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.

Best known for his work "The Postmodern Condition", Jean-Francois Lyotard is one of the leading figures in contemporary French philosophy. This collection of articles offers an estimation and critique of his work. While the various chapters deal with different aspects of Lyotard's writings, they are all concerned with the question of judgement. The importance to Lyotard of judgement, and how it is to be judged, is a recurrent theme throughout the entire range of his work. It is particularly evident in his continuing engagement with the work of Kant. Lyotard's own essay, "Sensus Communis", which opens this volume, investigates through Kant the presuppositions of judgement. Other essays variously consider how in his writings Lyotard has rendered problematic existing forms of aesthetic, ethical, legal and political judgement. This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics of philosophy, literary theory, cultural studies and French studies.

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.

Benjamin argues for a reappraisal of philosophy with reference to the centrality of ontology, offering original reinterpretations of contemporary painters including Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and R.B. Kitaj.

Most of us care about certain people and things, and some of these concerns become personal commitments, involving our values, our relationships, our work and our religious or political stances. But what is commitement, and why should it matter? Is social commitment - for example, to the family - being eroded by individualism or ironic detachment? And how should we deal with the potential tension between devotion to a life-stance, and the doubts prompted by pursuit of rational integrity? In this work, Piers Benn delves into the relationship between commitment and meaningful life, and asks whether commitment must be based on truth to provide such meaning. He also explores obstacles to commitment such as boredom, sloth and indifference. Drawing on his own experience of dithering and procrastination, he suggests that a sceptical, cautious attitude to important matters can be both a virtue and a real obstacle to human fulfillment.

Clothes protect our vulnerable skin and they keep us warm or cool. They help us show that we are young or old, rich or poor, at work or play, and whether we may be good to know. But though they are basic, much as food and shelter are - and also may be beautiful - they have long had a bad press in serious, moral and philosophical writing. The main reason for this is that they are external to us, a cover we may hide behind, and one on which some people spend too much money, perfecting a pompous plumage of vanity: also they, and the fashions for them, may not last long. Nonetheless, when we choose our own clothes, we know the choice is a sensitive matter and far from being merely superficial. John Harvey considers the overlapping values that clothes have for us. Clothes both cover and advertise the bodies within them. They help make us the men and women we are, and help us to attract each other. They enroll us in groups, from our own circle to our generation worldwide; and they show just how, as individuals, we want to be noticed. Clothes, like their wearers, may compete in claiming power. They may also, on and off the catwalk, compete to claim the spotlight. In sum they show how we think we matter - and they can matter themselves in ways that may be intimate and even crucial to us. At all times clothes have demanded attention, even when they have been castigated for their vanity, and contemporary opinion is still divided. Are clothes the most frivolous of consumer disposables - or are they, however extravagant, art? Though we wear and see them every day, the value that they have for us is multiple and fugitive and hard to catch exactly. "Clothes" attempts to sort the many-coloured wardrobe which marks off mankind from other creatures.

Although various aesthetic themes have preoccupied many major philosophers, from Plato to Goodman, the central questions of the philosophy of art have remained ill-defined. This book gives a concise and systematic account of the leading philosophical ideas about art and aesthetics from ancient times to the present day, and goes on to propose a new theory of aesthetic satisfaction and artistic abilities.

Phenomenology, Materiality, Cybernetics, Palimpsest, Cyborgs, Landscape Urbanism, Typology, Semiotics, Deconstruction - the minefield of theoretical ideas that students must navigate today can be utterly confusing, and how do these theories translate to the design studio? Landscape Theory in Design introduces theoretical ideas to students without the use of jargon or an assumption of extensive knowledge in other fields, and in doing so, links these ideas to the processes of design. In five thematic chapters Susan Herrington explains: the theoretic groundings of the theory of philosophy, why it matters to design, an example of the theory in a work of landscape architecture from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, debates surrounding the theory (particularly as they elaborate modern and postmodern thought) and primary readings that can be read as companions to her text. An extensive glossary of theoretical terms also adds a vital contribution to students' comprehension of theories relevant to the design of landscapes and gardens. Covering the design of over 40 landscape architects, architects, and designers in 111 distinct projects from 20 different countries, Landscape Theory in Design is essential reading for any student of the landscape.

The aesthetics of urban life offer a curious quality, one that is both highly visible and hidden, both openly influencing and subtly imprinting. These aesthetics participate in the production of places; to the way they are built, to their resisting materiality, to their image in people's minds, to advertising and to the way people respond to the place. Exploring the encounter with the aesthetics, images and material design of urban life, this book offers analytic insights into contemporary cities. It shows how photography, maps and videos play a crucial role in bringing aesthetic dimensions into urban studies. This transdisciplinary approach draws on the full spectrum of the visual representation to tie the encounter with the realm of the visual directly and explicitly into the exploration of urban space.

First published in 1985, this book draws together the author's artistic with analytical practices which had been developed over many years of sociological enquiry. It interprets a 'work of art' as a site on which a viewer or critic is invited to share in questioning celebration of the painting itself. The author reassesses modern painting's relation to its own origins and to tradition in light of the emergence of 'postmodern' practice - exploring its engagement of fundamental questions about language and being. Also assessed is the relevance of the metaphors of writings and Reading to an understanding of painting and viewing practices - looking at painters' writings as well as phenomenological and post-structuralist writers.

Although creativity, from Plato onwards, has been recognized as a topic in philosophy, it has been overshadowed by investigations of the meanings and values of works of art. A distinguished roster of philosophers of art reviews this trend in this collection of essays. The collection appeals to philosophers of art and theorists in art history, cinema studies and literary criticism.

Contemporary television has been marked by such exceptional programming that it is now common to hear claims that TV has finally become an art. In Appreciating the Art of Television, Nannicelli contends that televisual art is not a recent development, but has in fact existed for a long time. Yet despite the flourishing of two relevant academic subfields-the philosophy of film and television aesthetics-there is little scholarship on television, in general, as an art form. This book aims to provide scholars active in television aesthetics with a critical overview of the relevant philosophical literature, while also giving philosophers of film a particular account of the art of television that will hopefully spur further interest and debate. It offers the first sustained theoretical examination of what is involved in appreciating television as an art and how this bears on the practical business of television scholars, critics, students, and fans-namely the comprehension, interpretation, and evaluation of specific televisual artworks.

It has been claimed that the natural sciences have abstracted for themselves a 'material world' set apart from human concerns, and social sciences, in their turn, constructed 'a world of actors devoid of things'. While a subject such as archaeology, by its very nature, takes objects into account, other disciplines, such as psychology, emphasize internal mental structures and other non-material issues. This book brings together a team of contributors from across the social sciences who have been taking 'things' more seriously to examine how people relate to objects. The contributors focus on every day objects and how these objects enter into our activities over the course of time. Using a combination of different theoretical approaches, including actor network theory, ecological psychology, cognitive linguistics and science and technology studies, the book argues against the standard notion of objects and their properties as inert and meaningless and argues for the need to understand the relations between people and objects in terms of process and change.

This book presents a pioneering critical study of Complicite's work throughout the years. Drawing on an extensive overview of the available research material - including interviews, manuscripts and the company's own archive - the book is framed within a clearly defined research perspective and explores the singularity of theatre communication. The book results from an encounter between the London-based - but cosmopolitan in scope - company, and a fresh application of the form-oriented scholarship of Eastern Europe, Yuri Lotman's semiosphere in particular. Focused on the aesthetics of Complicite, this study achieves a critical distance and undertakes multidimensional scrutiny of the available research material. By identifying the principles of Complicite's aesthetics, the book attempts to grasp the company's artistic paradigm. It focuses on ways of creating, preserving, and decoding meanings, rather than on the nuances of performance or contextual issues.

If architectural judgment were a city, a city of ideas and forms, then it is a very imperfect city. When architects judge the success or failure of a building, the range of ways and criteria which can be used for this evaluation causes many contentious and discordant arguments. Proposing that the increase in number and intensity of such arguments threatens to destabilize the very grounds upon which judgment is supposed to rest, this book examines architectural judgment in its historical, cultural, political, and psychological dimensions and their convergence on that most expressive part of architecture, namely: architectural character. It stresses the value of reasoned judgment in justifying architectural form -a judgment based on three sets of criteria: those criteria that are external to architecture, those that are internal to architecture, and those that pertain to the psychology of the architect as image-maker. External criteria include, philosophies of history or theories of modernity; internal criteria include architectural character and architectural composition; while the psychological criteria pertain to 'mimetic rivalry', or rivaling desires for the same architectural forms. Yet, although architectural conflicts can adversely influence judgment, they can at the same time, contribute to the advancement of architectural culture.

Written as an advocacy of melancholy's value as part of landscape experience, this book situates the concept within landscape's aesthetic traditions, and reveals how it is a critical part of ethics and empathy. With a history that extends back to ancient times, melancholy has hovered at the edges of the appreciation of landscape, including the aesthetic exertions of the eighteenth-century. Implicated in the more formal categories of the Sublime and the Picturesque, melancholy captures the subtle condition of beautiful sadness. The book proposes a range of conditions which are conducive to melancholy, and presents examples from each, including: The Void, The Uncanny, Silence, Shadows and Darkness, Aura, Liminality, Fragments, Leavings, Submersion, Weathering and Patina.

"The authors argue against certain philosophical distinctions between art and science; between verbal and nonverbal meaning; and between the affective and the cognitive. The book continues Goodman's argument against one traditional mode of philosophizing which privileges the notions of 'truth' and 'knowledge'. Hence, the book is in a broadly pragmatic tradition. It also deals in detail with such topics as meaning in architecture and the concept of 'variation' in art, and contains a superb critique of some important views in contemporary epistemology. This work will be savored even by those who will not accept all aspects of Goodman and Elgin's approach. Essential for all undergraduate philosophy collections." --Stanley Bates, Choice

Philosophers have been sharply divided in attempts to reconcile the validity of the moral distinctions essential to social well-being with the apparent ethical neutrality of the factual world. The failure to find an agreed solution to this problem produced the popular theory of Logical Empiricism, according to which ethical statements are meaningless. This and other kindred doctrines of ethical relativism that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, are obviously fatal to the Christian belief that there is 'down here below' a recognisable Kingdom of God that men were born to serve. In this book, originally published in 1961, the author offer a complete analysis of the nature of ethical perception to show how the two factors in moral decisions - a sense of moral obligation, and recognisable objective ethical values - can both be brought into a single coherent system of truth. He isolates the unique and ultimate element common to all our ethical and moral concepts and presents a clear view that the basic values recognised in a reasonable humanistic morality are embraced in the wider ideals of Christian Love. The purpose is to present a coherent system of moral truth that will, in this scientific age, commend itself to thoughtful people without offending their intelligence.

First published in 1959, this book is concerned with the methodology of art history, and so with questions about historical thinking; it enquires what scientific history of art can accomplish, what are its mean and limitations? It contains philosophical reflections on history and begins with chapters on the scope and limitations of a sociology of art, and the concept of ideology in the history of art. The chapter on the concept of "art history without names" occupies the central position in the book - thoroughly discussing the basic philosophical outlook for the whole work. There are also further chapters on psychoanalysis, folk art and popular art. The chapter on the role of convention in the history of art points the way for further study.

This book seeks to establish the relevance of Albert Camus' philosophy and literature to contemporary ethics. By examining Camus' innovative methods of approaching moral problems, Whistler demonstrates that Camus' work has much to offer the world of ethics- Camus does philosophy differently, and the insights his methodologies offer could prove invaluable in both ethical theory and practice. Camus sees lived experience and emotion as ineliminable in ethics, and thus he chooses literary methods of communicating moral problems in an attempt to draw positively on these aspects of human morality. Using case studies of Camus' specific literary methods, including dialogue, myth, mime and syntax, Whistler pinpoints the efficacy of each of Camus' attempts to flesh-out moral problems, and thus shows just how much contemporary ethics could benefit from such a diversification in method.

First published in 1991. The arts can only thrive in a culture where there is conversation about them. This is particularly true of the arts in an education context. Yet often the discussion is poor because we do not have the necessary concepts for the elaboration of our aesthetic responses, or sufficient familiarity with the contending schools of interpretation. The aim of Key Concepts is to engender a broad and informed conversation about the arts. By means of over sixty alphabetically ordered essays, the author offers a map of aesthetics, critical theory and the arts in education. The essays are both informative and argumentative, with cross-references, a supporting bibliography and suggestions for further reading.

First published in 1970. What is a work of art? What is the status of things in pictures and books? How are we to distinguish and ascertain the meaning of a literary work at various levels? This book is intended both to introduce the reader to classic philosophical accounts of art and beauty, and to bring out the significance for aesthetics of recent developments in philosophy.

This book provides an introduction into the subject of aesthetics and the problems associated with it. It emphasizes that aesthetics is not strictly a criterion or rule for production or appreciation. The book will be of interest to students of both art and philosophy.

First published in 1933. The purpose of this work was to bridge a gap in English philosophical literature by completing the elaborate history of Bosanquet and to stimulate and enrich the whole study of aesthetics by means of his personal destructive and constructive criticism. This title will be of interest to students of philosophy.