In The Value of Literature, Rafe McGregor employs a unique approach - the combination of philosophical work on value theory and critical work on the relationship between form and content - to present a new argument for, and defence of, literary humanism. He argues that literature has value for art, for culture, and for humanity - in short, that it matters. Unlike most contemporary defenders of literary value, the author's strategy does not involve arguing that literature is good as a means to one of the various ends that matter to human beings. It is not that literature necessarily makes us cleverer, more sensitive, more virtuous, more creative, or just generally better people. Nor is it true that there is a necessary relation between literature and edification, clarification, cultural critique, catharsis, or therapy. Rather than offer an argument that forges a tenuous link between literature and truth, or literature and virtue, or literature and the sacred, this book analyses the non-derivative, sui generic value characteristic of literature and demonstrates why that matters as an end in itself.

In his Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Paul Crowther argued that art and aesthetic experiences have the capacity to humanize. In Art and Embodiment he develops this theme in much greater depth, arguing that art can bridge the gap between philosophy's traditional striving for generality and completeness, and the concreteness and contingency of humanity's basic relation to the world. As the key element in his theory, he proposes an ecological definition of art. His strategy involves first mapping out and analyzing the logical boundaries and ontological structures of the aesthetic domain. He then considers key concepts from this analysis in the light of a tradition in Continental philosophy (notably the work of Kant, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Hegel) which--by virtue of the philosophical significance that it assigns to art--significantly anticipates the ecological conception. On this basis, Crowther is able to give a full formulation of his ecological definition. Art, in making sensible or imaginative material into symbolic form, harmonizes and conserves what is unique and what is general in human experience. The aesthetic domain answers basic needs intrinsic to self-consciousness itself, and art is the highest realization of such needs. In the creation and reception of art the embodied subject is fully at home with his or her environment.

Claude Simon: Fashioning the Past by Writing the Present considers the aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical facets of a temporal paradox in the works of French novelist Claude Simon (1913-2005), and its broader implications for the study of narrative, and for cultural and post-modern theory. This paradox emerges from the problematic representation of the past through an aesthetic rooted in an exclusive valorization of the present. In his 1985 Nobel speech, as well as on other numerous occasions, Simon expressed a fascination with simultaneity through the provocative claim that he never wrote about the past, but attempted to capture only what was happening during the writing process, that is, in the "present of writing," as he put it. Simon's seemingly unambiguous claim raises significant issues and contradictions that become extensively apparent when the statement is considered in the light of his fictional works, since these must be construed, for the most part, as explorations of the past. In this study Alina Cherry propose to look at the tensions that arise from this paradox, and examine the present of writing holistically-that is both as a stylistic device and within the thematic context of Simon's works-in order to assess its capacity for becoming an instrument of ontological and epistemological inquiry that can also intervene powerfully in the decisive philosophical and socio-political debates that have animated the cultural landscape of post-World War II France. Simon's vivid portrayals of suffering and devastation open new ways of understanding the impact of some of the most traumatic historical events of the twentieth century: the two World Wars and the Spanish Civil War. This impact is necessarily connected with a need to tell these events, and to tell them in highly innovative ways, namely by creating a distinctive style that revolutionizes the outworn narrative traditions of a world whose very foundations have been shattered by the chaos of war and effectively undermines various institutions and dominant socio-cultural structures, revealing implicitly and explicitly, a strong ethical vein.

This book, which presents a cognitive-semiotic theory of cultural evolution, including that taking place in historical time, analyses various cognitive-semiotic artefacts and abilities. It claims that what makes human beings human is fundamentally the semiotic and cultural skills by means of which they endow their Lifeworld with meaning. The properties that have made human beings special among animals living in the terrestrial biosphere do not derive entirely from their biological-genetic evolution, but also stem from their interaction with the environment, in its culturally interpreted form, the Lifeworld. This, in turn, becomes possible thanks to the human ability to learn from other thinking beings, and to transfer experiences, knowledge, meaning, and perspectives to new generations.

Everyone is already painfully aware of our predicament - ecological extinctions, dwindling fossil fuel reserves and economic chaos. The solutions are less obvious, despite the many opportunities that surround us. We have never had more access to resources, knowledge and technology but this is not the problem. What we lack most is creative thinking, fuelled by collective optimism. In a pragmatic world run by careerist experts this is hardly surprising. As voters and consumers we are trained to choose and complain, but not how to envisage what we really, really want. How can we design a better world unless we revive the art of dreaming? For without dreams we are lost. Perhaps it should be the duty of all citizens to imagine alternative futures; in effect, to think more like designers. After all, designers have always been dreamers, and have often found ways to realize their dreams. Design for Micro-Utopias does not advocate a single, monolithic Utopia. Rather, it invites readers to embrace a more pluralized and mercurial version of Thomas More's famous 1516 novel of the same name. It therefore encourages the proliferation of many 'micro-utopias' rather than one 'Utopia'. This requires a less negative, critical and rational approach. Referencing a wide range of philosophical thinking from Aristotle to the present day, western and eastern spiritual ideals, and scientific, biological and systems theory, John Wood offers remedies for our excessively individualistic, mechanistic and disconnected thinking, and asks whether a metadesign approach might bring about a new mode of governance. This is a daring idea. Ultimately, he reminds us that if we believe that we will never be able to design miracles we make it more likely that this is so. The first step is to turn the 'impossible' into the 'thinkable'.

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Emerging from the disruption of the First World War, surrealism confronted the resulting 'crisis of consciousness' in a way that was arguably more profound than any other cultural movement of the time. The past few decades have seen an expansion of interest in surrealist writers, whose contribution to the history of ideas in the twentieth-century is only now being recognised. Surrealism: Key Concepts is the first book in English to present an overview of surrealism through the central ideas motivating the popular movement. An international team of contributors provide an accessible examination of the key concepts, emphasising their relevance to current debates in social and cultural theory. This book will be an invaluable guide for students studying a range of disciplines, including Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology and Cultural Studies, and anyone who wishes to engage critically with surrealism for the first time. Contributors: Dawn Ades, Joyce Cheng, Jonathan P. Eburne, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Guy Girard, Raihan Kadri, Michael Loewy, Jean-Michel Rabate, Michael Richardson, Donna Roberts, Bertrand Schmitt, Georges Sebbag, Raymond Spiteri, and Michael Stone-Richards.

Essays on Aesthetic Genesis is a collection of essays written on Jeff Mitscherling's work in realist phenomenology, Aesthetic Genesis: The Origin of Consciousness in the Intentional Being of Nature. The authors explicate, expand, contextualize and apply the concepts of intentional being, the "New Copernican Hypothesis" (a reversal of the fundamental tenet of phenomenology that all consciousness is intentional-intentionality, rather, gives rise to consciousness), the idea of intentional structures in nature, and the foundational concepts of Aesthetic Genesis as they appear in the work of Aristotle, Ingarden and Gadamer amongst others. This book takes as its focus Mitscherling's comprehensive phenomenological analysis of embodiment, aesthetic experience, the interpretation of texts, moral behavior, and cognition, and exemplifies subsequent work in the field of realist phenomenology being conducted by an international collection of active scholars influenced by Aesthetic Genesis.

Pictorial representation is one of the core questions in aesthetics and philosophy of art. What is a picture? How do pictures represent things? This collection of specially commissioned chapters examines the influential thesis that the core of pictorial representation is not resemblance but 'seeing-in', in particular as found in the work of Richard Wollheim. We can see a passing cloud as a rabbit, but we also see a rabbit in the clouds. 'Seeing-in' is an imaginative act of the kind employed by Leonardo's pupils when he told them to see what they could - for example, battle scenes - in a wall of cracked plaster. This collection examines the idea of 'seeing-in' as it appears primarily in the work of Wollheim but also its origins in the work of Wittgenstein. An international roster of contributors examine topics such as the contrast between seeing-in and seeing-as; whether or in what sense Wollheim can be thought of as borrowing from Wittgenstein; the idea that all perception is conceptual or propositional; the metaphor of figure and ground and its relation to the notion of 'two-foldedness'; the importance in art of emotion and the imagination. Wollheim, Wittgenstein and Pictorial Representation: Seeing-as and Seeing-in is essential reading for students and scholars of aesthetics and philosophy of art, and also of interest to those in related subjects such as philosophy of mind and art theory.

Arguing that we ought to look to psychedelic aesthetics of the 1960s in relation to current crises in liberal democracy, this book emphasizes the intersection of European thought and the psychedelic. The first half of the book focuses on philosophical influences of Herbert Marcuse and Antonin Artaud, while the second half shifts toward literary and theoretical influences of Aldous Huxley on psychedelic aesthetics. Framed within an emergent discourse of political theology, it suggests that taking a postsecular approach to psychedelic aesthetics helps us understand deeper connections between aesthetics and politics.

The Philosophical Contexts of Sartre's The Wall and Other Stories: Stories of Bad Faith presents a philosophical analysis of all five stories in Sartre's short-story collection. Kevin W. Sweeney argues that each of the five stories has its own philosophical idea or problem that serves as the context for the narrative. Sartre constructs each story as a reply to the philosophical issue in the context and as support for his position on that issue. In the opening story, "The Wall," Sartre uses the Constant-Kant debate to support his view that the story's protagonist is responsible for his ally's death. "The Room" presents in narrative form Sartre's criticism that the Freudian Censor is acting in bad faith. In "Erostratus," Sartre opposes Descartes's claim in his "hats and coats" example that we recognize the humanity of others by using our reason. In "Intimacy," Sartre again opposes a Cartesian position, this time the view that our feelings reveal our emotions. Sartre counters that Cartesian view by showing that the two women in the story act in bad faith because they do not distinguish their feelings from their emotions. The last story, "The Childhood of a Leader," shows how the protagonist acts in bad faith in trying to resolve the question of who he is by appealing to the view that one's roots in nature can provide one with a substantial identity. The stories are unified by showing the characters in all five narratives engaged in different acts of bad faith. The Philosophical Contexts of Sartre's The Wall and Other Stories is written for scholars interested in Jean-Paul Sartre's early literary and philosophical work, as well as for students interested in Sartre and twentieth-century French literature.

Forbidden Aesthetics, Ethical Justice, and Terror in Modern Western Culture explores the potential links between terror and aesthetics in modern Western society, specifically the affinity between terrorism and the possibility of an aesthetic appreciation of terrorist phenomena or events. But can we actually have an aesthetic appreciation of terror or terrorism? And if we can, is it ethical or legitimate? Emmanouil Aretoulakis proposes that Western spectators and subjects from the eighteenth century onwards have always felt, unconsciously or not, a certain kind of fascination or even exhilaration before scenes of tragedy and natural or manmade disaster. Owing to their immorality, such "forbidden" feelings go unacknowledged. It would definitely be callous as well as politically incorrect to acknowledge the existence of aesthetics in witnessing or representing human misery. Still, as Aretoulakis insists, our aesthetic faculties or even our appreciation of the beautiful are already inherent in how we view, appraise, and pass judgment upon phenomena of terrorism and disaster. Paradoxically, such a "forbidden aesthetics" is ethical despite its utter immorality.

Against Value in the Arts and Education proposes that it is often the staunchest defenders of art who do it the most harm, by suppressing or mollifying its dissenting voice, by neutralizing its painful truths, and by instrumentalizing its ambivalence. The result is that rather than expanding the autonomy of thought and feeling of the artist and the audience, art's defenders make art self-satisfied, or otherwise an echo-chamber for the limited and limiting self-description of people's lives lived in an "audit culture", a culture pervaded by the direct and indirect excrescence of practices of accountability. This book diagnoses the counter-intuitive effects of the rhetoric of value. It posits that the auditing of values pervades the fabric of people's work-lives, their education, and increasingly their everyday experience. The book uncovers figures of resentment, disenchantment and alienation fostered by the dogma of value. It argues instead that value judgments can behave insidiously, and incorporate aesthetic, ethical or ideological values fundamentally opposed to the "value" they purportedly name and describe. The collection contains contributions from leading scholars in the UK and US with contributions from anthropology, the history of art, literature, education, musicology, political science, and philosophy.

This book studies the tension between arts and politics in four contemporary artists from different countries, working with different media. The film directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne film parts of their natal city to refer to specific political problems in interpersonal relations. The novelist Arundhati Roy uses her poetic language to make room for people's desires; her fiction is utterly political and her political essays make place for the role of narratives and poetic language. Ai Weiwei uses references to Chinese history to give consistency to its 'economic miracle'. Finally, Burial's electronic music is firmly rooted in a living, breathing London; built to create a sound that is entirely new, and yet hauntingly familiar. These artists create in their own way a space for politics in their works and their oeuvre but their singularity comes together as a desire to reconstruct the political space within art from its ruins. These ruins were brought by the disenchantment of 1970s: the end of art, postmodernism, and the rise of design, marketing and communication. Each artwork bears the mark of the resistance against the depoliticisation of society and the arts, at once rejecting cynicism and idealism, referring to themes and political concepts that are larger than their own domain. This book focuses on these productive tensions.

In What Is Film?, Julie N. Books critically evaluates three philosophical doctrines of film realism (transparency, illusionism, and perceptual realism) and defends her view that films are creative works of art. By examining contemporary films, such as computer-animated films and films with computer-generated images, Dr. Books shows how films are creative works of art, thereby undermining the long-held view that films are slavish recordings of reality. This book is ideal for academics and courses on the philosophy of film, film theory, film history, filmmaking, metaphysics, and the philosophy of art.

In addition to being a great composer, Richard Wagner was also an important philosopher. Julian Young begins by examining the philosophy of art and society Wagner constructs during his time as a revolutionary anarchist-communist. Modernity, Wagner argued, is to be rescued from its current anomie through the rebirth of Greek tragedy (the original Gesamtkunstwerk) in the form of the "artwork of the future," an artwork of which his own operas are the prototype. Young then examines the entirely different philosophy Wagner constructs after his 1854 conversion from Hegelian optimism to Schopenhauerian pessimism. "Redemption" now becomes, not a future utopia in this world, but rather "transfigured" existence in another world, attainable only through death. Viewing Wagner's operas through the lens of his philosophy, the book offers often novel interpretations of Lohengrin, The Ring cycle, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal. Finally, Young dresses the cause of Friedrich Nietzsche's transformation from Wagner's intimate friend and disciple into his most savage critic. Nietzsche's fundamental accusation, it is argued, is one of betrayal: that Wagner betrayed his early, "life affirming" philosophy of art and life in favor of "life-denial." Nietzsche's assertion and the final conclusion of the book is that our task, now, is to "become better Wagnerians than Wagner."

The authors consider the relationship between knowledge and image, though multi-faceted, to be one of reciprocal dependence. But how do images carry and convey knowledge? The ambiguities of images means that interpretations do not necessarily follow the intention of the image producers. Through an array of different cases, the chapters critically reflect upon how images are mobilised and used in different knowledge practices, within certain knowledge traditions, in different historical periods. They question what we take for granted, what seems evident, what goes without saying. This approach spans across established categories such as "scientific imaging", "religious images" and "artworks", and considers how images may contribute meaning across such categories.

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.

What is love? What is it to be loved? Can we trust love? Is it overrated? These are just some of the questions Tony Milligan pursues in his novel exploration of a subject that has occupied philosophers since the time of Plato. Tackling the mood of pessimism about the nature of love that reaches back through Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, he examines the links between love and grief, love and nature, and between love of others and loving oneself. We love too few things in the world, Milligan concludes, adding that we need to be loved too, to appreciate our own value and the worth of life itself.

Nobody doubts that music has a special, somewhat mysterious power. Less clear is how we can evaluate that power. What makes music good or bad? Are there objective criteria for such a distinction? What impact can or should music have on individuals and on society as a whole? What are the factors responsible for the effect of music? This book summarizes and discusses how authors of classical antiquity addressed these questions on musical "ethos" and how they can be approached from a modern-day perspective. After systematically assembling and assessing the value-carrying characterizations of music in poetic literature, the author reviews all noteworthy Greek and Latin writings which enlighten musical "ethos" from the theoretical-philosophical perspective. He then carries the intuitions of the ancients into our time by proposing a coherent model to explain the relationship between music, ethos, and emotions based on the results of contemporary research in the disciplines of music psychology and philosophy. The concept of harmony, understood as the appropriate measure or as the balance of opposites and so central to the reflections of the ancient authors, plays a key role in shedding light on the value and impact, both positive and negative, of music in human existence. This book provides the most comprehensive overview available about the effect and ethos of music in antiquity and discusses many related questions of scholarly interest. It includes numerous references provided in the original language with translation, ample empirical material for further research, and an extensive bibliography.

Ancient thought, particularly that of Plato and Aristotle, has played an important role in the development of the field of aesthetics, and the ideas of ancient thinkers are still influential and controversial today. Ancient Aesthetics introduces and discusses the central contributions of key ancient philosophers to this field, carefully considering their theories regarding the arts, especially poetry, but also music and visual art, as well as the theory of beauty more generally. With a focus on Plato and Aristotle, the philosophers who have given us their thought about the arts at the greatest length, this volume also discusses Hellenistic aesthetics and Plotinus' theory of beauty, which was to prove very influential in later thought. Ancient Aesthetics is a valuable contribution to its field, and will be of interest to students of philosophy and classics.

This book theorizes the baroque as neither a time period nor an artistic style but as a collection of bodily practices developed from clashes between governmental discipline and artistic excess, moving between the dramaturgy of Jesuit spiritual exercises, the political theatre-making of Angelo Beolco (aka Ruzzante), and the civic governance of the Venetian Republic at a time of great tumult. The manuscript assembles plays seldom read or viewed by English-speaking audiences, archival materials from three Venetian archives, and several secondary sources on baroque, Renaissance, and early modern epistemology in order to forward and argument for understanding the baroque as a gathering of social practices. Such a rethinking of the baroque aims to complement the already lively studies of neo-baroque aesthetics and ethics emerging in contemporary scholarship on (for example) Latin American political art.

Narratives are artefacts of a special kind: they are intentionally crafted devices which fulfil their story-telling function by manifesting the intentions of their makers. But narrative itself is too inclusive a category for much more to be said about it than this; we should focus attention instead on the vaguely defined but interesting category of things rich in narrative structure. Such devices offer significant possibilities, not merely for the representation of stories, but for the expression of point of view; they have also played an important role in the evolution of reliable communication. Narratives and narrators argues that much of the pleasure of narrative communication depends on deep-seated and early developing tendencies in human beings to imitation and to joint attention, and imitation turns out to be the key to understanding such important literary techniques as free indirect discourse and character-focused narration. The book also examines irony in narrative, with an emphasis on the idea of the expression of ironic points of view. It looks closely at the idea of character, or robust, situation-independent ways of acting and thinking, as it is represented in narrative. It asks whether scepticism about the notion of character should have us reassess the dramatic and literary tradition which places such emphasis on character.

De-Signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice throws new light on the terrain between theory and practice in transdisciplinary discourses of design and art. The editors, Elizabeth Grierson, Harriet Edquist, and Helene Frichot, bring together diverse approaches to design theory, practice, and philosophy from leading scholars in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Themes include spatiality, difference, cultural aesthetics, and identity in the expanded field of place-making and being. The concept that design can be de-signed is presented as a way of exploring different approaches to an experimental and experiential thinking-doing that promises to further open up research possibilities in the fields of design and art thinking and practice. The book enacts a series of cartographic devices to articulate the spaces between theory and practice.

The Mahabharata is at once an archive and a living text, a sourcebook complete by itself and an open text perennially under construction. Driving home this striking contemporary relevance of the famous Indian epic, Mahabharata Now focuses on the issues of narration, aesthetics and ethics, as also their interlinkages. The cross-disciplinary essays in the volume imaginatively re-interpret the 'timeless' classic in the light of the pre-modern Indian narrative styles, poetics, aesthetic codes, and moral puzzles; the Western theories on modern ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy of science; and the contemporary social, ethical and political concerns. The essays are all united in their effort to situate the Mahabharata in the context of here and now without violating the sanctity of the 'written text' as we have it today. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of Indian and comparative philosophy, Indian and comparative literature, cultural studies, and history.