This book combines insights from the humanities and modern neuroscience to explore the contribution of affect and embodiment on meaning-making in case studies from animation, video games, and virtual worlds. As we interact more and more with animated characters and avatars in everyday media consumption, it has become vital to investigate the ways that animated environments influence our perception of the liberal humanist subject. This book is the first to apply recent research on the application of the embodied mind thesis to our understanding of embodied engagement with nonhumans and cyborgs in animated media, analyzing works by Emile Cohl, Hayao Miyazaki, Tim Burton, Norman McLaren, the Quay Brothers, Pixar, and many others. Drawing on the breakthroughs of modern brain science to argue that animated media broadens the viewer's perceptual reach, this title offers a welcome contribution to the growing literature at the intersection of cognitive studies and film studies, with a perspective on animation that is new and original. 'Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation' will be essential reading for researchers of Animation Studies, Film and Media Theory, Posthumanism, Video Games, and Digital Culture, and will provide a key insight into animation for both undergraduate and graduate students. Because of the increasing importance of visual effect cinema and video games, the book will also be of keen interest within Film Studies and Media Studies, as well as to general readers interested in scholarship in animated media.

From explorations of video game series to Netflix shows to Facebook timelines, Subjective Experiences of Interactive Nostalgia helps readers understand what it is actually like to be nostalgic in a world that increasingly asks us to interact with our past. Interdisciplinary authors tackle the subject from historical, philosophical, rhetorical, sociological, and economic perspectives, all the while asking big questions about what it means to be asked to be active participants in our own mediated histories. Scholars and pop culture enthusiasts alike will find something to love as this collection moves from a look at traditional interactive media, such as video games, to nostalgia within all things digital and ends with a rethinking of the potentials of nostalgia itself.

Ideas gain legitimacy as they are put to some practical use. A study of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) supports this pragmatism as a way of thinking about truth and meaning. Architecture has a strong pragmatic strand, not least as we think of building users, architecture as a practice, the practical demands of building, and utility. After all, Vitruvius placed firmness and delight in the company of utilitas amongst his demands on architecture. Peirce (pronounced 'purse') was a logician, and so many of his ideas are couched in terms of formal propositions and their limitations. His work appeals therefore to many architects grappling with the digital age, and references to his work cropped up in the Design Methods Movement that developed and grew from the 1950s. That movement sought to systematise the design process, contributing to the idea of the RIBA Plan of Work, computer-aided design, and various controversies about rendering the design process transparent and open to scrutiny. Peirce's commitment to logic led him to investigate the basic elements of logical statements, notably the element of the sign. His best-known contribution to design revolves around his intricate theory of semiotics, the science of signs. The study of semiotics divided around the 1980s between advocates of Peirce's semiotics, and the broader, more politically charged field of structuralism. The latter has held sway in architectural discourse since the 1980s. Why this happened and what we gain by reviving a Peircean semiotics is the task of this book.

Life as Art brings the resources of contemporary aesthetics since Nietzsche to bear on the problems of how one integrates the aesthetic emphases of meaning, liberation, and creativity into one's daily life. By linking together the aesthetic and ethical accounts of critical theorists, phenomenologists, and existentialists into a coherent view on the artful life, Life as Art shows the ways in which much of contemporary Continental theory has been concerned with alternative ways of constructing one's own life. Seen as a unified phenomenon, life as art signifies an active attempt to create a life which bears the resistance, openness, and creativity found in artworks.

This international collection discusses how the individualised, reflexive, late modern era has changed the way we experience and act on our emotions. Divided into four sections that include studies ranging across multiple continents and centuries, Emotions in Late Modernity does the following: Demonstrates an increased awareness and experience of emotional complexity in late modernity by challenging the legal emotional/rational divide; positive/negative concepts of emotional valence; sociological/ philosophical/psychological divisions around emotion, morality and gender; and traditional understandings of love and loneliness. Reveals tension between collectivised and individualised-privatised emotions in investigating 'emotional sharing' and individualised responsibility for anger crimes in courtrooms; and the generation of emotional energy and achievement emotions in classrooms. Debates the increasing mediation of emotions by contrasting their historical mediation (through texts and bodies) with contemporary digital mediation of emotions in classroom teaching, collective mobilisations (e.g. riots) and film and documentary representations. Demonstrates reflexive micro and macro management of emotions, with examinations of the 'politics of fear' around asylum seeking and religious subjects, and collective commitment to climate change mitigation. The first collection to investigate the changing nature of emotional experience in contemporary times, Emotions in Late Modernity will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as sociology of emotions, cultural studies, political science and psychology.

The downsides of monogamy are felt by most people engaged in long-term relationships, including restrictions on self-discovery, limits on friendship, sexual boredom, and a circumscribed understanding of intimacy. Yet, a "happily ever after" monogamy is assumed to be the ideal form of romantic love in many modern societies: a relationship that is morally ideal and will bring the most happiness to its two partners. In Why It's OK to Not Be Monogamous, Justin L. Clardy deeply questions these assumptions. He rejects the claim that non-monogamy among honest, informed and consenting adults is morally impermissible. He shows instead how polyamorous relationships can actually be exemplars of moral virtue. The book discusses how social and political forces sustain and reward monogamous relationships. The book defines non-monogamy as a privative concept; a negation of monogamy. Looking at its prevalence in the United States, the book explains how common criticisms of non-monogamy come up short. Clardy argues, as some researchers have recently shown-monogamy relies on continually demonizing non-monogamy to sustain its moral status. Finally, the book concludes with a focus on equality, asking what justice for polyamorous individuals might look like.

Masculinities and Desire considers the question of male subjectivity in relation to Deleuze and Guattari's theory of desire. Western tradition has thought of desire from the vantage point of masculine subjectivity; what happens when the order is reversed, and desire speaks through masculinity? Can masculinity be conceived beyond the gender binary and thus affirm its potential to transcend the patriarchal order? In answer, Masculinities and Desire calls for a radically new approach to traditional cultural criticism. Contributing a critical male perspective, the book sheds new light on the conceptual and ethical limits of established, representational (gender) criticism. Reflecting on masculinity with Deleuze, the book explores what happens to the masculine subject in his becoming-minoritarian and thus emerging as a work of desire. Wojtaszek examines the confining representations of masculinity in realms long associated with men, such as violence, virulent psychosis, metaphysical cannibalism and virtualization. Inspired by Deleuze's appeal for immanence, Wojtaszek argues that films including American Psycho, Fight Club, Becoming John Malkovich and The Matrix are adventures of deterritorialization that imaginatively tackle various masculinities, affirming their creative resistance and reinvention of subjectivity. Desire is revealed to be a powerful catalyst for escaping the regime of patriarchal representation.

This book addresses the 'perennial' question of the meaning of life from the point of view of a novel interpretation of Aristotle's teleology. Beginning with the premise that at the core of modernity and modern moral imagination are the entropy of meaning and the sense of meaninglessness, the author critically engages with the work of the post-war existentialists, chiefly that of Albert Camus and Martin Heidegger, to argue that their analyses are unconvincing and that the question of the meaning of being should therefore be approached using different assumptions, based on the notion of flourishing life. From this Aristotelian outlook, Existence, Meaning, Excellence employs Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of modernity, together with his conceptions of practice and the narrative unity of life and tradition to provide a novel philosophical account of existence, meaning and excellence - an account which is used to contribute to debates (between Kantian and Nietzschean perspectives) on the nature of art and genius, with Mozart's genius being used by way of illustration. A fascinating and powerfully argued engagement with existentialist thought that draws on the 'virtue' tradition to explore questions of meaning, as well as wider questions within philosophy, this book will appeal to philosophers and social theorists with interests in existentialism, moral philosophy and accounts of 'the good' based on the notions of human flourishing.

Rousseau and Nietzsche: Toward an Aesthetic Morality offers a vivid depiction of the problems and potential of modernity through the words of two of its most poignant voices. The book focuses upon the modern self's desire to individuate while facing the ethical responsibility to integrate into the world. Katrin Froese elegantly juxtaposes Nietzsche's drive for extraordinary individualism with Rousseau's call for the dependable citizen, demonstrating that where Nietzsche's aestheticism embraces the limitless and irreconcilable longings of a divided being, Rousseau's approach emphasizes the imposition of limits to ensure that harmony and contentment prevail. Going beyond conventional scholarship, the work emphasizes the similarities at the heart of Rousseau's notion of morality and Nietzsche's aestheticism: the moral vision that underlies Nietzsche's notion of art and the aesthetic understanding prevalent in Rousseau's moral system. This stunning new work of political philosophy will be of great use to scholars of political thought and readers seeking to understand what made Rousseau and Nietzsche's thought so decidedly modern.

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.

This innovative study re-evaluates the philosophical significance of aesthetics in the context of contemporary debates on the nature of philosophy. Lewis's main argument is that contemporary conceptions of meaning and truth have been reified, and that aesthetics is able to articulate why this is the case, with important consequences for understanding the horizons and nature of philosophical inquiry. Reification and the Aesthetics of Music challenges the most emphatic and problematic conceptions of meaning and truth in both analytic philosophy and postmodern thought by acknowledging the ontological and logical primacy of our concrete, practice-based experiences with aesthetic phenomena. By engaging with a variety of aesthetic practices, including Beethoven's symphonies and string quartets, Wagner's music dramas, Richard Strauss's Elektra, the twentieth-century avant-garde, Jamaican soundsystem culture, and punk and contemporary noise, this book demonstrates the aesthetic relevance of reification as well as the concept's applicability to contemporary debates within philosophy.

The Intertwining of Aesthetics and Ethics: Exceeding of Expectations, Ecstasy, Sublimity analyzes the common experiential ground for both aesthetics and ethics by considering experiential environment (both nature and art), the precedents to desire, the notion of experience incorporating a break, and the reverberations of surprise leading to the intertwining of aesthetics and ethics. Jadranka Skorin-Kapov discusses different philosophical positions on the relationship between nature and art, in conversation with Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Gadamer, and Adorno. She argues that Kantian sublimity can carry over from nature to art. As part of the discussions of expectations and authenticity, the author interprets Husserl's view on expectations, Heidegger's view on death and authenticity, Blanchot's view on death, and Arendt's view on natality. As for understanding the aesthetic experience as the paradigmatic experience, Skorin-Kapov is informed by Dewey's work on art as experience, Gadamer's work on experience of art, and Jauss's work on the aesthetics of reception and the horizon of expectations. After our sensibility and representational capability are broken, recuperation then leads to sublimity and the subsequent feelings of admiration and/or responsibility, allowing for the intertwining of aesthetics and ethics. Additionally, elements of Kantian morality, Foucault's ethics, and Kierkegaard's work on interactions between aesthetics and ethics together help to characterize the relation between aesthetics and ethics. Since we often encounter surprise due to unexpectedness in comedy, Skorin-Kapov also interprets philosophical views on the comedy and laughter (including Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Meredith, and Bergson), using the theatrical work of Dario Fo as an example. The novel analysis in The Intertwining of Aesthetics and Ethics will be of particular interest to students and scholars working or teaching in aesthetics, phenomenology, art history, cultural studies, and ethics.

In various ways, the essays presented in this volume explore the structures and aesthetic possibilities of music, dance and dramatic representation in ritual and theatrical situations in a diversity of ethnographic contexts in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Each essay enters into a discussion of the "logic" of aesthetic processes exploring their social and political and symbolic import. The aim is above all to explore the way artistic and aesthetic practices in performance produce and structure experience.

Affect and emotion have come to dominate discourse on social and political life in the mobile and networked societies of the early 21st century. This volume introduces a unique collection of essential concepts for theorizing and empirically investigating societies as Affective Societies. The concepts promote insights into the affective foundations of social coexistence and are indispensable to comprehend the many areas of conflict linked to emotion such as migration, political populism, or local and global inequalities. Adhering to an instructive narrative, Affective Societies provides historical orientation; detailed explication of the concept in question, clear-cut research examples, and an outlook at the end of each chapter. Presenting interdisciplinary research from scholars within the Collaborative Research Center "Affective Societies," this insightful monograph will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as affect and emotion, anthropology, cultural studies, and media studies.

From explorations of video game series to Netflix shows to Facebook timelines, Subjective Experiences of Interactive Nostalgia helps readers understand what it is actually like to be nostalgic in a world that increasingly asks us to interact with our past. Interdisciplinary authors tackle the subject from historical, philosophical, rhetorical, sociological, and economic perspectives, all the while asking big questions about what it means to be asked to be active participants in our own mediated histories. Scholars and pop culture enthusiasts alike will find something to love as this collection moves from a look at traditional interactive media, such as video games, to nostalgia within all things digital and ends with a rethinking of the potentials of nostalgia itself.

Aquinas on Beauty explores the nature and role of beauty in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with a standard definition of beauty provided by Aquinas, it explores each of the components of that definition. The result is a comprehensive account of Aquinas's formal view on the subject, supplemented by an exploration into Aquinas's commentary on Dionysius's Divine Names, including a comparison of his views with those of both Dionysius and those of Aquinas's mentor, Albert the Great. The book also highlights the tight connection in Aquinas's thought between aesthetics and ethics, and illustrates how Aquinas preserves what is best about aesthetic traditions preceding him, and anticipates what is best about aesthetic traditions that would follow, marrying objective and subjective aesthetic intuitions and charting a kind of via media between the common extremes.

This work outlines a new methodology for film analysis based on the radical materialist thought of Baruch Spinoza, re-evaluating contemporary cognitive media theory and philosophical theories on the emotional and intellectual aspects of film experience. Sticchi's exploration of Spinozian philosophy creates an experiential constructive model to blend the affective and intellectual aspects of cognition, and to combine it with different philosophical interpretations of film theory. Spinoza's embodied philosophy rejected logical and ethical dualisms, and established a perfect parallelism between sensation and reason and provides the opportunity to address negative emotions and sad passions without referring exclusively to traditional notions such as catharsis or sublimation, and to put forth a practical/embodied notion of Film-Philosophy. This new analytical approach is tested on four case studies, films that challenge the viewer's emotional engagement since they display situations of cosmic failure and depict controversial and damaged characters: A Serious Man (2009); Melancholia (2011); The Act of Killing (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). This book is an important addition to the literature in Film Studies, particularly in Cognitive Film Theory and Philosophy of Film. Its affective and semantic analyses of film experience (studies of embodied conceptualisation), connecting Spinoza's thought to the analysis of audiovisual media, will also be of interest to Philosophy scholars and in academic courses of film theory, film-philosophy and cognitive film studies.

"Rediscovering Aesthetics" brings together prominent international voices from art history, philosophy, and artistic practice to discuss the current role of aesthetics within and across their disciplines.
Following a period in which theories and histories of art, art criticism, and artistic practice seemed to focus exclusively on political, social, or empirical interpretations of art, aesthetics is being rediscovered both as a vital arena for discussion and a valid interpretive approach outside its traditional philosophical domain. This volume is distinctive, because it provides a selection of significant but divergent positions. The diversity of the views presented here demonstrates that a critical rethinking of aesthetics can be undertaken in a variety of (possibly incompatible) ways. The contributions open a transdisciplinary debate from which a new field of aesthetics may begin to emerge.
Contributors include: Claire Bishop, Diarmuid Costello, Paul Crowther, Arthur Danto, Nicholas Davey, Thierry de Duve, James Elkins, Francis Halsall, Michael Ann Holly, Julia Jansen, Michael Kelly, Robert Morris, Tony O'Connor, Peter Osborne, Adrian Piper, David Raskin, Carolee Schneemann, Richard Shiff, Wolfgang Welsch, and Richard Woodfield.

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.

Why are the visual arts so important and what is it that makes their forms significant? Countering recent interpretations of meaning that understand visual artworks on the model of literary texts, Crowther formulates a theory of the visual arts based on what their creation achieves both cognitively and aesthetically. He develops a phenomenology that emphasizes how visual art gives unique aesthetic expression to factors that are basic to perception. At the same time, he shows how various artistic media embody these factors in distinctive ways. Attentive to both the creation and reception of all major visual art forms (picturing, sculpture, architecture, and photography), "Phenomenology of the Visual Arts" also addresses complex idioms, including abstract, conceptual, and digital art.

This lively collection of essays explores the vital role of beauty in the human experience of place, interactions with other species, and contemplation of our own embodied lives. Devoting attention to themes such as global climate change, animal subjectivity, environmental justice and activism, and human moral responsibility for the environment, these contributions demonstrate that beauty is not only a meaningful dimension of our experience, but also a powerful strategy for inspiring cultural transformation. Taken as a whole, they underscore the ongoing relevance of aesthetics to the ecocritical project and the concern for beauty that motivates effective social and political engagement.

While comparative literature is a well-recognized field of study, the notion of comparative arts remains unfamiliar to many. In this fascinating book, Daniel Albright addresses the fundamental question of comparative arts: Are there many different arts, or is there one art which takes different forms? He considers various artistic media, especially literature, music, and painting, to discover which aspects of each medium are unique and which can be "translated" from one to another. Can a poem turn into a symphony, or a symphony into a painting?
Albright explores how different media interact, as in a drama, when speech, stage decor, and music are co-present, or in a musical composition that employs the collage method of the visual arts. Tracing arguments and questions about the relations among the arts from Aristotle's "Poetics" to the present day, he illuminates the understudied discipline of comparative arts and urges new attention to its riches.

In On the Genealogy of Color, Zed Adams argues for a historicized approach to conceptual analysis, by exploring the relevance of the history of color science for contemporary philosophical debates about color realism. Adams contends that two prominent positions in these debates, Cartesian anti-realism and Oxford realism, are both predicated on the assumption that the concept of color is ahistorical and unrevisable. Adams takes issue with this premise by offering a philosophical genealogy of the concept of color. This book makes a significant contribution to recent debates on philosophical methodology by demonstrating the efficacy of using the genealogical method to explore philosophical concepts, and will appeal to philosophers of perception, philosophers of mind, and metaphysicians.

The great German philosopher and aesthetic theorist Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) was one of the main philosophers of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. An accomplished musician, Adorno first focused on the theory of culture and art. Later he turned to the problem of the self-defeating dialectic of modern reason and freedom. In this collection of essays, imbued with the most up-to-date research, a distinguished roster of Adorno specialists explore the full range of his contributions to philosophy, history, music theory, aesthetics and sociology. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Adorno currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Adorno.

In this volume, Simona Goi and Frederick M. Dolan gather stimulating arguments for the indispensability of fiction-including poetry, drama, and film-as irreplaceable sites for wrestling with nature, meaning , shortcomings, and the future of modern politics. Between Terror and Freedom brings to the surface an understanding of modernity as a multifaceted and dynamic narrative as it relates to politics, philosophy, and fiction. Collecting essays across fields, Goi and Dolan challenge strict disciplinary boundaries. This is not meant to be read as another contribution to the debate of whether literature is, can, or should be political. Between Terror and Freedom instead reveals how literature illuminates and expands our understanding of philosophical and political questions. Political theorists, philosophers, cultural scholars, and rhetoricians offer a fresh perspective on the questions of our age and the paradoxes of modernity when they read literature.