The book proposes to see the talk about rules-following as a way of giving an account of particular people's characters and their lives. This focus on understanding others as variously coping with the claims of particular rules attempts to specify the variety of "attitudes towards a soul" as discussed in the Wittgensteinian tradition. The book derives from the philosophical tradition that considers human beings as rule-following creatures. It suggests that rules followed by other people allow for understanding and sympathising with them. Coping with rules is explored as a complicated lived practice, with respect to: particularised rules holding in relation to a context or to individual people, the variety of our responses to rules we are subject to, or our failure in coping with them.

Regarding Santayana it has been claimed that he lacks a system while contradicting himself in outrageous ways. An attentive analysis of his complete oeuvre, however, reveals something else entirely. It is not easy to classify a thinker as a Platonic materialist, an ironic nihilist, a spiritual atheist, and a conservative without political commitment, but, if one respects his own language, one discerns an astonishing, little-known Santayana, whose philosophical leitmotif consists in: 1) detecting the numerous "false steps," logical and moral, supplied by the imagination when it confuses things with the names that designate them, or the world with the feelings that it provokes in the human animal-these errors assume diverse faces: pantheism, moralism, egotism, subjectivism, transcendentalism, Platonism, Puritanism, and utopianism; 2) avoiding these illusions in such a way as to keep the spiritual door open as a form of life to be lived out in an honest fashion; 3) recognizing the natural origin of these temptations and asking oneself what moves humans to succumb imperceptibly to these mistakes, at times tragic, at others comical, and what precautions one can take to remain cognizant of the deceitful leaps that can hijack one's life; and 4) proposing as an alternative the radical distinction between essence and existence, which leads him to distinguish four realms of being: the realm of essence, the realm of matter, the realm of truth, and the realm of spirit. Essence as logical identity, matter as contingent existence, truth as frozen history, and spirit as the flames that part from contingency and approximate the eternal. An attempt has been made in this book to expand on and clarify these questions.

Dangerous Art takes up the problem of judging works of art using moral standards. When we think that a work is racist, or morally dangerous, what do we mean? James Harold approaches the topic from two angles. First, he takes up the moral question on its own. What could it mean to say that a work of art (rather than, say, a human being) is immoral? He then steps back and examines how moral evaluation fits into the larger task of evaluating artworks. If an artwork is immoral, what does that tell us about how to value the artwork? By tackling the issue from both sides, Harold demonstrates how many of the reasons previously given for thinking that works of art are immoral do not stand up to careful scrutiny. While many philosophers of art have simply assumed that artworks can be evaluated morally and proceeded as though such assessments were unproblematic, Harold highlights the complexities and difficulties inherent in such evaluations. He argues that even when works of art are rightly condemned from a moral point of view, the relationship between that moral flaw and their value as artworks is complex. He instead defends a moderate, skeptic version of autonomism between morality and aesthetics. Employing figures and ideas from ancient Greece, classical China, and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as William Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, he argues that we cannot judge artworks in the same way that we judge people on moral grounds. In this sense, we can judge an artwork to be both wicked and beautiful; nothing requires us to judge an artwork more or less valuable aesthetically just because we judge it to be morally bad or good. Taking up complex issues at the intersection of art and ethics, Dangerous Art will appeal to philosophers and students interested in art, aesthetics, moral philosophy, and philosophy of mind.

Decades of research on affect and emotion have brought out the paramount importance of affective processes for human lives. Affect in Relation brings together perspectives from social science and cultural studies to analyze the formative, subject constituting potentials of affect and emotion. Relational affect is understood not as individual mental states, but as social-relational processes that are both formative and transformative of human subjects. This volume explores relational affect through a combination of interdisciplinary case studies within four key contexts: Part I: "Affective Families" deals with the affective dynamics in transnational families who are scattered across several regions and nations. Part II: "Affect and Place" brings together work on affective place-making in the contexts of migration and in political movements. Part III: "Affect at Work" analyzes the affective dimension of contemporary white-collar workplaces. Part IV: "Affect and Media" focuses on the role of media in the formation and mobilization of relational affect. In its transdisciplinary spirit, analytical rigor and focus on timely and salient global matters, Affect in Relation consolidates the field of affect studies and opens up new avenues for scholarly and practical co-operation. It will appeal to both students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies and human development.

Soccer has long been known as 'the beautiful game'. This multi-disciplinary volume explores soccer, soccer culture, and the representation of soccer in art, film, and literature, using the critical tools of aesthetics, poetics, and rhetoric. Including international contributions from scholars of philosophy, literary and cultural studies, linguistics, art history, and the creative arts, this book begins by investigating the relationship between beauty and soccer and asks what criteria should be used to judge the sport's aesthetic value. Covering topics as diverse as humor, national identity, style, celebrity, and social media, its chapters examine the nature of fandom, the role of language, and the significance of soccer in contemporary popular culture. It also discusses what one might call the 'stylistics' of soccer, analyzing how players, fans, and commentators communicate on and off the pitch, in the press, on social media, and in wider public discourse. The Aesthetics, Poetics, and Rhetoric of Soccer makes for fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in sport, culture, literature, philosophy, linguistics, and society.

Comprehending tragedy has been a major philosophical and critical preoccupation in Western thought. Whether concerned with the generic problem of definition or with tragedy in the context of specific writers or periods, books with multiple and often conflicting perspectives abound. In an effort to bring order to the explanations over two millennia, "Tragedy and Tragic Theory" lucidly analyzes the principal ideas about tragedy from Plato to the present.

Critically surveying the similarities and differences among major theories, Palmer analyzes features associated with tragedy, such as the tragic hero, katharsis, and self-recognition; develops a working definition of tragedy; and applies these ideas to a sampling of plays that present special interpretive problems. He incorporates and explores the ideas of such eminent thinkers as Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzche, Schopenhauer, Schiller, Kierkegaard, and Freud, as well as contemporary theorists, who also appear with biographical blurbs in an appendix to the volume along with an extensive bibliography. By examining both tragedy and the theoretical responses to tragedy, this study demonstrates that the definition of tragedy depends on the meaning perceived by an audience rather than on a structured stimulus independent of response; yet, it does not abandon the possibility of isolating fixed defining characteristics. The audience response approach provides a framework for analyzing earlier theories. Systematically developed, the study is equally valuable as a text in drama and criticism or as a convenient reference tool to drama theory and theorists.

This book offers a unique interpretation of tragic literature in the Western tradition, deploying the method and style of Analytic philosophy. Richard Gaskin argues that tragic literature seeks to offer moral and linguistic redress (compensation) for suffering. Moral redress involves the balancing of a protagonist's suffering with guilt (and vice versa): Gaskin contends that, to a much greater extent than has been recognized by recent critics, traditional tragedy represents suffering as incurred by avoidable and culpable mistakes of a cognitive nature. Moral redress operates in the first instance at the level of the individual agent. Linguistic redress, by contrast, operates at a higher level of generality, namely at the level of the community: its fundamental motor is the sheer expressibility of suffering in words. Against many writers on tragedy, Gaskin argues that language is competent to express pain and suffering, and that tragic literature has that expression as one its principal purposes. The definition of tragic literature in this book is expanded to include more than stage drama: the treatment stretches from the Classical and Medieval periods through to the early twentieth century. There is a special focus on Sophocles, but Gaskin takes account of most other major tragic authors in the European tradition, including Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, Seneca, Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Buchner, Ibsen, Hardy, Kafka, and Mann; lesser-known areas, such as Renaissance neo-Latin tragedy, are also covered. Among theorists of tragedy, Gaskin concentrates on Aristotle and Bradley; but the contributions of numerous contemporary commentators are also assessed. Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: A Philosophical Perspective offers a new and genuinely interdisciplinary perspective on tragedy that will be of considerable interest both to philosophers of literature and to literary critics.

Reflections on Architecture, Society and Politics brings together a series of thirteen interview-articles by Graham Cairns in collaboration with some of the most prominent polemic thinkers and critical practitioners from the fields of architecture and the social sciences, including Noam Chomsky, Peggy Deamer, Robert A.M. Stern, Daniel Libeskind and Kenneth Frampton. Each chapter explores the relationship between architecture and socio-political issues through discussion of architectural theories and projects, citing specific issues and themes that have led to, and will shape, the various aspects of the current and future built environment. Ranging from Chomsky's examination of the US-Mexico border as the architecture of oppression to Robert A.M. Stern's defence of projects for the Disney corporation and George W. Bush, this book places politics at the center of issues within contemporary architecture.

"Art and Social Theory" provides a comprehensive introduction to sociological studies of the arts. It examines the central debates of social theorists and sociologists about the place of the arts in society and the social significance of aesthetics.

provides a comprehensive introduction to sociological study of art;
examines the central debates of social theorists and sociologists about the place of the arts in society and the social significance of aesthetics;
discusses the meaning of the arts in relation to changing cultural institutions and socio-economic structures;
explores questions of aesthetic value and cultural politics, taste and social class, money and patronage, ideology and utopia, myth and popular culture, and the meaning of modernism and postmodernism;
presents lucid accounts of leading social theorists of the arts from Weber, Simmel, Benjamin, Kracauer and the Frankfurt School to Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Luhmann and Jameson.

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the social practice of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of taste. For the first time, this book unites sociologists and other social scientists with artists and curators, art theorists and art educators, and art, design and cultural historians who engage with the practice of taste as it relates to encounters with art, cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life, in national and transnational contexts. The volume is divided into four sections. The first section on 'Taste and art', shows how art practice was drawn into the sphere of 'good taste', contrasting this with a post-conceptualist critique that offers a challenge to the social functions of good taste through an encounter with art. The next section on 'Taste making and the museum' examines the challenges and changing social, political and organisational dynamics propelling museums beyond the terms of a supposedly universal institution and language of taste. The third section of the book, 'Taste after Bourdieu in Japan' offers a case study of the challenges to the cross-cultural transmission and local reproduction of 'good taste', exemplified by the complex cultural context of Japan. The final section on 'Taste, the home and everyday life' juxtaposes the analysis of the reproduction of inequality and alienation through taste, with arguments on how the legacy of ideas of 'good taste' have extended the possibilities of experience and sharpened our consciousness of identity. As the first book to bring together arts practitioners and theorists with sociologists and other social scientists to examine the legacy and continuing validity of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of taste, this publication engages with the opportunities and problems involved in understanding the social value and the cultural dispositions of taste 'after Bourdieu'. It does so at a moment when the practice of taste is being radically changed by the global expansion of cultural choices, and the emergence of deploying impersonal algorithms as solutions to cultural and creative decision-making.

This book is centred around the examination of whether it is possible to find cognitive aspects or purposes in aesthetic judgements and in perceptions of beauty, and whether it is possible to meaningfully develop cognitive aesthetics as a unified science (the unification of philosophical and cognitive approaches) using an epistemic background of beauty and art. The book offers various aspects of understanding cognitive characteristics of aesthetic experience. The authors examine the distinction between ordinary and aesthetic experience. They regard a conceptual and semantic analysis of the concept of beauty and focuse on the differences in the evaluation of physical beauty between the sexes from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. The problem of the facial attractiveness and the aesthetic experience from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience is also object of their investigation. The contributors elaborate on beauty in music and emotionality, the problem of the beauty in mathematics and the mathematics of beauty, and consider the vision of how cognitive science affects art theory.

Drawing extensively upon archival resources and manuscript evidence, Wordsworth Before Coleridge rewrites the early history of Wordsworth's intellectual development and thereby overturns a century-old consensus that derives his most important philosophical ideas from Coleridge. Beginning with Wordsworth's mathematical and poetic studies at Hawkshead Grammar School and Cambridge University, both of which tutored the young poet in mind-matter dualism, the book charts the process by which Wordsworth came, not to reject this philosophical foundation, but to reevaluate the indispensable role of passion within it. Prompted by his reading in 1793 or early 1794 of Dugald Stewart's Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Wordsworth rejected the exclusive rationality of William Godwin's political philosophy and the anti-passionate morality of Alexander Pope's philosophical poetics. Subsequent exposure, between 1795 and 1797, to Cambridge Platonism and English Kantianism supplied the key ideas of mind-nature fitness and multilevel psychological activity that, along with Stewart's analysis of imaginative association, animate Wordsworth's signature philosophy of "feeling intellect," from the initial drafts of The Pedlar and The Prelude in 1798 to the "Prospectus" to The Recluse and The Excursion, published together in 1814. By presenting for the first time a fully nuanced account of Wordsworth's intellectual formation prior to the advent of Coleridge as his close companion and creative collaborator, Wordsworth Before Coleridge reveals at long last the true sources and abiding originality of the poet's philosophical mind.

How is love different from lust or infatuation? Do love and marriage really go together "like a horse and carriage"? Does sex have any necessary connection to either? And how important are love, sex, and marriage to a well-lived life? In the Second Edition of this lively, lucid, and comprehensive book, Raja Halwani explores and elucidates the nature, uses, and ethics of romantic love, sexuality, and marriage. It is structured in three parts: Love examines the nature of romantic love and how it differs from other types of love, such as friendship and parental love. It also investigates the relationship of love to morality and asks what limits morality puts on romantic love and even whether romantic love is inherently moral. Sex demonstrates the difficulty in defining sex and the sexual, and examines what constitutes good and bad sex in terms of pleasure, "naturalness," and moral permissibility. It discusses the nature of sexual desire and its connection to objectification and virtue, all the while looking at specific sexual engagements such as pornography, BDSM, and raced desires. Marriage traces the history of the institution and describes the various forms in which marriage exists and the reasons why people marry. It also investigates the necessity of marriage and ways in which it requires reform. Updates and Revisions in the Second Edition Expands the coverage of love and morality from one to two chapters, incorporating much of the recent literature on love as a moral emotion. Includes a new chapter on sex and virtue ethics. Ends each of the chapters on sex with an "applied" topic, such as pornography, BDSM, prostitution, racial sexual desires, and adultery. Increases coverage of the nature and purpose of marriage, including debates surrounding same-sex marriage, but also moving beyond these debates to include issues on minimal marriage, temporary marriage, polygamy, and other forms of marriage. Updates the Further Reading and Study Questions sections at the end of each chapter and provides an up-to-date comprehensive bibliography at the back of the book. Includes new discussions of topics on the nature of love; love and reasons; distinctions between two types of romantic love; love and its connections to moral theories; definitions of crucial sexual concepts; objectification; virtue and sex; racial sexual desires; and the definition of marriage and whether it is important as an institution.

This volume brings philosophers, art historians, intellectual historians, and literary scholars together to argue for the philosophical significance of Michael Fried's art history and criticism. It demonstrates that Fried's work on modernism, artistic intention, the ontology of art, theatricality, and anti-theatricality can throw new light on problems in and beyond philosophical aesthetics. Featuring an essay by Fried and articles from world-leading scholars, this collection engages with philosophical themes from Fried's texts, and clarifies the relevance to his work of philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Morris Weitz, Elizabeth Anscombe, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Denis Diderot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Jacques Ranciere, and Soren Kierkegaard. As it makes a case for the importance of Fried for philosophy, this volume contributes to current debates in analytic and continental aesthetics, philosophy of action, philosophy of history, political philosophy, modernism studies, literary studies, and art theory.

This book defines theatricality and performativity through metaphors of texture and weaving, drawn mainly from anthropologist Tim Ingold and philosopher Stephen C. Pepper. Tracing the two concepts' various relations to practices of seeing and doing, but also to conflicting values of novelty and normativity, the study proceeds in a series of intertwining threads, from the theatrical to the performative: Antitheatrical (Plato, the Baroque, Michael Fried); Pro-theatrical (directors Wagner, Fuchs, Meyerhold, Brecht, and Brook); Dramatic (weaving memory in Shaffer's Amadeus and Beckett's Footfalls); Efficient (from modernist "machines for living in" to the "smart home"); Activist (knit graffiti, clown patrols, and the Anthropo(s)cene). An approach is developed in which 'performativity' names the way we tacitly weave worlds and identities, variously concealed or clarified by the step-aside tactics of 'theatricality'.

Since the 1990s, artists and art writers around the world have increasingly undermined the essentialism associated with notions of "critical practice." We can see this manifesting in the renewed relevance of what were previously considered "outsider" art practices, the emphasis on first-person accounts of identity over critical theory, and the proliferation of exhibitions that refuse to distinguish between art and the productions of culture more generally. How Folklore Shaped Modern Art: A Post-Critical History of Aesthetics underscores how the cultural traditions, belief systems and performed exchanges that were once integral to the folklore discipline are now central to contemporary art's "post-critical turn." This shift is considered here as less a direct confrontation of critical procedures than a symptom of art's inclusive ideals, overturning the historical separation of fine art from those "uncritical" forms located in material and commercial culture. In a global context, aesthetics is now just one of numerous traditions informing our encounters with visual culture today, symptomatic of the pull towards an impossibly pluralistic image of art that reflects the irreducible conditions of identity.

In cognitive research, metaphors have been shown to help us imagine complex, abstract, or invisible ideas, concepts, or emotions. Contributors to this book argue that metaphors occur not only in language, but in audio visual media well. This is all the more evident in entertainment media, which strategically "sell" their products by addressing their viewers' immediate, reflexive understanding through pictures, sounds, and language. This volume applies cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) to film, television, and video games in order to analyze the embodied aesthetics and meanings of those moving images.

Aesthetics and Politics of Space in Russia and Japan: A Comparative Philosophical Study examines the parallels between Russian and Japanese philosophies and religions by revealing a common concept of space in Russian and Japanese aesthetics and political theories. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein shows points of convergence between the two traditions regarding the treatment of space within the realm of identity (both individual and communal), and in formulations of the relationship between regionalism, localism and globalism. Russian and Japanese philosophers like Nishida, Watsuji, Trubetzkoy, and the Eurasianists transformed the traditional notion of communal space, which has always been seen as an organic time-space unity, into a sophisticated element very well described as "time-space development." Botz-Bornstein's comparative study also leads to an analysis of contemporary themes. Reflections on Noh-plays and icons, for example, permit him to untangle the relationships between the virtual, the dream, the imaginary, and reality. Virtual reality, as an environment that pulls users into itself, makes use of strategies that are also common in Noh-plays and icons, both of which share a particular conception of space. The "non-Western" alternatives presented in Aesthetics and Politics of Space in Russia and Japan can be considered as useful additions to contemporary political and aesthetic discourses.

The book presents the various viewpoints that poetics, literary history and Western rhetoric have adopted throughout Western history. The aim of poetics is to render the specificity of the literary discourse by either highlighting the extra literary generative forces or by focusing on the intrinsic study of literary works. Rhetoric chiefly places emphasis on the verbal effects of discourses whereas literary history predominantly examines the temporal succession of the literary systems or of the literary institution. The author focuses on the three sections: poetics, rhetoric, and literary history and provides an introductory study on the subject of reference.

When the Enlightenment thinker Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote his treatise Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry in 1766, he outlined the strengths and weaknesses of each art. Painting was assigned to the realm of space; poetry to the realm of time. Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics explores how artists since the eighteenth century up to the present day have grappled with the consequences of Lessing's theory and those that it spawned. As the book reveals, many artists have been - and continue to be - influenced by Lessing-like theories, which have percolated into the art education and art criticism. Artists from Jean Raoux to Willem de Kooning and Frances Bacon, and art critics such as Clement Greenberg, have felt the weight of Lessing's theories in their modes of creation, whether consciously or not. Should we sound the death knell for the theories of Lessing and his kind? Or will conceptions of temporality, spatiality and artistic competition continue to unfold? This book - the first to consider how Lessing's writings connect to visual art's production - brings these questions to the fore.

Benjamin Tilghman has been a leading commentator on analytic philosophy for many years. This book brings together his most significant and influential work on aesthetics. Spanning a period of thirty years and covering topics in aesthetics from literature to painting, the collection traces the development of Tilghman's two principal themes; a rejection of philosophical theory as a way of resolving problems about our understanding and appreciation of art and the importance of the representation and presentation of the human and human concerns in art. Tilghman is profoundly influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his work is informed throughout by his conception and practice of philosophy. Written with exceptional clarity and with many references to original work in both painting and literature, this collection will be an invaluable resource not only for professional philosophers but for those working in the arts generally, art historians, critics and literary theorists.

Choreographies of the Living explores the implications of shifting from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman reveals the aesthetic impulse itself to be profoundly trans-species, and in doing so she revises our received wisdom about the value and functions of artistic capacities. Countering the long history of aesthetic theory in the West-beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and moving up through the recent claims of "neuroaesthetics"-Rohman challenges the likening of aesthetic experience to an exclusively human form of judgment. Turning toward the animal in new frameworks for understanding aesthetic impulses, Rohman emphasizes a deep coincidence of humans' and animals' elaborations of fundamental life forces. Examining a range of literary, visual, dance, and performance works and processes by modernist and contemporary figures such as Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Merce Cunningham, Rohman reconceives the aesthetic itself not as a distinction separating humans from other animals, but rather as a framework connecting embodied beings. Her view challenges our species to acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most hallowed and formerly exceptional activities.