Exploring the rupture between Wittgenstein's early and late phases, Michael Smith provides an original re-assessment of the metaphysical consistencies that exist throughout his divergent texts. Smith shows how Wittgenstein's criticism of metaphysics typically invoked the very thing he was seeking to erase. Taking an alternative approach to the inherent contradiction in his work, the 'problem of metaphysics', as Smith terms it, becomes the organizing principle of Wittgenstein's thought rather than something to overcome. This metaphysical thread enables further reflection on the poetic nature of Wittgenstein's philosophy as well as his preoccupation with ethics and aesthetics as important factors mostly absent from the secondary literature. The turn to aesthetics is crucial to a re-assessment of Wittgenstein's legacy, and is done in conjunction with an innovative analysis of Nietzsche's critique of Kantian aesthetics and Kant's 'judgments of taste'. The result is a unique discussion of the limits and possibilities of metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics and the task of the philosopher more generally.

The Kantian Aesthetic explains the kind of perceptual knowledge involved in aesthetic judgments. It does so by linking Kant's aesthetics to a critically upgraded account of his theory of knowledge. This upgraded theory emphasizes those conceptual and imaginative structures which Kant terms, respectively, "categories" and "schemata." By describing examples of aesthetic judgment, it is shown that these judgments must involve categories and fundamental schemata (even though Kant himself, and most commentators after him, have not fully appreciated the fact). It is argued, in turn, that this shows the aesthetic to be not just one kind of pleasurable experience amongst others, but one based on factors necessary to objective knowledge and personal identity, and which, indeed, itself plays a role in how these capacities develop.
In order to explain how individual aesthetic judgments are justified, and the aesthetic basis of art, however, the Kantian position just outlined has to be developed further. This is done by exploring some of his other ideas concerning how critical comparisons inform our cultivation of taste, and art's relation to genius. By linking the points made earlier to a more developed account of this horizon of critical comparisons, a Kantian approach can be shown to be both a satisfying and comprehensive explanation of the cognitive basis of aesthetic experiences. It is shown also that the approach can even cover some of the kinds of avant-garde works which were thought previously to limit its relevance.

Drawing on art, media, and phenomenological sources, Showing Off!: A Philosophy of Image challenges much recent thought by proposing a fundamentally positive relationship between visuality and the ethical. In philosophy, cultural studies and art, relationships between visuality and the ethical are usually theorized in negative terms, according to the dyadic logics of seeing on the one hand, and being seen, on the other. Here, agency and power are assumed to operate either on the side of those who see, or on the side of those who control the means by which people and things enter into visibility. To be seen, by contrast - when it occurs outside of those parameters of control- is to be at a disadvantage; hence, for instance, contemporary theorist Peggy Phelan's rejection of the idea, central to activist practices of the 1970's and 80's, that projects of political emancipation must be intertwined with, and are dependent on, processes of 'making oneself visible'. Acknowledgment of the vulnerability of visibility also underlies the realities of life lived within increasingly pervasive systems of imposed and self-imposed surveillance, and apparently confident public performances of visual self display. Showing Off!: A Philosophy of Image is written against the backdrop of these phenomena, positions and concerns, but asks what happens to our debates about visibility when a third term, that of 'self-showing', is brought into play. Indeed, it proposes a fundamentally positive relationship between visuality and the ethical, one primarily rooted not in acts of open and non-oppressive seeing or spectating, as might be expected, but rather in our capacity to inhabit both the risks and the possibilities of our own visible being. In other words, this book maintains that the proper site of generosity and agency within any visual encounter is located not on the side of sight, but on that of self-showing - or showing off!

A group of mostly Jewish German-speaking writers, the Prague Circle included some of the most significant figures in modern Western literature. Its core members, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Paul Kornfeld, and Egon Erwin Kisch, are renowned for their seminal dramas, lyric poetry, novels, short stories, and essays on aesthetics. The writers of the Prague Circle were bound together not by a common perspective or a particular ideology, but by shared experiences and interests. From their vantage point in the Bohemian capital during the early decades of the twentieth century, they witnessed first-hand the collapse of the familiar and predictable, if not entirely comfortable, monarchical old order and the ascent of an anxious and uncertain modern era that led inexorably to fascism, militarization, and war. In order to deal with their new challenges, they considered strategies as diverse and oppositional as the members of the Prague Circle themselves. Their responses were shaped to various degrees by Catholicism, Zionism, expressionism, activism, anti-activism, international solidarity with the working class, and transcendence. Stephen Shearier explores how these authors aligned themselves on the spectrum of the Activism Debate, which preceded the much studied Expressionist Debate by a generation. This study examines the critical reception of these influential literary figures to determine how their legacies have been shaped.

Aesthetic Capitalism debates the social aesthetics of contemporary economic processes. The book connects modern cultural dynamics with the workings of contemporary capitalism. It explores art and the new spirit of capitalism; visual culture and the experience economy; aesthetics and organisations; the art of fiscal management; capitalism without myth; and architecture in the age of aesthetic capitalism. Contributors include: Peter Murphy, Eduardo de la Fuente, Antonio Strati, Ken Friedman, Dominique Bouchet, Anders Michelsen, David Roberts, Carlo Tognato

The book presents five philosophical and axiological studies devoted to the relationship between "aesthetics "and "politics." It shows this relationship throughout the works of some avant-gardists, pragmatists, and postmodernists. It is also a voice in the discussion about the meaning of the fine arts and aesthetics in the context of the political aims and norms. This voice claims that the political dimension of art and aesthetics should be studied much more seriously than it has been till today, and needs more courageous re-interpretations and re-readings.

From Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales to Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, this is a comprehensive guide to comedy in the English literary canon. Beginning with a critical exploration of historical and philosophical theories of humour, the book then supplies close-readings of a wide range of major texts, authors and genres from the Medieval period to the present. The Comic Mode in English Literature examines such texts as: Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's DreamPope's The Rape of the LockAusten's EmmaDickens' The Pickwick PapersWilde's The Importance of Being EarnestAmis's Lucky Jim Covering poetry, prose and drama, this comprehensive guide will be essential reading for students of comic writing, literary history and genre.

This book addresses the interrelations between aesthetics, ethics, and politics in the framework of pragmatist aesthetics, offering a comprehensive panorama of the ways and fields in which pragmatist aesthetics ties in with vital social and ethical problems of modernity. Most of the contributors refer to the model propounded by Richard Shusterman. Following in Dewey's footsteps, Shusterman has elaborated and expanded his concept, adding new dimensions to it. The most important supplement is the idea of aesthetic experience being constituted by our bodiliness. In somaesthetics, pragmatism has acquired a new dimension - a fully developed, comprehensive aesthetic theory. Pragmatist aesthetics with its essential notion of the body engages in critical dialogue with many key concepts of modernity which locate the body in social and cultural frameworks. The articles collected in this volume illustrate the complex range of pragmatist aesthetics and its impact on the understanding of crucial issues in social and moral philosophy.

Anthony Everett defends the commonsense view that there are no such things as fictional people, places, and things. More precisely he develops and defends a pretense theoretic account on which there are no such things as fictional objects and our talk and thought that purports to be about them takes place within the scope of a pretense. Nevertheless we may mistakenly suppose there are fictional objects because we mistake the fact that certain utterances count as true within the pretense, and convey veridical information about the real world, for the genuine truth of those utterances. In the first half of The Nonexistent an account of this form is motivated, developed in detail, and defended from objections. The second half of the book then argues against fictional realism, the view that we should accept fictional objects into our ontology. First it is argued that the standard arguments offered for fictional realism all fail. Then a series of problems are raised for fictional realism. The upshot of these is that fictional realism provides an inadequate account of a significant range of talk and thought that purports to concern fictional objects. In contrast the pretense theoretic account developed earlier provides a very straightforward and attractive account of these cases and of fictional character discourse in general. Overall, Everett argues that we gain little but lose much by accepting fictional realism.

Written from the perspective of a practising artist, this book proposes that, against a groundswell of historians, museums and commentators claiming to speak on behalf of art, it is artists alone who may define what art really is. Jelinek contends that while there are objects called 'art' in museums from deep into human history and from around the globe - from Hans Sloane's collection, which became the foundation of the British Museum, to Alfred Barr's inclusion of 'primitive art' within the walls of MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art - only those that have been made with the knowledge and discipline of art should rightly be termed as such. Policing the definition of art in this way is not to entrench it as an elitist occupation, but in order to focus on its liberal democratic potential. Between Discipline and a Hard Place describes the value of art outside the current preoccupation with economic considerations yet without resorting to a range of stereotypical and ultimately instrumentalist political or social goods, such as social inclusion or education. A wider argument is also made for disciplinarity, as Jelinek discusses the great potential as well as the pitfalls of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary working, particularly with the so-called 'creative' arts. A passionate treatise arguing for a new way of understanding art that forefronts the role of the artist and the importance of inclusion within both the concept of art and the art world.

By exploring central issues in the philosophy of literature, illustrated by a wide range of novels, poems, and plays, Philosophy of Literature gets to the heart of why literature matters to us and sheds new light on the nature and interpretation of literary works. Provides a comprehensive study, along with original insights, into the philosophy of literature Develops a unique point of view - from one of the field's leading exponents Offers examples of key issues using excerpts from well-known novels, poems, and plays from different historical periods

In our contemporary age aesthetics seems to crumble and no longer be reducible to a coherent image. And yet given the vast amount of works in aesthetics produced in the last hundred years, this age could be defined "the century of aesthetics." "20th Century Aesthetics" is a new account of international aesthetic thought by Mario Perniola, one of Italy's leading contemporary thinkers. Starting from four conceptual fields - life, form, knowledge, action - Perniola identifies the lines of aesthetic reflection that derive from them and elucidates them with reference to major authors: from Dilthey to Foucault (aesthetics of life), from Wolfflin to McLuhan and Lyotard (aesthetics of form), from Croce to Goodman (aesthetics and knowledge), from Dewey to Bloom (aesthetics and action). There is also a fifth one that touches on the sphere of affectivity and emotionality, and which comes to aesthetics from thinkers like Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Lacan, Derrida and Deleuze. The volume concludes with an extensive sixth chapter on Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, Brazilian, South Korean and South East Asian aesthetic thought and on the present decline of Western aesthetic sensibility.

This book is the first essay collection on Richard Shusterman, the foremost representative of contemporary pragmatist aesthetics, a philosopher whose books have been translated into more than fifteen languages. The 12 essays, which cover the wide-ranging scope of Shusterman's pragmatist thought, divide into three sections: Literary Theory and Philosophy of Art; Epistemology, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics; and Somaesthetics. Written by an international group of authors from different philosophical perspectives, the book's essays not only provide a good introduction to Shusterman's innovative pragmatist theories, but show their useful applications to important and controversial topics in philosophy, politics, religious and gender studies, the arts, and somaesthetics. The book also includes two new texts by Shusterman: an introductory essay in which he explains the trajectory of his intellectual development and a detailed response to the other contributors, which closes the book.

Architecture and Control makes a collective critical intervention into the relationship between architecture, including virtual architectures, and practices of control since the turn of the twentieth to twenty-first centuries. Authors from the fields of architectural theory, literature, film and cultural studies come together here with visual artists to explore the contested sites at which, in the present day, attempts at gaining control give rise to architectures of control as well as the potential for architectures of resistance. Together, these contributions make clear how a variety of post-2000 architectures enable control to be established, all the while observing how certain architectures and infrastructures allow for alternative, progressive modes of control, and even modes of the unforeseen and the uncontrolled, to arise. Contributors are: Pablo Bustinduy, Rafael Dernbach, Alexander R. Galloway, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Maria Finn, Runa Johannessen, Natalie Koerner, Michael Krause, Samantha Martin-McAuliffe, Lorna Muir, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Anne Elisabeth Sejten and Joey Whitfield

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.

The Re-enchantment of the World is a philosophical exploration of the role of art and religion as sources of meaning in an increasingly material world dominated by science. Gordon Graham takes as his starting point Max Weber's idea that contemporary Western culture is marked by a "disenchantment of the world"--the loss of spiritual value in the wake of religion's decline and the triumph of the physical and biological sciences. Relating themes in Hegel, Nietzsche, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, and Gadamer to topics in contemporary philosophy of the arts, Graham explores the idea that art, now freed from its previous service to religion, has the potential to re-enchant the world. In so doing, he develops an argument that draws on the strengths of both "analytical" and "continental" traditions of philosophical reflection.
The opening chapter examines ways in which human lives can be made meaningful as a background to the debates surrounding secularization and secularism. Subsequent chapters are devoted to painting, literature, music, architecture, and festival with special attention given to Surrealism, 19th-century fiction, James Joyce, the music of J. S. Bach and the operas of Wagner. Graham concludes that that only religion properly so called can "enchant the world," and that modern art's ambition to do so fails.

Oxi (Gr. Determiner, lit. 'No', fig. 'Resistance', pronounced 'ochi') retells Sophocles' Antigone through the contemporary Greek crisis and modern European philosophy. A collaboration between the renowned British auteur Ken McMullen and the literary theorist Martin McQuillan, the film draws upon and responds to the importance of the Antigone of modern thought (Hegel, Arendt, Lacan, Derrida, Butler), while coming up close to the politics of the street and the malign effects of the austerity experiment in Greece today. The screenplay weaves together a range of idioms, including performance, fiction, documentary, interview and literary collage. The result is an intensely moving reflection on the tragedy of austerity today, with contributions from Helene Cixous, Etienne Balibar and Antonio Negri, as well as several significant figures in Greek cultural life. The volume includes full transcripts of the interviews with Cixous, Balibar and Negri, and a previously unpublished interview with Jacques Derrida on the question of Oedipus, as well as critical commentary from the filmmakers.

"Architecture and Philosophy: New Perspectives on the Work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins "is a collection of essays on the work of architect Arakawa and poet Madeline Gins and in particular their book "Architectural Body" (2000). The essays approach their cutting edge and ambitious project to design 'an architecture against death' from various angles and disciplines including aesthetics, architecture, linguistics, philosophy. The papers retrace the place of "Architectural Body" in the aesthetic landscape of art at the turn of the 21st century and assess the utopian stance of their work.

This study offers the first comprehensive account of Emerson's philosophy since his philosophical rehabilitation began in the late 1970s. It builds on the historical reconstruction proposed in the author's previous book, Emerson's Metaphysics, and like that study draws on the entire Emerson corpus-the poetry and sermons included. The aim here is expository. The overall though not exclusive emphasis is on identity, as the first term of Emerson's metaphysics of identity and flowing or metamorphosis. This metaphysics, or general conception of the nature of reality, is what grounds his epistemology and ethics, as well as his esthetic, religious, and political thought. Acknowledging its primacy enables a general account like this to avoid the anti-realist overemphasis on epistemology and language that has often characterized rehabilitation readings of his philosophy. After an initial chapter on Emerson's metaphysics, the subsequent chapters devoted to the other branches of his thought also begin with their "necessary foundation" in identity, which is the law of things and the law of mind alike. Perception of identity in metamorphosis is what characterizes the philosopher, the poet, the scientist, the reformer, and the man of faith and virtue. Identity of mind and world is felt in what Emerson calls the moral sentiment. Identity is Emerson's answer to the Sphinx-riddle of life experienced as a puzzling succession of facts and events.

This book is a unique contribution to scholarship of the poetics of Wallace Stevens, offering an analysis of the entire oeuvre of Stevens's poetry using the philosophical framework of Martin Heidegger. Marking the first book-length engagement with a philosophical reading of Stevens, it uses Heidegger's theories as a framework through which Stevens's poetry can be read and shows how philosophy and literature can enter into a productive dialogue. It also makes a case for a Heideggerian reading of poetry, exploring his later philosophy with respect to his writing on art, language, and poetry. Taking Stevens's repeated emphasis on the terms "being", "consciousness", "reality" and "truth" as its starting point, the book provides a new reading of Stevens with a philosopher who aligns poetic insight with a reconceptualization of the metaphysical significance of these concepts. It pursues the link between philosophy, American poetry as reflected through Stevens, and modernist poetics, looking from Stevens's modernist techniques to broader European philosophical movements of the twentieth century.