This book reviews Iris Murdoch's thought as a whole. It surveys the breadth of her thinking, taking account of her philosophical works, her novels and her letters. It shows how she explored many aspects of experience and brought together apparently contradictory concepts such as truth and love. The volume deals with her notions of truth, love, language, morality, politics and her life. It shows how she offers a challenging provocative way of seeing things which is related to but distinct from standard forms of analytical philosophy and Continental thought. Unlike so many philosophers she does offer a philosophy to live by and unlike many novelists she has reflected deeply on the kind of novels she aimed to write. The upshot is that her novels and her philosophy can be read together productively as contributions to how we can see others and the world.

Literary scholarship has paid little serious attention to Habermas' philosophy, and, on the other hand, the reception of Habermas has given little attention to the role that literary practice can play in a broader theory of communicative action. David Colclasure's argument sets out to demonstrate that a specific, literary form of rationality inheres in literary practice and the public reception of literary works which provides a unique contribution to the political public sphere.

The main purpose of this book is to explicate the problematic relationship between the heterogeneity of what is experienced as beautiful and the homogeneity of the conceptualization of that experience, or attempt at such a conceptualization in the era of modern philosophy. While the heterogeneity of what is experienced as beautiful was permitted, and indeed celebrated, in the dominant ancient conception-for example, in the Symposium and Phaedrus of Plato-the need for homogenization in the later appropriation of Plato and in the Enlightenment period relegated the beautiful to the privileged domain of artworks. In her analysis Agnes Heller provides a unique and significant emphasis on the original 'life content' of the experience of the beautiful, which becomes lost in the modern system of the arts. This book details the history of the concept of the beautiful, starting with what Agnes Heller distinguishes between the 'warm' metaphysics of beauty and the 'cold' one-inspired by Plato's Janus-faced relationship to beauty-and ending with a fragmented yet hopeful vision propagated by Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, among others. In between these two historical parentheses-the metaphysical Plato on one hand and the post-metaphysical Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Adorno on the other hand-lay a plenitude of figures and intellectual developments, all of which contributed to the demise of the concept of the beautiful in the Western metaphysical tradition. The most important of these figures and developments are examined in this book.

In engaging with the full range of 'the arts', contributors to this volume consider the relationship between law, justice, the ethical and the aesthetic. Art continually informs the ethics of a legal theory concerned to address how theoretical abstractions and concrete oppressions overlook singularity and spontaneity. Indeed, the exercise of the legal role and the scholarly understanding of legal texts were classically defined as ars iuris - an art of law - which drew on the panoply of humanist disciplines, from philology to fine art. That tradition has fallen by the wayside, particularly in the wake of modernism. But approaching art in that way risks distorting the very inexpressibility to which art is attentive and responsive, whilst remaining a custodian of its mystery. The novelty and ambition of this book, then, is to elicit, in very different ways, styles and orientations, the importance of the relationship between law and art. What can law and art bring to one another, and what can their relationship tell us about how truth relates to power? The insights presented in this collection disturb and supplement conventional accounts of justice; inaugurating new possibilities for addressing the origin of violence in our world.

Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History is a significant contribution to the fields of theory, Darwin studies, and cultural history. This collection of eight essays is the first volume to address, from the point of view of art and literary historians, Darwin's intersections with aesthetic theories and cultural histories from the eighteenth century to the present day. Among the philosophers of art influenced by Darwinian evolution and considered in this collection are Alois Riegl, Ruskin, and Aby Warburg. This stimulating collection ranges in content from essays on the influence of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory on Darwin and nineteenth-century debates circulating around beauty to the study of evolutionary models in contemporary art.

A spirited memoir by artist Aviva Rahmani, offering a relatable narrative to discuss trigger point theory and the importance of eco-art activism. Divining Chaos is an intimate personal memoir of unparalleled transparency into the moments in Rahmani's life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Detailing the history that led her to two seminal projects-Ghost Nets, restoring a coastal town dump to flourishing wetlands, and The Blued Trees Symphony, which applied her premises to challenge natural gas pipelines with a novel legal theory about land use-Rahmani shares the decisions that shaped her life's work and thinking. Her discussions about trigger point theory argue for how to predict, confront, and determine outcomes to the ecological challenges we face today.

Recently, scholars in a variety of disciplines-including philosophy, film and media studies, and literary studies-have become interested in the aesthetics, definition, and ontology of the screenplay. To this end, this volume addresses the fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of the screenplay: What is a screenplay? Is the screenplay art-more specifically, literature? What kind of a thing is a screenplay? Nannicelli argues that the screenplay is a kind of artefact; as such, its boundaries are determined collectively by screenwriters, and its ontological nature is determined collectively by both writers and readers of screenplays. Any plausible philosophical account of the screenplay must be strictly constrained by our collective creative and appreciative practices, and must recognize that those practices indicate that at least some screenplays are artworks.

The 7th book from Nadir Lahiji for the Routledge architecture list. Adopts Alain Badiou's thesis from The Pornographic Age to argue that the dominant pedagogy within architecture is at odds with the intended purpose of architectural practice and education. Aimed at architecture students at higher graduate and post-graduate levels.

Released in 1958, Vertigo is widely regarded as Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece and one of the greatest films of all time. This is the first book devoted to exploring the philosophical aspects of Vertigo. Following an introduction by the editor that places the film in context, each chapter reflects upon Hitchcock's film from a philosophical perspective. Topics discussed include: memory, loss, memorialisation, and creativity mimetic or representational art and art as magic the nature of romantic love gender, sexual objectification, and identity looking, "the gaze", and voyeurism film and psychoanalysis fantasy, illusion, and reality the phenomenology of colour. Including annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, this collection is essential reading for anyone interested in Vertigo, and an ideal resource for students of film and philosophy.

Released in 1958, Vertigo is widely regarded as Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece and one of the greatest films of all time. This is the first book devoted to exploring the philosophical aspects of Vertigo. Following an introduction by the editor that places the film in context, each chapter reflects upon Hitchcock's film from a philosophical perspective. Topics discussed include: memory, loss, memorialisation, and creativity mimetic or representational art and art as magic the nature of romantic love gender, sexual objectification, and identity looking, "the gaze", and voyeurism film and psychoanalysis fantasy, illusion, and reality the phenomenology of colour. Including annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, this collection is essential reading for anyone interested in Vertigo, and an ideal resource for students of film and philosophy.

In Praise of Theatre is Alain Badiou s latest work on the most complete of the arts, the theatrical stage. This book, certain to be of great interest to scholars and theatre practitioners alike, elaborates the theory of the theatre developed by Badiou in works such as Rhapsody for the Theatre and the Theses on Theatre and enquires into the status of a theatre that would be adequate to our contemporary, market-oriented chaos. In a departure from his usual emphasis upon canonical figures of the stage such as Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett, Badiou devotes In Praise of Theatre largely to a consideration of contemporary practitioners, including Jan Fabre, Brigitte Jacques and Romeo Castellucci. In addition, the book features an incisive analysis of the precarious status of the theatre today, in which Badiou describes not only the current threats to the theatre from the right, but the far more insidious threat from the left.

The beginning is both internal and external to the text it initiates, and that noncoincidence points to the text's vexed relation with its outside. Hence the nontrivial self-reflexivity of any textual beginning, which must bear witness to the self-grounding quality of the literary work- its inability either to comprise its inception or to externalize it in an authorizing exteriority. In a different but related way, the fact that they must begin renders our lives and our desires opaque to us; what Freud called "latency" marks not only sexuality but human thought with a self-division shaped by asynchronicity. From Henry James's New York Edition prefaces to George Eliot's epigraphs, from Ovid's play with meter to Charles Dickens's thematizing of the ex nihilo emergence of character, from Wallace Stevens's abstract consideration of poetic origins to James Baldwin's, Carson McCullers's, and Eudora Welty's descriptions of queer childhood, writers repeatedly confront the problem of inception. Inception introduces a fundamental contingency into texts and psyches alike: in the beginning, all could have been otherwise. For Kevin Ohi, the act of inception, and the potential it embodies, enables us to see making and unmaking coincide within the mechanism of creation. In this sense, Inceptions traces an ethics of reading, the possibility of perceiving, in the ostensibly finished forms of lives and texts, the potentiality inherent in their having started forth.

This is a collection of four essays on aesthetic, ethical, and political issues by Dieter Henrich, the preeminent Kant scholar in Germany today. Although his interests have ranged widely, he is perhaps best known for rekindling interest in the great classical German tradition from Kant to Hegel. The first essay summarizes Henrich's research into the development of the Kant's moral philosophy, focusing on the architecture of the third Critique. Of special interest in this essay is Henrich's intriguing and wholly new account of the relations between Kant and Rousseau. In the second essay, Henrich analyzes the interrelations between Kant's aesthetics and his cognitive theories. His third essay argues that the justification of the claim that human rights are universally valid requires reference to a moral image of the world. To employ Kant's notion of a moral image of the world without ignoring the insights and experience of this century requires drastic changes in the content of such an image. Finally, in Henrich's ambitious concluding essay, the author compares the development of the political process of the French Revolution and the course of classical German philosophy, raise the general question of the relation between political processes and theorizing, and argues that both the project of political liberty set in motion by the French Revolution, and the projects of classical German philosophy remain incomplete.

Reinterpreting Badiou's philosophy in light of both his persistent, reverent invocations of the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan, and his long-term engagement with Samuel Beckett, Badiou, Poem and Subject fundamentally reassesses Badiou's radical departure from the legacy of Martin Heidegger, and his wholesale rejection of philosophies that would, in the wake of twentieth-century violence and beyond, proclaim their own end or completion. For Badiou, both writers, from the terminus of Literary Modernism, affirm novel conceptions of subjectivity capable of transcending the historical conditions of their presentation: Celan's collective and ephemeral subject of 'anabasis', and Beckett's disjunctive 'Two' of love. Blending close textual analyses with critical reflections on Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe and Adorno, among others, Tom Betteridge argues that Badiou's innovative readings of both Celan's poetry and the 'latent poem' in Beckett's late prose are crucial to understanding his significance in the history of twentieth-century French philosophy and its German heritage, offering a significant contribution to a growing field of interest in Badiou's philosophical encounter with poetry, and its political ramifications.

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time has long fascinated philosophers for its complex accounts of time, personal identity and narrative, amongst many other themes. Proust as Philosopher: The Art of Metaphor is the first book to try and connect Proust's implicit ontology of experience with the question of style, and of metaphor in particular. Miguel de Beistegui begins with an observation: throughout In Search of Lost Time, the two main characters seem prone to chronic dissatisfaction in matters of love, friendship and even art. Reality always falls short of expectation. At the same time, the narrator experiences unexpected bouts of intense elation, the cause and meaning of which remain elusive. Beistegui argues we should understand these experiences as acts of artistic creation, and that this is why Proust himself wrote that true life is the life of art. He goes on to explore the nature of these joyful and pleasurable experiences and the transformation required of art, and particularly literature, if it is to incorporate them. He concludes that Proust revolutionises the idea of metaphor, extending beyond the confines of language to understand the nature of lived, bodily experience.

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time has long fascinated philosophers for its complex accounts of time, personal identity and narrative, amongst many other themes. Proust as Philosopher: The Art of Metaphor is the first book to try and connect Proust's implicit ontology of experience with the question of style, and of metaphor in particular. Miguel de Beistegui begins with an observation: throughout In Search of Lost Time, the two main characters seem prone to chronic dissatisfaction in matters of love, friendship and even art. Reality always falls short of expectation. At the same time, the narrator experiences unexpected bouts of intense elation, the cause and meaning of which remain elusive. Beistegui argues we should understand these experiences as acts of artistic creation, and that this is why Proust himself wrote that true life is the life of art. He goes on to explore the nature of these joyful and pleasurable experiences and the transformation required of art, and particularly literature, if it is to incorporate them. He concludes that Proust revolutionises the idea of metaphor, extending beyond the confines of language to understand the nature of lived, bodily experience.

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.

This unique introduction fully engages and clearly explains pragmatism, an approach to knowledge and philosophy that rejects outmoded conceptions of objectivity while avoiding relativism and subjectivism. It follows pragmatism's focus on the process of inquiry rather than on abstract justifications meant to appease the skeptic. According to pragmatists, getting to know the world is a creative human enterprise, wherein we fashion our concepts in terms of how they affect us practically, including in future inquiry. This book fully illuminates that enterprise and the resulting radical rethinking of basic philosophical conceptions like truth, reality, and reason. Author Cornelis de Waal helps the reader recognize, understand, and assess classical and current pragmatist contributions-from Charles S. Peirce to Cornel West-evaluate existing views from a pragmatist angle, formulate pragmatist critiques, and develop a pragmatist viewpoint on a specific issue. The book discusses: Classical pragmatists, including Peirce, James, Dewey, and Addams; Contemporary figures, including Rorty, Putnam, Haack, and West; Connections with other twentieth-century approaches, including phenomenology, critical theory, and logical positivism; Peirce's pragmatic maxim and its relation to James's Will to Believe; Applications to philosophy of law, feminism, and issues of race and racism.

The Collective Imagination explores the social foundations of the human imagination. In a lucid and wide-ranging discussion, Peter Murphy looks at the collective expression of the imagination in our economies, universities, cities, and political systems, providing a tour-de-force account of the power of the imagination to unite opposites and find similarities among things that we ordinarily think of as different. It is not only individuals who possess the power to imagine; societies do as well. A compelling journey through various peak moments of creation, this book examines the cities and nations, institutions and individuals who ply the paraphernalia of paradoxes and dialogues, wry dramaturgy and witty expression that set the act of creation in motion. Whilst exploring the manner in which, through the media of pattern, figure, and shape, and the miracles of metaphor, things come into being, Murphy recognises that creative periods never last: creative forms invariably tire; inventive centres inevitably fade. The Collective Imagination explores the contemporary dilemmas and historic pathos caused by this-as cities and societies, periods and generations slip behind in the race for economic and social discovery. Left bewildered and bothered, and struggling to catch up, they substitute empty bombast, faded glory, chronic dullness or stolid glumness for initiative, irony, and inventiveness. A comprehensive audit of the creativity claims of the post-modern age - that finds them badly wanting and looks to the future - The Collective Imagination will appeal to sociologists and philosophers concerned with cultural theory, cultural and media studies and aesthetics.

Meaning in the visual arts centers on how the physical work makes its content or presence visible. The art object is fundamental. Indeed, the different object forms of each visual medium allows our experience of space-time, and our relations to other people, to be aesthetically embodied in unique ways. Through these embodiments, visual art compensates for what is otherwise existentially lost, and becomes part of what makes life worth living. The present book shows this by discussing a range of visual art forms, namely pictorial representation, abstraction, sculpture and assemblage works, land art, architecture, photography, and varieties of digital art.

Originally published in 1984, this study deals with a number of influential figures in the European tradition of Marxist theories of aesthetics, ranging from Lukacs to Benjamin, through the Frankfurt School, to Brecht and the Althusserians. Pauline Johnson shows that, despite the great diversity in these theories about art, they all formulate a common problem, and she argues that an adequate response to this problem must be based on account of the practical foundations within the recipient's own experience for a changed consciousness.

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.

The 7th book from Nadir Lahiji for the Routledge architecture list. Adopts Alain Badiou's thesis from The Pornographic Age to argue that the dominant pedagogy within architecture is at odds with the intended purpose of architectural practice and education. Aimed at architecture students at higher graduate and post-graduate levels.

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.