts change when conveyed by the new media (the web; 3D printers, videos, etc.) or also simply diffused by them. Every author shows to analyze the topic without glorifying nor criticizing this strong tendency. Their analyses proceed as descriptions, stating how both the virtual production and virtual communication change our attitudes toward what we call the arts. The scope of the topics goes from photography to cinema, to painting, from theatre to avant-guarde art and net art, construction of robots and simulation of brain functions. The result is an astonishing range of new possibilities for the arts and new perspectives regarding our knowledge of the world.

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 is included.

Why do we value music? Many people report that listening to music is one of life's most rewarding activities. In Critique of Pure Music, James O. Young seeks to explain why this is so. Formalists tell us that music is appreciated as pure, contentless form. On this view, listeners receive pleasure, or a pleasurable 'musical' emotion, when they explore the abstract patterns found in music. Music, formalists believe, does not arouse ordinary emotions such as joy, melancholy or fear, nor can it represent emotion or provide psychological insight. Young holds that formalists are wrong on all counts. Drawing upon the latest psychological research, he argues that music is expressive of emotion by resembling human expressive behaviour. By resembling human expressive behaviour, music is able to arouse ordinary emotions in listeners. This, in turn, makes possible the representation of emotion by music. The representation of emotion in music gives music the capacity to provide psychological insight-into the emotional lives of composers, and the emotional lives of individuals from a variety of times and places. And it is this capacity of music to provide psychological insight which explains a good deal of the value of music, both vocal and purely instrumental. Without it, music could not be experienced as profound. Philosophers, psychologists, musicians, musicologists, and music lovers will all find something of interest in this book.

The book contains analyses and interpretations of multidimensional perspectives in philosophical, economical and psychological research on imagination. The authors analyse Russian (N. Bierdiajew) and French philosophy and anthropology (G. Bachelard, G. Durand), German conceptions (I. Kant's, F. Baader's, F. Schiller 's or Heideggerian interpretations) of the role of imagination in art, science and sociopolitical domains. Image and imagination play the main role in the contemporary social world. It is investigated by psychology, sociology and political sciences, and many subdisciplines of philosophy have their own traditions in approaches to image and imagination problem. The authors try to integrate the results of these research efforts.

The concept of secular millennialism summarizes a crucial point made by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism: that twentieth-century totalitarian movements, in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union under Stalin, are not nationalistic but essentially millennialist, focused on the achievement of a universal world order. The question of whether totalitarian thinking can be located in a secular millennialist tradition is brought to the forefront in Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism: Its Trail from Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler by Benjamin Bennett. Bennett contends that the new philosophical science of aesthetics-beginning in the eighteenth century with Baumgarten, Kant, and Schiller-is the source of such a tradition. Bennett uses the term "aesthetics" to designate a tradition which begins under that name but, in the course of the nineteenth century, concerns itself less directly with questions of beauty or art while not losing its secular millennialist tendency. He argues that modern philosophical hermeneutics, in Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, belongs to the aesthetic tradition. Bennett explores the realistic novel as the main vehicle by which aesthetic tradition maintains itself in the nineteenth century and attracts a large popular following. The argument culminates in a discussion of relations among aesthetics, totalitarian propaganda, and the "totalitarian imagination" with its dream of "human omnipotence" (Arendt). Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism also maintains an attentiveness to instances of resistance against the aesthetic impetus in history-hence ultimately against totalitarianism.