The Scottish poet Kenneth White and the Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas came together by chance when Malpas heard an interview with White on ABC radio. Malpas contacted White, and from there they exchanged books and ideas. They arranged to meet at White's place on the Breton coast, where a conversation about poetry and philosophy developed over four days. Inspired by poets from John Donne to Hoelderlin, and philosophers from Nietzsche to Heidegger, they discussed the world, place, narrative, language and politics. This book records that conversation. The Fundamental Field is made up of two essays: the first is by White on Malpas; the second is by Malpas on White. The volume closes with a set of three new philosophical poems by White.

Aristotle's Poetics is the first philosophical account of an art form and the foundational text in aesthetics. The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Poetics is an accessible guide to this often dense and cryptic work. Angela Curran introduces and assesses: Aristotle's life and the background to the Poetics the ideas and text of the Poetics the continuing importance of Aristotle's work to philosophy today.

This book of expert essays explores the concept of the whole as it operates within the psychology of Jung, the philosophy of Deleuze, and selected areas of wider twentieth-century Western culture, which provided the context within which these two seminal thinkers worked. Addressing this topic from a variety of perspectives and disciplines and with an eye to contemporary social, political, and environmental crises, the contributors aim to clarify some of the epistemological and ethical issues surrounding attempts, such as those of Jung and Deleuze, to think in terms of the whole, whether the whole in question is a particular bounded system (such as an organism, person, society, or ecosystem) or, most broadly, reality as a whole. Jung, Deleuze, and the Problematic Whole will contribute to enhancing critical self-reflection among the many contemporary theorists and practitioners in whose work thinking in terms of the whole plays a significant role.

This book bridges the gap between the many insights into art provided by research in evolutionary theory, psychology and neuroscience and those enduring normative issues best addressed by philosophy. The sciences have helped us understand how art functions, our art preferences, and the neurological systems underlying our engagement with art. But we continue to rely on philosophy to tell us what is truly good in art, how we should engage with art, and the conceptual basis for this engagement. Naturalized Aesthetics: A Scientific Framework for the Philosophy of Art integrates a systematic and comprehensive naturalism, grounded in the sciences, with an "ecology" of art. It shows how the environments in which we make and experience art - our "engineered art niches" - affect the practice and experience of art and generate normativity - the goods and the shoulds - in our engagement with art. There are, in effect, two "streams" of normativity, according to this book: a niche-dependent, social, impersonal and objective stream and a niche-independent, individual, personal and subjective stream. Recognition of these two streams allows us to make progress in long-standing and unresolved philosophical disputes about how to interpret, evaluate and conceive art. Key Features: Provides a structured and critical introduction to the scientific accounts of art based on evolutionary thinking, psychology and neuroscience. Develops an "ecology" of art based on the insight that we engage with art in engineered niches. Presents a naturalistic account of normativity based on the recognition of two streams: a niche-dependent, social, impersonal and objective stream; and a niche-independent, individual, personal and subjective stream. Serves as an introduction and critical analysis of the debates about the interpretation, evaluation and definitions of art.

Color is one of cinema's most alluring formal systems, building on a range of artistic traditions that orchestrate visual cues to tell stories, stage ideas, and elicit feelings. But what if color is not-or not only-a formal system, but instead a linguistic effect, emerging from the slipstream of our talk and embodiment in a world? This book develops a compelling framework from which to understand the mobility of color in art and mind, where color impressions are seen through, and even governed by, patterns of ordinary language use, schemata, memories, and narrative. Edward Branigan draws on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and other philosophers who struggle valiantly with problems of color aesthetics, contemporary theories of film and narrative, and art-historical models of analysis. Examples of a variety of media, from American pop art to contemporary European cinema, illustrate a theory based on a spectator's present-time tracking of temporal patterns that are firmly entwined with language use and social intelligence.

This volume builds on two recent developments in philosophy on the relationship between art and science: the notion of representation and the role of values in theory choice and the development of scientific theories. Its aim is to address questions regarding scientific creativity and imagination, the status of scientific performances-such as thought experiments and visual aids-and the role of aesthetic considerations in the context of discovery and justification of scientific theories. Several contributions focus on the concept of beauty as employed by practising scientists, the aesthetic factors at play in science and their role in decision making. Other essays address the question of scientific creativity and how aesthetic judgment resolves the problem of theory choice by employing aesthetic criteria and incorporating insights from both objectivism and subjectivism. The volume also features original perspectives on the role of the sublime in science and sheds light on the empirical work studying the experience of the sublime in science and its relation to the experience of understanding. The Aesthetics of Science tackles these topics from a variety of novel and thought-provoking angles. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in philosophy of science and aesthetics, as well as other subdisciplines such as epistemology and philosophy of mathematics.

This book builds a new understanding of the body and its relationship to images and technology, using a framework where novel writings of pragmatist somaesthetics and phenomenology meet new research on bodily reactions. Max Ryynanen gives an overview of the topic by collecting the existing information of our bodies gazing at visual culture and the philosophies supporting these phenomena, and examines the way the gaze and the body come together in our relationship to culture. Themes covered include somatic film; the body in artistic documentation of activist art; body parts (and their mutilation or surgeries) in contemporary art and film; robot cars and our visual relationship to them; the usefulness of Indian rasa philosophy in explaining digital culture; and an examination of Mario Perniola's work about the idea that we, human beings, are increasingly experiencing ourselves to be simply "things." The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, aesthetics, cultural philosophy, film studies, technology studies, media studies, cultural studies, and visual studies.

This Handbook covers the most urgent, controversial, and important topics in the philosophy of sex. It is both philosophically rigorous and yet accessible to specialists and non-specialists, covering ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of language, and featuring interactions with neighboring disciplines such as psychology, bioethics, sociology, and anthropology. The volume's 40 chapters, written by an international team of both respected senior researchers and essential emerging scholars, are divided into eight parts: I. What is Sex? Is Sex Good? II. Sexual Orientations III. Sexual Autonomy and Consent IV. Regulating Sexual Relationships V. Pathologizing Sex and Sexuality VI. Contested Desires VII. Objectification and Commercialized Sex VIII. Technology and the Future of Sex The broad scope of coverage, depth in insight and research, and accessibility in language make The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality a comprehensive introduction for newcomers to the subject as well as an invaluable reference work for advanced students and researchers in the field.

A sequel to Essays in Monetary Economics, this book develops the ideas on domestic and international monetary issues, with reference to specific events and crises of the 1960s and 70s. These essays are distinguished by the author's expert grasp of the analytical techniques and contemporaneous policy problems of both domestic and international monetary economics.

The notion of human dignity is frequently, yet enigmatically, invoked in legal and political debates on sex work, where many people use it without much elaboration on exactly what they mean by it. Sex Work and Human Dignity: Law, Politics and Discourse sheds light on this enigma, by exploring how dignity-based discourses are used by those who write and talk about prostitution and also what role these discourses may play in shaping wider cultural understandings of sex work and sex workers. The book draws on political discourse theory and is international in its scope, with analysis of legal cases, textual sources, and empirical data gathered through interviews with activists from several different countries in the Global North and South. The book traces how the concept of dignity is used in a range of legal and political discourses on sex work and ultimately asks to what extent dignity-based discourses help to advance, or hinder, sex workers' social inclusion. This book will appeal to students and researchers interested in sex work and feminism, as well as those who study human dignity. Its interdisciplinary nature means it will appeal to those working in a range of disciplines, including law, sociology, philosophy, and political theory.

This book offers a sustained, interdisciplinary examination of taste. It addresses a range of topics that have been at the heart of lively debates in philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and experimental philosophy. Our everyday lives are suffused with discussions about taste. We are quick to offer familiar platitudes about taste, but we struggle when facing the questions that matter-what taste is, how it is related to subjectivity, what distinguishes good from bad taste, why it is valuable to make and evaluate judgments about matters of taste, and what, exactly, we mean in speaking about these matters. The essays in this volume open up new, intersecting lines of research about these questions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. They address the notion of aesthetic taste; connections between taste and the natures of truth, disagreement, assertion, belief, retraction, linguistic context-sensitivity, and the semantics/pragmatics interface; experimental inquiry about taste; and metaphysical questions underlying ongoing discussions about taste. Perspectives on Taste will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, and experimental philosophy.

This book radically rethinks the philosophical basis of copyright in the arts. The author reflects on the ontology of art to argue that current copyright laws cannot be justified. The book begins by identifying two problems that result from current copyright laws: (1) creativity is restricted and (2) they primarily serve the interests of large corporations over those of the artists and general public. Against this background, the author presents an account of the ontology of artworks and explains what metaphysics can tell us about ownership in the arts. Next, he makes a moral argument that copyright terms should be shorter and that corporations should not own copyrights. The remaining chapters tackle questions regarding the appropriation of tokens of artworks, pattern types, and artistic elements. The result is a sweeping reinterpretation of copyright in the arts that rests on sound ontological and moral foundations. Radically Rethinking Copyright in the Arts will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics and philosophy of art, metaphysics, philosophy of law, and intellectual property law.

Through a close re-examination of Eugene O'Neill's oeuvre, from minor plays to his Pulitzer-winning works, this study proposes that O'Neill's vision of tragedy privileges a particular emotional response over a more "rational" one among his audience members. In addition to offering a new paradigm through which to interpret O'Neill's work, this book argues that O'Neill's theory of tragedy is a robust account of the value of difficult theatre as a whole, with more explanatory scope and power than its cognitivist counterparts. This paradigm reshapes our understanding of live theatrical tragedy's impact and significance for our lives. The book enters the discussion of tragic value by way of the plays of Eugene O'Neill, and through this study, Killian makes the case that O'Neill has refused to allow Plato to define the terms of tragedy's merit, as the cognitivists have. He argues that O'Neill's theory of tragedy is non-cognitive and locates the value of a play in its ability to trigger certain emotional responses from the audience. This would be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, literature and philosophy.

The point is to get away from questions of origin, to forget about where a theory or a form of knowledge or politics come from originally, and to define instead scenes where we can see things play out, with the idea that the origin itself is a kind of scene : this is how Jacques Ranciere defines his intellectual project. In this long conversation with Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan, Ranciere demonstrates the richness and fruitfulness of this approach, never yielding to the temptation of linearity or causality, bringing out scenes, instances, that together form an intellectual project. The development of Ranciere s philosophical work, from his formative years through the political and methodological break with Louis Althusser and the lessons of May 68, is documented here, as are the confrontations with other thinkers, the controversies and occasional misunderstandings. So too is the unity of his work and the distinctive style of his thinking, despite the frequent disconnect between politics and aesthetics and the subterranean movement between categories and works. Lastly one sees his view of our age, and of our age s many different and competing realities. What we gain in the end is a rich and multi-layered portrait of a life and a body of thought dedicated to the exercise of philosophy and to the emergence of possible new worlds.

How do cultural changes such as the increasing lustful possibilities of our liquid modernity affect 'romantic' values as psychotherapists and counsellors - and, in turn, affect how they work through their clients' relationships? Do they embody values from a previous era that are inappropriate for the era we are in now, which some term 'post-romantic'? For example, do they really privilege monogamous relationships? There again, do those psychotherapists who advocate polygamy really want others to legitimize their own desire to have affairs? How wary should one be of accepting such prevailing theories as Freud's nuclear family romance and his 'ordinary unhappiness'? Is anyone value-free regarding romanticism/post-romanticism and should they be? Is 'to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part' still an ideal worth working towards or more an ideological imprisonment? This book seeks to explore recent research on how notions of romanticism and post-romanticism affect therapeutic practices. Love, Sex and Psychotherapy in a Post-Romantic Era is a significant new contribution to psychotherapy, and will be a great resource for prospective and current clients, trainee and professional therapists, academics, researchers, and advanced students of Psychology, Psychotherapy, Philosophy and Human Behaviour. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling.

The book delves into the affective, embodied, and sensory dimensions of traffic and urban mobility. It brings together key phenomenological and post-phenomenological readings to challenge taken for granted assumptions of urban traffic. Through the experiences of traffic users in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, the book provides fascinating pathways into structures and processes that make up phenomenal traffic worlds. It explores the nature of the traffic experience, modalities of existence within it, and the wide spectrum of awarenesses involved in making sense from non-sense. The book offers rich theoretical insights on how we feel our way through our affect-laden worlds. Through empirical examples from the urban traffic in Ho Chi Minh City, the book explores this fluid, constantly changing complex collective of ongoing negotiations we call 'traffic,' often emotional, involving and producing all kinds of entities. It develops a range of philosophical concepts in order to better understand the complex relationships between humans and non-humans in everyday settings. Offering innovative insights into the structures, authorities, materialities and forms of power that shape our experiences of traffic, this book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners interested in philosophy, cultural geography, mobilities, transport studies, cultural studies, and urban studies.

*A Financial Times Book of the Year* 'The first time I opened What Artists Wear, I gasped with pleasure. Imagine it as a kind of punk cousin to John Berger's Ways of Seeing, liberally illustrated with the most astonishing images of artists, decked out in finery or rags ... It transported me to somewhere glamorous, exciting, even revolutionary' Olivia Laing, Guardian Most of us live our lives in our clothes without realizing their power. But in the hands of artists, garments reveal themselves. They are pure tools of expression, storytelling, resistance and creativity: canvases on which to show who we really are. In What Artists Wear, style luminary Charlie Porter takes us on an invigorating, eye-opening journey through the iconic outfits worn by artists, in the studio, on stage, at work, at home and at play. From Yves Klein's spotless tailoring to the kaleidoscopic costumes of Yayoi Kusama and Cindy Sherman; from Andy Warhol's signature denim to Charlotte Prodger's casualwear, Porter's roving eye picks out the magical, revealing details in the clothes he encounters, weaving together a new way of understanding artists, and of dressing ourselves. Part love letter, part guide to chic, and featuring generous photographic spreads, What Artists Wear is both a manual and a manifesto, a radical, gleeful, inspiration to see the world anew-and find greater pleasure and possibility in the clothes we all wear.

The first posthumous collection from the writings of Stanley Cavell, shedding new light on the distinctive vision and intellectual trajectory of an influential American philosopher. For Stanley Cavell, philosophy was a matter of responding to the voices of others. Throughout his career, he articulated the belief that words spring to life in concrete circumstances of speech: the significance and power of language depend on the occasions that elicit it. When Cavell died in 2018, he left behind some of his own most powerful language-a plan for a book collecting numerous unpublished essays and lectures, as well as papers printed in niche journals. Here and There presents this manuscript, with thematically relevant additions, for the first time. These writings, composed between the 1980s and the 2000s, reflect Cavell's expansive interests and distinctive philosophical method. The collection traverses all the major themes of his immense body of work: modernity, psychoanalysis, the human voice, moral perfectionism, tragedy, skepticism. Cavell's rich and cohesive philosophical vision unites his wide-ranging engagement with poets, critics, psychoanalysts, social scientists, and fellow philosophers. In Here and There, readers will find dialogues with Shakespeare, Thoreau, Wittgenstein, Freud, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Wallace Stevens, Veena Das, and Peter Kivy, among others. One of the collection's most striking features is an ensemble of five pieces on music, constituting Cavell's first discussion of the subject since the mid-1960s. Edited by philosophers who have been invested in Cavell's work for decades, Here and There not only gathers the strands of a writing life but also maps its author's intellectual journeys. In these works, Cavell models what it looks like to examine seriously one's own passions and to forge new communities through unexpected conversations.

Peter Sloterdijk is an internationally renowned philosopher and thinker whose work is now seen as increasingly relevant to our contemporary world situation and the multiple crises that punctuate it, including those within ethical, political, economic, technological, and ecological realms. This volume focuses upon one of his central ideas, anthropotechnics. Broadly speaking, anthropotechnics refers to the technological constitution of the human as its fundamental mode of existence, which is characterized by the ability to create dwelling places that 'immunize' human beings from exterior threats while at the same time instituting practices and exercises that call on humanity to transcend itself 'ascetically'. The essays included in this volume enter a critical dialogue with Sloterdijk and his many philosophical interlocutors in order to interrogate the many implications of anthropotechnics in relation to some of the most pressing issues of our time, including and especially the question of the future of humanity in relation to globalism and modernization, climate change, the post-secular, neoliberalism, and artificial intelligence. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Mieke Bal takes us on a journey through the range of her work, using the concept of image-thinking as a point of connection between cultural analysis and artistic practice. Sharing a lifetime of experience of writing about art, making films and installations, as well as curating exhibitions, she shows us how these may be brought into dialogue with insights from theory.Bal teaches us how to think with images, but also how to write and think as artists and writers about our own creative work. This is Mieke Bal at her most personal and her best.

Acclaimed social critic Curtis White describes an all-encompassing and little-noticed force taking over our culture and our lives that he calls the Middle Mind: the current failure of the American imagination in the media, politics, education, art, technology, and religion. Irreverent, provocative, and far-reaching, White presents a clear vision of this dangerous mindset that threatens America's intellectual and cultural freedoms, concluding with an imperative to reawaken and unleash the once powerful American imagination.

The Middle Mind is pragmatic, plainspoken, populist, contemptuous of the Right's narrowness, and incredulous before the Left's convolutions. It wants to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has bought an SUV with the intent of visiting it. It even understands in some indistinct way how that very SUV spells the Arctic's doom.

This book introduces the reader to the ways in which happiness has been explored in philosophy and literature for thousands of years, in order to understand the newest theoretical approaches to happiness. Jeffrey R. Di Leo draws on its long and rich history as a window into our present obsession with happiness. Each of the four chapters of this book provides a substantially different literary-theoretical account of how and why literature matters with respect to considerations of happiness. From the neoliberal happiness industry and the psychoanalytic rejection of happiness to aesthetic hedonism and revolutionary happiness, literature viewed from the perspective of happiness becomes a story about what is and is not the goal of life. The multidisciplinary approach of this book will appeal to a variety of readers from literary studies, critical theory, philosophy and psychology and anyone with an interest in happiness and theories of emotion.

This project is born out of similar questions and discussions on the topic of organicism emergent from two critical strands regarding the discourse of organic self-generation: one dealing with the problem of stopping in the design processes in history, and the other with the organic legacy of style in the nineteenth-century as a preeminent form of aesthetic ideology. The epistemologies of self-generation outlined by enlightenment and critical philosophy provided the model for the discursive formations of modern urban planning and architecture. The form of the organism was thought to calibrate modernism's infinite extension. The architectural organicism of today does not take on the language of the biological sciences, as they did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but rather the image of complex systems, be they computational/informational, geo/ecological, even ontological/aesthetic 'networks'. What is retained from the modernity of yesterday is the ideology of endless self-generation. Revisiting such a topic feels relevant now, in a time when the idea of endless generation is rendered more suspect than ever, amid an ever increasing speed and complexity of AI networks. The essays collected in this book offer a variety of critiques of the modernist idea of endless growth in the fields of architecture, literature, philosophy, and the history of science. They range in scope from theoretical and speculative to analytic and critical; from studies of the history of modernity to reflections of our contemporary world. Far from advocating a return to the romantic forms of nineteenth century naturphilosophie, this project focuses in probing organicism for new forms of critique and emergent subjectivities in a contemporary, 'post' pandemic constellation of neo-naturalism in design, climate change, complex systems and information networks. This book will be of interest to a broad range of researchers and professionals in architecture and art history, historians of science, visual artists, and scholars in the humanities more generally.

The only book introducing Plato and Aristotle for literature students; it assumes no prior knowledge of philosophy so is pitched at the ideal level Uses literary examples all students will be familiar with from across the world and time periods so will be of relevance at every stage of study Ideal text book for those studying literary theory as its foundations are in Plato and Aristotle The book's usefulness will last throughout students' degrees and courses as the influence of Plato and Aristotle is evident in all periods/locations

Sublime Subjects explores two fundamental questions: what is the start of humanity? When and how does a newborn child become a subject? These are relevant to psychoanalysis not only theoretically, but also in clinical practice, where the issue at stake is how to help the analysand's mind to grow or, better, to increase the ability to give a meaning to experience. Giuseppe Civitarese here argues that the psychoanalytic theory of sublimation and the aesthetic theory of the sublime are theories of subjectivation that can illuminate each other and give us a better understanding of the birth of the psyche. The aesthetic experience in art and in psychoanalytic practice are concerned with the social constitution of the individual, understood at its pre-reflective, non-verbal or inter-corporeal level. It is at this level that, thanks to the encounter with a receptive other, the turbulences of sensations and proto-emotions become soothing rhythms, proto-ideas or sensible ideas at first and, once words are added, concepts. In Bionian terms, the at-one-ment between mother and baby is a form of primordial abstraction and occurs first in the dimension of the purely sensory and indistinct, and then in the affective space, which nonetheless is always a symbolic space if we take account that sociality is provided for the couple-system by the mother. It is exactly the intersubjective process of elevating toward conceptual thinking, but without ever detaching oneself from the thinking deposited in the body as procedural knowledge, that justifies the definition adopted here of human beings as Sublime Subjects. This book explores these topics not only through the lens of the concept of sublimation or the theory of the sublime, but also through those of masochism, hypochondria, truth and two readings of classical Freudian papers such as the clinical case of Dora and 'Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning'. Sublime Subjects will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as literature and philosophy scholars.