Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has described Morphology as a science dedicated to the observation and description of everything "that is handled by chance and occasionally in other [sciences]". This meant that morphological research could be undertaken by any science or discipline as far as it considers form within its subject. This volume collects eighteen articles from scholars and contributors from philosophy, ranging from epistemology to aesthetics (with explorations into poetry, music, painting and photography), from philosophical anthropology to the philosophy of language, and from ontology to moral and political philosophy. Other contributions represent disciplines including art history, mathematics, cognitive science, linguistics, history, demography, computer science, and architecture. The wide range of areas puts to the test Goethe's morphological thought, i.e. Goethe's understanding of form as knowledge. Contributors: Ana Agud, Chiara Cappelletto, Dennis L. Sepper, Diana Soeiro, Diogo Seixas Lopes, Federico Vercellone, Herve Le Bras, Javier Arnaldo, Jean Petitot, Joachim Schulte, Joao Constancio, Jose Gil, Maria Filomena Molder, Maria Joao Mayer Branco, Maurizio Gribaudi, Nelio Conceicao, Nuno Fonseca, Silvio Varela Sousa.

This book is a result of studies on psychoanalysis, politics, and art. The topics in this book range from populism, the limits of the political, identity, melancholy, the peculiarity of psychoanalytical interpretation to the connection of theatre and politics. Psychoanalysis is a form of practicing personal truth, which needs to be one's own and which is not a result of anonymous discourse. Politics is the practice of being with others; it is the cultivation of antagonistic relations with others. Art is the practice aiming at giving one's life the mark of something unique, it is the very practice of life.

Like us, the ancient Greeks and Romans came to know and understand the world through their senses. Yet sensory experience has rarely been considered in the study of antiquity and, when the senses are examined, sight is regularly privileged. 'Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses' presents a radical reappraisal of antiquity's textures, flavours, and aromas, sounds and sights. It offers both a fresh look at society in the ancient world and an opportunity to deepen the reading of classical literature. The book will appeal to readers in classical society and literature, philosophy and cultural history. All Greek and Latin is translated and technical matters are explained for the non-specialist. The introduction sets the ancient senses within the history of aesthetics and the subsequent essays explores the senses throughout the classical period and on to the modern reception of classical literature.

The relationship between philosophy and theatre is a central theme in the writings of Plato and Aristotle and of dramatists from Aristophanes to Stoppard. Where Plato argued that playwrights and actors should be banished from the ideal city for their suspect imitations of reality, Aristotle argued that theatre, particularly tragedy, was vital for stimulating our emotions and helping us to understanding ourselves. Despite this rich history the study of philosophy and theatre has been largely overlooked in contemporary philosophy. This is the first book to introduce philosophy and theatre. It covers key topics and debates, presenting the contributions of major figures in the history of philosophy, including: what is theatre? How does theatre compare with other arts? theatre as imitation, including Plato on mimesis truth and illusion in the theatre, including Nietzsche on tragedy theatre as history theatre and morality, including Rousseau's criticisms of theatre audience and emotion, including Aristotle on catharsis theatre and politics, including Brecht's Epic Theatre. Including annotated further reading and summaries at the end of each chapter, Philosophy and Theatre is an ideal starting point for those studying philosophy, theatre studies and related subjects in the arts and humanities.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. While wine drunk millennia ago was the humble beverage of the people, today the drink is inextricable with power, sophistication, and often wealth. Bottles sell for half a million dollars. Point systems tell us which wines are considered the best. Wine professionals give us the language to describe what we taste. Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of addiction, purveyor of pleasure, pain, and memory - wine has never been contained in a single glass. Drawing from science, religion, literature, and memoir, Wine meditates on the power structures bound up with making and drinking this ancient, intoxicating beverage. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Urban public space continues to be the focus of debate regarding its conceptualization and how it is designed, (re)produced and managed. Nowadays public spaces are facing new challenges conceptually and practically. This book focuses on two of them: mobility and aestheticization. Mobility and flows are considered to be key characteristics of the post-modern era. While for some scholars it means the "end of place", others are trying to re-conceptualize it by bringing together notions of space, place, mobility and identity. Still surprisingly few authors address the concept of public space in this respect. Principles of aesthetic and diverse forms of aestheticization seem to have affected urban space and culture throughout Modernity, forming a dimension where power and conflict around urban space are performed. In this book nine authors with social science and arts backgrounds from six countries discuss how these processes shape the life of modern cities, and where the social sciences should move for a better understanding of them.

In this book, McMahon argues that a reading of Kant's body of work in the light of a pragmatist theory of meaning and language (which arguably is a Kantian legacy) leads one to put community reception ahead of individual reception in the order of aesthetic relations. A core premise of the book is that neo-pragmatism draws attention to an otherwise overlooked aspect of Kant's "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," and this is the conception of community which it sets forth. While offering an interpretation of Kant's aesthetic theory, the book focuses on the implications of Kant's third critique for contemporary art. McMahon draws upon Kant and his legacy in pragmatist theories of meaning and language to argue that aesthetic judgment is a version of moral judgment: a way to cultivate attitudes conducive to community, which plays a pivotal role in the evolution of language, meaning, and knowledge.

Featuring chapters by a diverse range of leading international artists and theorists, this book suggests that contemporary art is increasingly characterized by the problem of where and when it is situated. While much advanced artistic speculation of the twentieth-century was aligned with the question "what is art?," a key question for many artists and thinkers in the twenty-first century has become "where is art?" Contributors explore the challenge of meaningfully identifying and evaluating works located across multiple versions and locations in space and time. In doing so, they also seek to find appropriate language and criteria for evaluating forms of art that often straddle other realms of knowledge and activity. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, art criticism, and philosophy of art.

The Arts-Based Research Primer explores the arts-based research paradigm and its potential to intersect with and augment traditional social science and educational research methods. The arts-based research (ABR) paradigm may be broadly understood as a flexible architecture of practice-based theory-building methodologies. This text aims to reveal how arts-based ways of knowing and doing lend themselves to blended spaces of naturalistic inquiry, and is intended to aid artists and scientists alike in their research and professional practices. This text also highlights the utility of arts-based research concepts toward building innovative curriculum-making strategies for educational practice both within and beyond the classroom setting. Accessible examples of analytic, synthetic, critical-activist, and improvisational arts-based research methodologies and their outcomes were solicited from a wide range of researchers in varying disciplines, including senior faculty and emerging graduate level scholars. Chapters include a paradigm analysis of the characteristics of arts-based research; brief historical overviews along with a review of recent ABR literature; charts, diagrams and photographs representing ABR approaches for addressing diverse kinds of questions; suggestions for using an ABR inquiry model when writing a research paper; and detailed glossaries of key concepts and terms.

This book presents and discusses the varying and seminal role which colour plays in the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Having once said that "Colours spur us to philosophize", the theme of colour was one to which Wittgenstein returned constantly throughout his career. Ranging from his Notebooks, 1914-1916 and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the posthumously published Remarks on Colours and On Certainty, this book explores how both his view of philosophical problems generally and his view on colours specifically changed considerably over time. Paying particular attention to his so-called intermediary period, it takes a case-based approach to the presentation of colour in texts from this period, from Some Remarks on Logical Form and Philosophical Remarks to his Big Typescript.

In global terms, creative industries are on the rise, as are new media investigations in art and initiatives that encourage innovation in the arts, for end-use in the economy. However, there is a significant lack of critical reflection on this form of creative production. This important book points out the dangers and downfalls that accompany such a boom of the creative industries and the subordination of art to the economy and politics. Specifically, it shows that art, as a mode of social and aesthetic practice, is losing the very thing which it has striven for so desperately in the course of modernity: its independence from other spheres of human activity.

Proposing a new approach to Jamesian aesthetics, Daniel Hannah examines the complicated relationship between Henry James's impressionism and his handling of 'the public.' Hannah challenges solely phenomenological or pictorial accounts of literary impressionism, instead foregrounding James's treatment of the word 'impression' as a mediatory unit that both resists and accommodates invasive publicity. Thus even as he envisages a breakdown between public and private at the end of the nineteenth century, James registers that breakdown not only as a threat but also as an opportunity for aesthetic gain. Beginning with a reading of 'The Art of Fiction' as both a public-forming essay and an aesthetic manifesto, Hannah's study examines James's responses to painterly impressionism and to aestheticism, and offers original readings of What Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove, and The American Scene that treat James's articulation of impressionism in relation to the child, the future of the novel, and shifts in the American national imaginary. Hannah's study persuasively argues that throughout his career James returns to impressionability not only as a site of immense vulnerability in an age of rapid change but also as a crucible for reshaping, challenging, and adapting to the public sphere's shifting forms.

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.

By interrogating the terms and concepts most central to cultural change, Future Theory interrogates how theory can play a central role in dynamic transition. It demonstrates how entangled the highly politicized spheres of cultural production, scientific invention, and intellectual discourse are in the contemporary world and how new concepts and forms of thinking are crucial to embarking upon change. Future Theory is built around five key concepts - change, boundaries, ruptures, assemblages, horizons - examined by leading international thinkers to build a vision of how theory can be applied to a constantly shifting world.

The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime. Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute's involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities. Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman's poetry to Ed Ruscha's photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity's only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book has received the AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award 2012. This book introduces a progressive type of education called Critical Aesthetic Pedagogy. This pedagogy utilizes the arts to promote critical learning, and incorporates particular types of aesthetic experiences into pedagogical practices to increase students' social empowerment and commitment to social justice. The first coherent body of work that marries critical pedagogy and aesthetics, the book guides theory and practice for teacher educators interested in infusing their critical pedagogical practices with the arts. It also proposes tangible reforms in the public school system that will enable a critical aesthetic process to take root and thrive. Critical Aesthetic Pedagogy can be used in upper-level undergraduate and graduate teacher education and art education courses. It can also help P-12 teachers and art organizations to successfully develop and carry out critical aesthetic practices at all levels. In addition, it provides a rationale for school administrators, community leaders, and educational policymakers for embracing critical aesthetic practices as a way to improve the education of all children.

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.