This book focuses on a dimension of art which the philosophical tradition (from Plato to Hegel and even Adorno) has consistently overlooked, such was its commitment - explicit or implicit - to mimesis and the metaphysics of truth it presupposes. De Beistegui refers to this dimension, which unfolds outside the space that stretches between the sensible and the supersensible - the space of metaphysics itself - as the hypersensible and show how the operation of art to which it corresponds is best described as metaphorical. The movement of the book, then, is from the classical or metaphysical aesthetics of mimesis (Part One) to the aesthetics of the hypersensible and metaphor (Part Two). Against much of the history of aesthetics and the metaphysical discourse on art, he argues that the philosophical value of art doesn't consist in its ability to bridge the space between the sensible and the supersensible, or the image and the Idea, and reveal the sensible as proto-conceptual, but to open up a different sense of the sensible. His aim, then, is to shift the place and role that philosophy attributes to art.

The German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) is known as the founder of modern aesthetics because he introduced the term "aesthetics" into philosophy in his Reflections on Poetry (1736), Metaphysics (1739), and in his unfinished Aesthetics (1750/1758). This volume is the first collection of essays in the English language devoted to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's aesthetics. The essays collected in this volume explain the distinguishing features of Baumgarten's aesthetics; situate it in its historical context; document its reception; and examine its contributions to contemporary philosophy.

China is currently afflicted by enormous environmental problems. This book, drawing on ancient and modern Chinese environmental thinking, considers what it is that makes an environment a desirable place for living. The book emphasises ideas of beauty, and discusses how these ideas can be applied in natural, agricultural and urban environments in order to produce desirable environments. The book argues that environment is both a product of nature and of human beings, and as such is potentially alterable by culture. The book explores the three aspects of environmental beauty whereby such alteration might be beneficially made: integrated and holistic; ecological and man-made; and authentic and everyday. This book addresses environmental issues by distinctively suggesting that an aesthetic approach inspired from ancient Chinese tradition could help us overcome the many problems that human beings have created at local and global levels. Although its main focus is the traditional and current contexts of the People's Republic of China, the book transcends national borders. A typical example is the ancient Chinese thought system and cultural practice of Feng Shui ( ) that sought to negotiate how the natural environment and human constructions can cohabit without destructing each other. The author evokes that sought-after harmony through the powerful image of gardens of life whose environmental beauty can be found in traditional Chinese gardens and palaces as well as historically and culturally preserved cities.

For British playwright, John Osborne, there are no brave causes; only people who muddle through life, who hurt, and are often hurt in return. This study deals with Osborne's complete oeuvre and critically examines its form and technique; the function of the gaze; its construction of gender; and the relationship between Osborne's life and work. Gilleman has also traced the evolution of Osborne's reception by turning to critical reviews at the beginning of each chapter.

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

Originally published in 1924, this title is substantially a continuation of Baudouin's earlier work Studies in Psychoanalysis, being an application of psychoanalysis to the theory of aesthetics, as illustrated by a detailed study of the works of the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren. The 'interpretation' Freud has supplied for dreams Baudouin attempts - and archives - for the imagery of the artistic creator. The work is in part based upon private documents supplied to the author by Madame Verhaeren, an autograph letter, and a previously unpublished poem.

This book engages debates in current art criticism concerning the turn toward participatory works of art. In particular, it analyzes ludic participation, in which play and games are used organizationally so that participants actively engage with or complete the work of art through their play. Here Stott explores the complex and systematic organization of works of ludic participation, showing how these correlate with social systems of communication, exhibition, and governance. At a time when the advocacy of play and participation has become widespread in our culture, he addresses the shortage of literature on the use of play and games in modern and contemporary arts practice in order to begin a play theory of organization and governance.

In recent years architectural discourse has witnessed a renewed interest in materiality under the guise of such familiar tropes as 'material honesty,' 'form finding,' or 'digital materiality.' Motivated in part by the development of new materials and an increasing integration of designers in fabricating architecture, a proliferation of recent publications from both practice and academia explore the pragmatics of materiality and its role as a protagonist of architectural form. Yet, as the ethos of material pragmatism gains more popularity, theorizations about the poetic imagination of architecture continue to recede. Compared to an emphasis on the design of visual form in architectural practice, the material imagination is employed when the architect 'thinks matter, dreams in it, lives in it, or, in other words, materializes the imaginary.' As an alternative to a formal approach in architectural design, this book challenges readers to rethink the reverie of materials in architecture through an examination of historical precedent, architectural practice, literary sources, philosophical analyses and everyday experience. Focusing on matter as the premise of an architect's imagination, each chapter identifies and graphically illustrates how material imagination defines the conceptual premises for making architecture.

Criticism and Modernity traces the conditions under which criticism emerges as a socio-cultural practice within the institutionalized forms of European modernity and democracy. It argues that criticism is born out of anxieties about national supremacy in the late seventeenth century, with the consequence that the emergent national cultures of the eighteenth century and since become sites for the regulation of the democratic subject through the academic form of arguments about the proper relations of aesthetics to ethics and politics. The central issue is that of legitimation: how can subjective aesthetic experiences regulate the norms of ethical justice? That question is posed not as an abstract philosophical issue, but rather as a question properly located within the struggles for national culture. The usual Germanic source of modern aesthetics and criticism is here placed in the broader European context, involving contests between England, France, Scotland, Ireland, and the emergent Germany and Italy. Writers addressed include Corneille, Dryden, Moliere, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer; and, throughout, the legacy of these thinkers is found in the most recent contemporary theory, in work by Agamben, Badiou, Lyotard, MacIntyre, and others. A closing chapter considers the formation of the university across modern Europe, in Vico's Naples, Humboldt's Berlin, Newman's Dublin, Blair's Edinburgh, the France of Alain and Benda, the England of Leavis, as well as our contemporary institutional predicaments.

This book presents a counter-history to the relentless critique of the humanist subject and authorial agency that has taken place over the past fifty years. It is both an interrogation of that critique and the tracing of an alternative narrative from Romanticism to the twenty-first century which celebrates the agency of the artist as a powerful contribution to the wellbeing of the community. It does so through arguments based on philosophical aesthetics and cultural theory interspersed with case histories of particular artists. It also engages with a second issue that cannot be separated from the first. This is the question of what the role and purpose of art is in society. This has become particularly important since the 1990s because of the "social turn" in art in which it is claimed that the only valid role for art was one that had explicit social consequences. This book argues that a political role for art is valuable, but not the only one that can be envisaged nor indeed is it the most obvious or most important. Art has other social roles both as a means to engender empathy and community, and to re-enchant a world bereft of meaning and reduced to material values. The book will appeal to practising artists as well as scholars working in art history, philosophy, aesthetics, and curatorial studies.

While the current philosophical debate surrounding Hegel's aesthetics focuses heavily on the philosopher's controversial 'end of art' thesis, its participants rarely give attention to Hegel's ideas on the nature of beauty and its relation to art. This study seeks to remedy this oversight by placing Hegel's views on beauty front and center. Peters asks us to rethink the common assumption that Hegelian beauty is exclusive to art and argues that for Hegel beauty, like art, is subject to historical development. Her careful analysis of Hegel's notion of beauty not only has crucial implications for our understanding of the 'end of art' and Hegel's aesthetics in general, but also sheds light on other fields of Hegel's philosophy, in particular his anthropology and aspects of his ethical thought.

Works of fiction are works of the imagination and for the imagination. Gregory Currie energetically defends the familiar idea that fictions are guides to the imagination, a view which has come under attack in recent years. Responding to a number of challenges to this standpoint, he argues that within the domain of the imagination there lies a number of distinct and not well-recognized capacities which make the connection between fiction and imagination work. Currie then considers the question of whether in guiding the imagination fictions may also guide our beliefs, our outlook, and our habits in directions of learning. It is widely held that fictions very often provide opportunities for the acquisition of knowledge and of skills. Without denying that this sometimes happens, this book explores the difficulties and dangers of too optimistic a picture of learning from fiction. It is easy to exaggerate the connection between fiction and learning, to ignore countervailing tendencies in fiction to create error and ignorance, and to suppose that claims about learning from fiction require no serious empirical support. Currie makes a case for modesty about learning from fiction-reasoning that a lot of what we take to be learning in this area is itself a kind of pretence, that we are too optimistic about the psychological and moral insights of authors, that the case for fiction as a Darwinian adaptation is weak, and that empathy is both hard to acquire and not always morally advantageous.

This book draws on the theatrical thinking of Samuel Beckett and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to propose a method for research undertaken at the borders of performance and philosophy. Exploring how Beckett fabricates encounters with the impossible and the unthinkable in performance, it asks how philosophy can approach what cannot be thought while honouring and preserving its alterity. Employing its method, it creates a series of encounters between aspects of Beckett's theatrical practice and a range of concepts drawn from Deleuze's philosophy. Through the force of these encounters, a new range of concepts is invented. These provide novel ways of thinking affect and the body in performance; the possibility of theatrical automation; and the importance of failure and invention in our attempts to respond to performance encounters. Further, this book includes new approaches to Beckett's later theatrical work and provides an overview of Deleuze's conception of philosophical practice as an ongoing struggle to think with immanence.

This book explores the ways in which music can engender religious experience, by virtue of its ability to evoke the ineffable and affect how the world is open to us. Arguing against approaches that limit the religious significance of music to an illustrative function, The Extravagance of Music sets out a more expansive and optimistic vision, which suggests that there is an 'excess' or 'extravagance' in both music and the divine that can open up revelatory and transformative possibilities. In Part I, David Brown argues that even in the absence of words, classical instrumental music can disclose something of the divine nature that allows us to speak of an experience analogous to contemplative prayer. In Part II, Gavin Hopps contends that, far from being a wasteland of mind-closing triviality, popular music frequently aspires to elicit the imaginative engagement of the listener and is capable of evoking intimations of transcendence. Filled with fresh and accessible discussions of diverse examples and forms of music, this ground-breaking book affirms the disclosive and affective capacities of music, and shows how it can help to awaken, vivify, and sustain a sense of the divine in everyday life.

The general scope of the present volume is to present a variety of approaches and topics within the growing field of research on Byzantine aesthetics. Theurgy in Neoplatonic and Christian contexts is represented by the contributions of W.-M. Stock and L. Bergemann; theories of beauty are at the centre of interest of the papers by S. Mariev and M. Marchetto. A. Pizzone approaches Byzantine aesthetics by looking for aesthetic experience in the literary texts, while the remaining contributions explore issues related to the iconoclast controversy: An important moment in the development of Byzantine philosophy on the eve of iconoclasm is the primary interest of A. del Campo Echevarria, who looks at the question of universals in John of Damaskos. The relationship between image and text in Byzantine illustrated manuscripts occupies the attention of B. Crostini. D. Afinogenov explores from a philological perspective the fate of important iconophile terminology in Old Bulgarian, while L. Lukhovitskij reconstructs from historical and philological perspectives the historical memory of the iconoclast controversy during the Late Byzantine Period.

Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan methodically outlines key concepts in psychoanalytic discourse by reading them against key modern and post-modern architects. It begins with what is arguably, the central concept for each discipline, by putting the unconscious in a dialectic relation to space. The text is cyclical, episodic, cloudlike, rather than expository; the intention is not simply to explain the concept of the unconscious but, to different degrees, perform it in the text. Psychoanalysis is one of the great humanist discourses of the 20th Century. This book will be of interest to the humanist in architects, planners, social scientists, whether they are students, professionals, or amateurs.

Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan methodically outlines key concepts in psychoanalytic discourse by reading them against key modern and post-modern architects. It begins with what is arguably, the central concept for each discipline, by putting the unconscious in a dialectic relation to space. The text is cyclical, episodic, cloudlike, rather than expository; the intention is not simply to explain the concept of the unconscious but, to different degrees, perform it in the text. Psychoanalysis is one of the great humanist discourses of the 20th Century. This book will be of interest to the humanist in architects, planners, social scientists, whether they are students, professionals, or amateurs.

Aesthetics is not a "factual" discipline; there are no aesthetic facts. The word itself is derived from the Greek word for "feeling" and the discipline arises because of the need to find a place for the passions within epistemology the branch of philosophy that investigates our beliefs. Aesthetics is more than just the study of beauty; it is a study of that which appeals to our senses, most often in connection with the classification, analysis, appreciation, and understanding of art. The Historical Dictionary of Aesthetics covers its history from Classical Greece to the present, including entries on non-western aesthetics. The book contains a chronology, a list of acronyms and abbreviations, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the main concepts, terminology, important persons (philosophers, critics, and artists), and the rules and criteria we apply in making judgments on art. By providing concise information on aesthetics, this dictionary is not only accessible to students, but it provides details and facts to specialists in the field.

Dialogic Materialism: Bakhtin, Embodiment and Moving Image Art argues for the relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of dialogism as a means of examining the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary moving image art forms. The volume comprises six chapters divided into two sections. The first section, Part I, illustrates the key concepts in Bakhtin's multifaceted dialogism and develops these ideas in relation to moving image art. The main focus of this first part is the proposal of what the author terms dialogic materialism, which builds upon the Marxism inherent in Bakhtin, examining the material processes of cultural exchange with a particular emphasis on multi-perspective subjective relations. Part II consists of case studies that apply dialogic materialism to the moving image artwork of three artists: Stan Douglas, Jamelie Hassan and Chris Marker. Applying Bakhtinian theory to the field of the visual arts provides a means of examining the fundamentally dialogic nature of moving image art making and viewing, a perspective that is not fully developed within the existing literature.

The rise of literary theory spawned the rise of anti-aestheticism, so that even for cultural theorists, discussions concerning aesthetics were often carried out in a critical shorthand that failed to engage with the particularity of the work of art, much less the specificities of aesthetic experience. This text introduces the notion of a new aestheticism - "new" insofar as it identifies a turn taken by a number of important contemporary thinkers towards the idea that focusing on the specifically aesthetic impact of a work of art or literature has the potential to open radically different ways of thinking about identity, politics and culture. The appearance of a new aestheticism at a moment that is often termed "post-theoretical" is a direct index of the extent to which, as "theory" now enters a more reflective phase, there is an increased willingness among critics and philosophers to consider the ways in which literary and cultural theory often overlooked key aspects of its reliance on philosophical aesthetics. With its impressive array of contributors, This work should be of particular interest to students and scholars of literature, philosophy and cultural studies.

With its demand that works of art be judged according to the their morally didactic content, Tolstoy's reviled aesthetics has seemed to exclude from the canon far too many works widely accepted as masterpieces, including Shakespeare and Beethoven. This book, first published in 1985, argues that these are not mere oversights on the part of Tolstoy: he knew full well the consequences of his line of reasoning. The author contends that, even if we disagree with and eventually reject much of what Tolstoy concludes, his account of the nature and purpose of art is nevertheless worth consideration. Diffey's argument by no means accepts all of 'What is Art?', but by suggesting that the work is best interpreted as a counterpoint to the amoral aestheticism prevalent in Russia at the time, he does much to restore it to a status deserving attention, particularly in today's climate of extreme relativism.

New, completely revised and re-written edition. Offers a detailed but accessible account of the vital German philosophical tradition of thinking about art and the self. Looks at recent historical research and contemporary arguments in philosophy and theory in the humanities, following the path of German philosophy from Kant, via Fichte and Holderlin, the early Romantics, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, to Nietzsche. Develops the approaches to subjectivity, aesthetics, music and language in relation to new theoretical developments bridging the divide between the continental and analytical traditions of philosophy. The huge growth of interest in German philosophy as a resource for re-thinking both literary and cultural theory, and contemporary philosophy will make this an indispensable read -- .

Artistic Research Methodology argues for artistic research as a context-aware and historical process that works inside-in, beginning and ending with acts committed within an artistic practice. An artistic researcher has three intertwined tasks. First, she needs to develop and perfect her own artistic skills, vision and conceptual thinking. This happens by developing a vocabulary for not only making but also writing and speaking about art. Second, an artistic researcher has to contribute to academia and the "invisible colleges" around the world by proposing an argument in the form of a thesis, a narrative; and in so doing helping to build a community of artistic research and the bodies of knowledge these communities rely on. Third, she must communicate with practicing artists and the larger public, performing what one could call "audience education". There is no way of being an engaged and committed partner in a community without taking sides, without getting entangled in issues of power. Consequently, the methodology of artistic research has to be responsive both to the requirements of the practice and the traditions of science. Here the embedded nature of the knowledge produced through artistic research becomes evident. Artistic Research Methodology is essential reading for university courses in art, art education, media and social sciences.

With the emerging dominance of digital technology, the time is ripe to reconsider the nature of the image. Some say that there is no longer a phenomenal image, only disembodied information (0-1) waiting to be configured. For photography, this implies that a faith in the principle of an "evidential force" of the impossibility of doubting that the subject was before the lens is no longer plausible. Technologically speaking, we have arrived at a point where the manipulation of the image is an ever-present possibility, when once it was difficult, if not impossible.

What are the key moments in the genealogy of the Western image which might illuminate the present status of the image? And what exactly is the situation to which we have arrived as far as the image is concerned? These are the questions guiding the reflections in this book. In it we move, in Part 1, from a study of the Greek to the Byzantine image, from the Renaissance image and the image in the Enlightenment to the image as it emerges in the Industrial Revolution.

Part 2 examines key aspects of the image today, such as the digital and the cinema image, as well as the work of philosophers of the image, including: Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard Stiegler. "

The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice investigates the widely debated, deeply flawed yet influential concept of the uncanny through the lens of feminist theory and contemporary art practice. Not merely a subversive strategy but a cipher of the fraught but fertile dialogue between feminism and psychoanalysis, the uncanny makes an ideal vehicle for an arrangement marked by ambivalence and acts as a constant reminder that feminism and psychoanalysis are never quite at home with one another. The Feminist Uncanny begins by charting the uncanniness of femininity in foundational psychoanalytic texts by Ernst Jentsch, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Mladen Dolar, and contextually introduces a range of feminist responses and appropriations by Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Sarah Kofman, among others. The book also offers thematically organised interpretations of famous artworks and practices informed by feminism, including Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, Faith Ringgold's story quilts and Susan Hiller's 'paraconceptualism', as well as less well-known practice, such as the Women's Postal Art Even (Feministo) and the photomontages of Maud Sulter. Dead (lexicalised) metaphors, unhomely domesticity, identity and (dis)identification, and the tension between family stories and art's histories are examined in and from the perspective of different artistic and critical practices, illustrating different aspects of the feminist uncanny. Through a 'partisan' yet comprehensive critical review of the fascinating concept of the uncanny, The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice proposes a new concept, the feminist uncanny, which it upholds as one of the most enduring legacies of the Women's Liberation Movement in contemporary art theory and practice.