Organised around the theme of beauty, this innovative collection offers insight into the development of anthropological thinking on art, aesthetics and creativity in recent years. The volume incorporates current work on perception and generative processes, and seeks to move beyond a purely aesthetic and relativist stance. The chapters invite readers to consider how people sense and seek out beauty, whether through acts of human creativity and production; through sensory experience of sound, light or touch, or experiencing architecture; visiting heritage sites or ancient buildings; experiencing the environment through 'places of outstanding natural beauty'; or through cooperative action, machine-engineering or designing for the future.

This book proposes that the highest expression of ethics is an aesthetic. It suggests that the quintessential performance of any field of practice is an art that captures an ethic beyond any literal statement of values. This is to advocate for a shift in emphasis, away from current juridical approaches to ethics (ethicalcodes or regulation), toward ethics as an aesthetic practice-away from ethics as a minimal requirement, toward ethics as an aspiration. The book explores the relationship between art and ethics: a subject that has fascinated philosophers from ancient Greece to the present. It explores this relationship in all the arts: literature, the visual arts, film, the performing arts, and music. It also examines current issues raised by 'hybrid' artists who are working at the ambiguous intersections between art, bioart and bioethics and challenging ethical limits in working with living materials. In considering these issues the book investigates the potential for art and ethics to be mutually challenged and changed in this meeting.

The book is aimed at artists and students of the arts, who may be interested in approaching ethics and the arts in a new way. It is also aimed at students and teachers of ethics and philosophy, as well as those working in bioethics and the health professions. It will have appeal to the 'general educated reader' as being current, of considerable interest, and offering a perspective on ethics that goes beyond a professional context to include questions about how one approaches ethics in one's own life and practices.

Kant announces that the Critique of the Power of Judgment will bring his entire critical enterprise to an end. But it is by no means agreed upon that it in fact does so and, if it does, how. In this book, Ido Geiger argues that a principal concern of the third Critique is completing the account of the transcendental conditions of empirical experience and knowledge. This includes both Kant's analysis of natural beauty and his discussion of teleological judgments of organisms and of nature generally. Geiger's original reading of the third Critique shows that it forms a unified whole - and that it does in fact deliver the final part of Kant's transcendental undertaking. His book will be valuable to all who are interested in Kant's theory of the aesthetic and conceptual purposiveness of nature.

Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and other analytic philosophers of the early 20th century claimed to depart from the British idealists who dominated philosophical debate from the 1870s onwards. The nature and extent of this departure is now widely questioned as philosophers return to the writings of Bernard Bosanquet, F. H. Bradley, R. G. Collingwood, T. H. Green, J. M. E. McTaggart, and others. Nowadays, the British idealist movement is mostly remembered for its seminal contributions to metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy. The contributors to this volume explore some of the movement's other, equally-insightful, contributions to the philosophies of language, aesthetics and emotions. These chapters cover core philosophical issues including the relationship between the speech communities and the general will; the role of emotions in the Absolute; key differences between leading British idealists on the relationships between emotions and relations; the nature of love; the historical re-enactment of imagination and creativity; expressivism in art; and the actual idealism of the British idealists' Italian counterparts. This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of the History of Philosophy.

This book is based on the comprehensive investigations of the literary forms of philosophy around 1800 conducted within research project 'Heuristics between Science and Poetry'. It presents new research on the debates on the concept of the symbol from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century.

By contextualizing Walter Pater's aestheticism alongside Alexandre Kojeve's and Georges Bataille's readings of Hegelianism, this book shows that Pater's aestheticism constitutes both a philosophy of death and at the same time a philosophy of the impossibility of death.

Neoplatonic Aesthetics: Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts explores the idea of a Neoplatonic aesthetic, a philosophy of the arts based on the writings of Plato and the Neoplatonists - principally Plotinus, Proclucs, Pseudo-Dionysius, Nicolas Cusanus, and Marsilio Ficino - and more contemporary philosophers - Stephen MacKenna, Iris Murdoch, Denman Ross, Jacques Derrida, and Hans Georg Gadamer. This book examines the artistic production of figures such as Gioseffe Zarlino, Fra Angelico, Leon Battista Alberti, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Giorgio Vasari, and it formulates theoretical approaches to contemporary production based in the Neoplatonic philosophies.

In his Enquiry --which has been described as "certainly on of the most important aesthetic documents that eighteenth -century England produced" --the young Burke provided a systematic analysis of the 'sublime' and the 'beautiful,' together with a distinctive terminology which served to express certain facets of the changing sensibility of his time. The introduction traces the main sources of Burke's ideas and establishes the nature of his originality. The largest section of the editor's introduction, however, examines the influence of the Enquiry. Major writers like Johnson, Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy, painters such as Fuseli and Mortimer, and critics such as Diderot, Lessing and Kant, as well as many other minor figures, recognized Burke's new insights, and in varying degrees assimilated them. The second edition, revised by Burke himself, provides the copy-text, including changes between the first and second editions.

Although universally recognised as one of the greatest of modern philosophers, Wittgenstein's work in aesthetics has been unjustly neglected. This is the first book exclusively devoted to Wittgenstein's aesthetics, exploring the themes developed by Wittgenstein in his own writing on aesthetics as well as the implications of Wittgenstein's wider philosophical views for understanding central issues in aesthetics. Drawing together original contributions from leading international scholars, this book will be an important addition to studies of Wittgenstein's thought, but its discussion of issues in literature, music and performing art, and criticism will also be of interest to many students of literary and cultural studies. Exploring three key themes - the capacity of the arts to illuminate our lives; the nature of the particular responses involved in understanding and appreciating works of art; the role of theory and principle in artistic and critical practice - the contributors address issues raised by contemporary philosophers of art, and seek to make connections between Wittgenstein's work and that of other significant philosophies of art in the Western tradition. Displaying the best practice of modern philosophical writing - clarity, cogency, respect for but not blind obedience to common sense, argument illustrated with detailed examples, rejection of speculation and pretension - this book demonstrates how philosophy can make a valuable contribution to understanding the arts.

Feminist approaches to art are extremely influential and widely studied across a variety of disciplines, including art theory, cultural and visual studies, and philosophy. "Gender and Aesthetics" is an introduction to the major theories and thinkers within art and aesthetics from a philosophical perspective, carefully introducing and examining the role that gender plays in forming ideas about art. It is ideal for anyone coming to the topic for the first time.
Organized thematically, the book introduces in clear language the most important topics within feminist aesthetics:
* Who is an artist and why are there so few women painters?
* Art, pleasure and beauty
* Music, literature and painting
* The role of gender in taste and food
* What is art and who is an artist?
* Disgust and the sublime
Each chapter discusses important topics and thinkers within art and examines the role gender plays in our understanding of them. These topics include creativity, genius and the appreciation of art, and thinkers from Plato, Kant, and Hume to Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Also included in the book are illustrations from Gauguin and Hogarth to Cindy Sherman and Nancy Spero to clarify and help introduce often difficult concepts. Each chapter concludes with a summary and further reading and there is an extensive annotated bibliography.
Carolyn Korsmeyer's style is refreshing and accessible, making the book suitable for students of philosophy, gender studies, visual studies and art theory, as well as anyone interested in the impact of gender on theories of art.

The German Left and Aesthetic Politics examines the articulation of contending materialist aesthetic practices within the ideological fractures of the German Left between the Second and Third International. It is hinged on the major literary critical contributions of Franz Mehring, representative of the Second, and Karl Wittfogel and Georg Lukacs representing the Third. Both parties focussed on the bourgeois revolutionary cultural heritage and how it might provide examples for emulation. However, after the 1918 November Revolution, a politically radical avant-garde challenged that tradition. Figures and institutions including the Berlin Dadaists, Piscator's proletarian theatre, and Bertolt Brecht, as well as dissident Marxist intellectuals like Karl Korsch and Fritz Sternberg, asked other questions and proposed other answers. Revisiting the contexts and contents of these exchanges allows the reader to understand the serious role allocated to cultural questions in constructing the "third pillar of socialism," its integrative dimension.

Elements of Criticism (1762) is a philosophical work by Henry Home, Lord Kames. Published at the height of his career as a leading legal and cultural figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, Elements of Criticism has been credited as a crucial academic work in the development of modern English literary studies. "The science of criticism tends to improve the heart not less than the understanding...A just taste in the fine arts, by sweetening and harmonizing the temper, is a strong antidote to the turbulence of passion and violence of pursuit. Elegance of taste procures to a man so much enjoyment at home, or easily within reach, that in order to be occupied, he is, in youth, under no temptation to precipitate into hunting, gaming, drinking; nor, in middle age, to deliver himself over to ambition; nor, in old age, to avarice." Although he is largely unheard of today, Henry Home was an integral figure in the elevation of the art of literary criticism as a subject in universities around Britain and the world. His central thesis is that criticism itself stems from the senses and directly relates to humanity's capacity for reason. Through art, Home believed, humanity could live both morally and in harmony with the natural world, thereby creating a civilization rooted in virtue and creativity. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Henry Home, Lord Kames' Elements of Criticism is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is a philosophical treatise published in pamphlet form by Irish statesman and thinker Edmund Burke. Following in the footsteps of generations of philosophers, especially Aristotle and Hume, Burke sought to describe the inherent difference between beauty and sublimity as emotional responses rooted in human perception. His work was incredibly influential for the growth of Romanticism in Europe and Britain especially, which sought to capture the sublime in both visual art, music, and literature. Burke begins with a section on the senses in relation to human individuality and society in order to illuminate the collective nature of passions-for which we may read emotions-and to argue that the power of the arts is to shape and effect those emotions. In the second part, Burke observes the passions caused by the sublime, including terror, as well as records the effects of certain sensory perceptions-of sound, light, color, and smell-on creating sublime feelings in the mind. Part three follows the same trajectory but describes the beautiful instead before ultimately comparing the two, and part four attempts to ascertain their causes in nature. Burke concludes his treatise with a brief section on the sublime and beautiful in poetry, laying the groundwork for Romanticism's use of language, among other things, to purposefully invoke feeling in the reader or observer. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is a classic of philosophy reimagined for modern readers.

In response to the question "What is art?", today's arts establishment has a simple answer: "anything" is art if a reputed artist or expert says it is. Many people are sceptical about the alleged new art forms that have proliferated during the 20th century - from "abstract art" and "performance art" to "Hyperfiction" and "chance music". Yet today's "experts" claim that all such work, however incomprehensible, is art. An alternative to this view is provided by philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982). Although best known as the author of "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged", Rand created an original and illuminating philosophy of art, which not only offers a profound analysis of the cognitive and emotional function of art but also confirms the widespread view that much of today's purported art is really not art at all. In "What Art Is", Torres and Kamhi present the first in-depth examination and critique of Rand's aesthetic theory. Contrasting her ideas with those of other thinkers, they conclude that, despite shortcomings in detail, Rand's account is compelling. Moreover, they demonstrate that it is supported by evidence from anthropology, neurology, cognitive science and psychology. The authors apply Rand's theory to a debunking of prominent modernist and postmodernist "artists". Finally, they explore its implications for such fields as arts education, law and public policy. Fifteen years after Ayn Rand's death, interest in her life and ideas is booming. All her published works remain in print, and hitherto unpublished writings continue to appear. In 1998 the Showtime cable TV channel will air a movie adaptation of Barbara Branden's biography "The Passion of Ayn Rand", starring Helen Mirren as Rand.

Elements of Criticism (1762) is a philosophical work by Henry Home, Lord Kames. Published at the height of his career as a leading legal and cultural figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, Elements of Criticism has been credited as a crucial academic work in the development of modern English literary studies. "The science of criticism tends to improve the heart not less than the understanding...A just taste in the fine arts, by sweetening and harmonizing the temper, is a strong antidote to the turbulence of passion and violence of pursuit. Elegance of taste procures to a man so much enjoyment at home, or easily within reach, that in order to be occupied, he is, in youth, under no temptation to precipitate into hunting, gaming, drinking; nor, in middle age, to deliver himself over to ambition; nor, in old age, to avarice." Although he is largely unheard of today, Henry Home was an integral figure in the elevation of the art of literary criticism as a subject in universities around Britain and the world. His central thesis is that criticism itself stems from the senses and directly relates to humanity's capacity for reason. Through art, Home believed, humanity could live both morally and in harmony with the natural world, thereby creating a civilization rooted in virtue and creativity. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Henry Home, Lord Kames' Elements of Criticism is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is a philosophical treatise published in pamphlet form by Irish statesman and thinker Edmund Burke. Following in the footsteps of generations of philosophers, especially Aristotle and Hume, Burke sought to describe the inherent difference between beauty and sublimity as emotional responses rooted in human perception. His work was incredibly influential for the growth of Romanticism in Europe and Britain especially, which sought to capture the sublime in both visual art, music, and literature. Burke begins with a section on the senses in relation to human individuality and society in order to illuminate the collective nature of passions-for which we may read emotions-and to argue that the power of the arts is to shape and effect those emotions. In the second part, Burke observes the passions caused by the sublime, including terror, as well as records the effects of certain sensory perceptions-of sound, light, color, and smell-on creating sublime feelings in the mind. Part three follows the same trajectory but describes the beautiful instead before ultimately comparing the two, and part four attempts to ascertain their causes in nature. Burke concludes his treatise with a brief section on the sublime and beautiful in poetry, laying the groundwork for Romanticism's use of language, among other things, to purposefully invoke feeling in the reader or observer. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is a classic of philosophy reimagined for modern readers.

This book presents a new interpretation of the principle of utility in moral and political theory based on the writings of the classical utilitarians from Hume to J.S. Mill. Discussion of utility in writers such as Adam Smith, William Paley and Jeremy Bentham are considered.

It is only worth examining the experience of aesthetic pleasure if there are grounds for believing that there are objective truths underpinning the subjective experience of beauty. This book explores the roots of aesthetic perception within the framework of individual taste and collective fashion.

Its aim is to offer mental tools for the critical analysis of buildings and urban configurations with the purpose of enhancing appreciation of the built environment. It is some of the recent branches of science and biomathematics which provide a platform for a theory of aesthetics which transcends the subjective without undermining subjectivity.

Beauty is not arbitrary; there is a logic which informs its infinite variety of manifestations. It is not enough just to know what we like; the experience of beauty is that much richer when we know why we like it.

"Public Education and the Imagination-Intellect argues for re-thinking the thinking process and for urban education reform. Weems's work lives in the moment of creation. Her imagination-intellect theory chapters frame this book; she posits that the imagination and intellect are inextricably linked; that like Freire's architect all ideas are first imagined, then intellectually developed in an interconnected process that mirrors the blood's circulation through the body. The two plays and the collection of poems are rich, layered landscapes of African American culture and meanings. They lend themselves to multi-interpretation, co-performance, and co-ownership by each audience member who engages the work.

Architectural Forms and Philosophical Structures examines architectural and architectonic forms as products of philosophical and epistemological structures in selected cultures and time periods, and analyzes architecture as a text of its culture. Relations between architectural forms and philosophical structures are explored in Western civilization, beginning in Egypt and Greece and culminating in twentieth-century Europe and America. Architecture, like all forms of artistic expression, is interwoven with the beliefs and the structures of knowledge of its culture.

David Wang's Architecture and Sacrament considers architectural theory from a Christian theological perspective, specifically, the analogy of being (analogia entis). The book tracks social and cultural reasons why the theological literature tends to be separate from contemporary architecture theory. Wang argues that retrieval of the sacramental outlook embedded within the analogy of being, which informed centuries of art and architecture in the West, can shed light on current architectural issues such as "big box stores," the environmental crisis and the loss of sense of community. The book critiques the materialist basis of current architectural discourse, subsumed largely under the banner of critical theory. This volume on how European ideas inform architectural theory complements Wang's previous book, A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture: Past, Present, Future, and will appeal to architecture students and academics, as well as those grappling with the philosophical moorings of all built environments.

Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts is the first comprehensive collection of papers by philosophers examining the nature of imagination and its role in understanding and making art.

Imagination is a central concept in aesthetics with close ties to issues in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, yet it has not received the kind of sustained, critical attention it deserves. This collection of seventeen brand new essays critically examines just how and in what form the notion of imagination illuminates fundamental problems in the philosophy of art.

eBook available with sample pages: 020349864X

A novel interpretation of architecture, ugliness, and the social consequences of aesthetic judgment When buildings are deemed ugly, what are the consequences? In Ugliness and Judgment, Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgment-and its concern for ugliness-in architectural debates and their resulting social effects across three centuries of British architectural history. From eighteenth-century ideas about Stonehenge to Prince Charles's opinions about the National Gallery, Hyde uncovers a new story of aesthetic judgment, where arguments about architectural ugliness do not pertain solely to buildings or assessments of style, but intrude into other spheres of civil society. Hyde explores how accidental and willful conditions of ugliness-including the gothic revival Houses of Parliament, the brutalist concrete of the South Bank, and the historicist novelty of Number One Poultry-have been debated in parliamentary committees, courtrooms, and public inquiries. He recounts how architects such as Christopher Wren, John Soane, James Stirling, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe have been summoned by tribunals of aesthetic judgment. With his novel scrutiny of lawsuits for libel, changing paradigms of nuisance law, and conventions of monarchical privilege, he shows how aesthetic judgments have become entangled in wider assessments of art, science, religion, political economy, and the state. Moving beyond superficialities of taste in order to see how architectural improprieties enable architecture to participate in social transformations, Ugliness and Judgment sheds new light on the role of aesthetic measurement in our world.

Aesthetics: A Reader provides centrally important texts that explore the current state of the debate on twelve major topics within aesthetics and the philosophy of art. With the exception of excerpts from classic texts by Hume, Kant, Hanslick, and Collingwood, all the readings are by contemporary authors. Most of these essays have been abridged by the editors to enhance their accessibility and to maximize our ability to present a variety of positions on a given topic. Aesthetics provides a wide-ranging introduction to aesthetic theory and philosophy of art for readers, particularly university students who seek an overview of major controversies, theories, and writers. Each chapter features three to four contrasting views of each topic introduced by an original introductory essay that outlines the chapter's central issues, concepts, and controversies.

Amajor shift in critical attitudes toward the arts took place in the eighteenth century. The fine arts were now looked upon as a group, divorced from the sciences and governed by their own rules. The century abounded with treatises that sought to establish the overriding principles that differentiate art from other walks of life as well as the principles that differentiate them from each other. This burst of scholarly activity resulted in the incorporation of aesthetics among the classic branches of philosophy, heralding the cognitive turn in epistemology. Among the writings that initiated this turn, none were more important than the British contribution. "The Arts in Mind" brings together an annotated selection of these key texts.

A companion volume to the editors' "Tuning the Mind," which analyzed this major shift in world view and its historical context, "The Arts in Mind" is the first representative sampling of what constitutes an important school of British thought. The texts are neither obscure nor forgotten, although most histories of eighteenth-century thought treat them in a partial or incomplete way. Here they are made available complete or through representative extracts together with an editor's introduction to each selection providing essential biographical and intellectual background. The treatises included are representative of the changed climate of opinion which entailed new issues such as those of perception, symbolic function, and the role of history and culture in shaping the world.

Contents include: Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, "Characteristics"; Francis Hutcheson, "Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Harmony and Design"; Hildebrand Jacob, "Of the Sister Arts: An Essay"; James Harris, "On Music, Painting and Poetry"; Charles Avison, "An Essay on Musical Expression"; James Beattie, "Essay on Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind"; Daniel Webb, "Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music"; Thomas Twining, "On Poetry Considered as an Imitative Art," "On the Different Senses of the Word Imitative as Applied to Music by the Ancients and by the Moderns"; Adam Smith, "Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in What are Called the Imaginative Arts."