This anthology fosters an interdisciplinary dialogue between the mathematical and artistic approaches in the field where mathematical and artistic thinking and practice merge. The articles included highlight the most significant current ideas and phenomena, providing a multifaceted and extensive snapshot of the field and indicating how interdisciplinary approaches are applied in the research of various cultural and artistic phenomena. The discussions are related, for example, to the fields of aesthetics, anthropology, art history, art theory, artistic practice, cultural studies, ethno-mathematics, geometry, mathematics, new physics, philosophy, physics, study of visual illusions, and symmetry studies. Further, the book introduces a new concept: the interdisciplinary aesthetics of mathematical art, which the editors use to explain the manifold nature of the aesthetic principles intertwined in these discussions.

An interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the complex and conflicted topic of beauty in cultural, arts and medicine, looking back through the long cultural history of beauty, and asking whether it is possible to 'recover beauty'.

Suffering Art Gladly is concerned with the ostensibly paradoxical phenomenon of negative emotions involved in the experience of art: how can we explain the pleasure felt or satisfaction taken in such experience when it is the vehicle of negative emotions, that is, ones that seem to be unpleasant or undesirable, and that one normally tries to avoid experiencing? The question is as old as philosophical reflection on the arts, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and subsequently addressed by Hume, Burke, Diderot, Kant, and Schopenhauer, among others. Moreover, it is still an important and unresolved question in contemporary philosophy of art, where the discussion has been notably enlivened by recent research on the nature of imagination, cognition, and the emotions. Suffering Art Gladly comprises essays of two kinds, though the division between them is not airtight. The first kind are essays with a primarily historical focus, examining the problem of negative emotion from art as treated by important figures in the history of aesthetic thought, including Aristotle, Hume, Diderot, Kant, and Schopenhauer. The second kind are essays with a primarily contemporary focus, in which the methods and tools of contemporary analytic philosophy are much in evidence. In addition to the thirteen essays forming the heart of the book there is a general introduction by the editor, motivating the basic problem with which the essays are variously concerned and identifying the presuppositions or assumptions that are involved in different solutions to the problem. The individual essays are wide-ranging, dealing with a variety of artforms, negative emotions, and specific works of art, and the contributors, all recognized scholars in the field of aesthetics, are a mixture of junior and senior figures representing seven nationalities.

Aesthetics is no longer merely the philosophy of perception and the arts. Nelson Goodman, Arthur Danto and others have contributed to develop aesthetics from a field at the margins of philosophy to one permeating substantial areas of theoretical and practical philosophy. New approaches like environmental and ecological aesthetics widened the understanding of the aesthetics of nature. The contributions in this volume address the most important issues in contemporary aesthetics, many of them from a Wittgensteinian perspective. The 39th International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium, organized by the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, was held at Kirchberg am Wechsel, Lower Austria, from August 7th to 13th 2016 and aimed at taking an inventory of important tendencies and positions in contemporary aesthetics. The volume includes a selection of the invited papers.

Sound coming from outside the field of vision, from somewhere beyond, holds a privileged place in the Western imagination. When separated from their source, sounds seem to manifest transcendent realms, divine powers, or supernatural forces. According to legend, the philosopher Pythagoras lectured to his disciples from behind a veil, and two thousand years later, in the age of absolute music, listeners were similarly fascinated with disembodied sounds, employing various techniques to isolate sounds from their sources. With recording and radio came spatial and temporal separation of sounds from sources, and new ways of composing music.
Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice explores the phenomenon of acousmatic sound. An unusual and neglected word, "acousmatic" was first introduced into modern parlance in the mid-1960s by avant garde composer of musique concrete Pierre Schaeffer to describe the experience of hearing a sound without seeing its cause. Working through, and often against, Schaeffer's ideas, Brian Kane presents a powerful argument for the central yet overlooked role of acousmatic sound in music aesthetics, sound studies, literature, philosophy and the history of the senses. Kane investigates acousmatic sound from a number of methodological perspectives -- historical, cultural, philosophical and musical -- and provides a framework that makes sense of the many surprising and paradoxical ways that unseen sound has been understood. Finely detailed and thoroughly researched, Sound Unseenpursues unseen sounds through a stunning array of cases -- from Bayreuth to Kafka's "Burrow," Apollinaire to %Zi%zek, music and metaphysics to architecture and automata, and from Pythagoras to the present-to offer the definitive account of acousmatic sound in theory and practice.
The first major study in English of Pierre Schaeffer's theory of "acousmatics," Sound Unseen is an essential text for scholars of philosophy of music, electronic music, sound studies, and the history of the senses."

The thoroughly contemporary question of the relationship between emotion and reason was debated with such complexity by the philosophers of the 17th century that their concepts remain a source of inspiration for today's research about the emotionality of the mind. The analyses of the works of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and many other thinkers collected in this volume offer new insights into the diversity and significance of philosophical reflections about emotions during the early modern era. A focus is placed on affective components in learning processes and the boundaries between emotions and reason.

The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art provides an extensive research resource to the burgeoning field of Asian aesthetics. Featuring leading international scholars and teachers whose work defines the field, this unique volume reflects the very best scholarship in creative, analytic, and comparative philosophy. Beginning with a philosophical reconstruction of the classical rasa aesthetics, chapters range from the nature of art-emotions, tones of thinking, and aesthetic education to issues in film-theory and problems of the past versus present. As well as discussing indigenous versus foreign in aesthetic practices, this volume covers North and South Indian performance practices and theories, alongside recent and new themes including the Gandhian aesthetics of surrender and self-control and the aesthetics of touch in the light of the politics of untouchability. With such unparalleled and authoritative coverage, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art represents a dynamic map of comparative cross-cultural aesthetics. Bringing together original philosophical research from renowned thinkers, it makes a major contribution to both Eastern and Western contemporary aesthetics.

The Sublime in Schopenhauer's Philosophy transforms our understanding of Schopenhauer's aesthetics and anthropology. Vandenabeele seeks ultimately to rework Schopenhauer's theory into a viable form so as to establish the sublime as a distinctive aesthetic category with a broader existential and metaphysical significance.

With its pessimistic vision and bleak message of world-denial, it has often been difficult to know how to engage with Schopenhauer's philosophy. Schopenhauer's arguments have seemed flawed and his doctrines marred by inconsistencies; his very pessimism almost too flamboyant to be believable. Yet a way of redrawing this engagement stands open, Sophia Vasalou argues, if we attend more closely to the visionary power of Schopenhauer's work. The aim of this book is to place the aesthetic character of Schopenhauer's standpoint at the heart of the way we read his philosophy and the way we answer the question: why read Schopenhauer - and how? Approaching his philosophy as an enactment of the sublime with a longer history in the ancient philosophical tradition, Vasalou provides a fresh way of assessing Schopenhauer's relevance in critical terms. This book will be valuable for students and scholars with an interest in post-Kantian philosophy and ancient ethics.

The book traces the literary journey that Proust's work made to China and back by means of translation, intertextual engagement, and the creation of a transcultural dialogue through migrant literature. It begins with a translation history of Proust's work in China and studies the different (re)translations and editions of La Recherche highlighting their culturally conditioned thematic emphases and negligence, such as time and memory over anti-Semitism and homosexuality. The book then moves on to explore three contemporary mainland Chinese writers' creative intertextual engagement with Proust against the backdrop of China's explosive development from modernity to post-modernity in the 1990s. Finally, back to France, the book examines the multifarious literary relations between Proust and the Franco-Chinese migrant writer Francois Cheng. It demonstrates how the cultural heritages of China and the West can be re-negotiated and put into dialogue through the fictional and creative medium of literature, as well as providing a means of understanding the economic, political, and cultural exchanges in our current global context.

The book is the first English translation of Nicolai Hartmann's final book, published in 1953. It will be of value to graduate students in philosophy, scholars concerned with 20th century Continental philosophy, students of aesthetics and art history and criticism, and persons in and out of academic philosophy who wish to develop their aesthetic understanding and responsiveness to art and music. Aesthetics, Hartmann believes, centers on the phenomenon of beauty, and art "objectivates" beauty, but beauty exists only for a prepared observer. Part One explores the act of aesthetic appreciation and its relation to the aesthetic object. It discovers phenomenologically determinable levels of apprehension. Beauty appears when an observer peers through the physical foreground of the work into the strata upon which form has been bestowed by an artist in the process of expressing some theme. The theory of the stratification of aesthetic objects is perhaps Hartmann's most original and fundamental contribution to aesthetics. He makes useful and perceptive distinctions between the levels in which beauty is given to perception by nature, in the performing and the plastic arts, and in literature of all kinds. Part Two develops the phenomenology of beauty in each of the fine arts. Then Hartmann explores some traditional categories of European aesthetics, most centrally those of unity of value and of truth in art. Part Three discusses the forms of aesthetic values. Hartmann contrasts aesthetic values with moral values, and this exploration culminates in an extensive phenomenological exhibition of three specific aesthetic values, the sublime, the charming, and the comic. A brief appendix, never completed by the author, contains some reflections upon the ontological implications of aesthetics. Engaged in constant dialogue with thinkers of the past, especially with Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Hartmann corrects and develops their insights by reference to familiar phenomena of art, especially with Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Greek sculpture and architecture. In the course of his analysis, he considers truth in art (the true-to-life and the essential truth), the value of art, and the relation of art and morality. The work stands with other great 20th century contributors to art theory and philosophical aesthetics: Heidegger, Sartre, Croce, Adorno, Ingarden, and Benjamin, among others.

In a short chapter of the Critique of Practical Reason entitled "On the Typic of the Pure Practical Power of Judgment," Kant addresses a crucial problem facing his theory of moral judgment: How can we represent the supersensible moral law so as to apply it to actions in the sensible world? Despite its importance to Kant's project, previous studies of the Typic have been fragmentary, disparate, and contradictory. This book provides a detailed commentary on the Typic, elucidating how it enables moral judgment by means of the law of nature, which serves as the 'type', or analogue, of the moral law. In addition, the book situates the Typic, both historically and conceptually, within Kant's theory of symbolic representation. While many commentators have assimilated the Typic to the aesthetic notion of 'symbolic hypotyposis' in the third Critique, the author contends that it has greater continuities with the theoretical notion of 'symbolic anthropomorphism' in the Prolegomena. As the first comprehensive, book-length study of the Typic that critically engages with the secondary literature, this monograph fills an important gap in the research on Kant's ethics and aesthetics and provides a starting point for further inquiry and debate.

New arts created in the context of new social realities are impacting our traditional ideas about aesthetics. Art, art markets and aesthetics now interact in ways that demand new forms of thought and revision of old. Cosmopolitan Aesthetics presents the first thorough account of the challenges facing aesthetics today in the light of globalization, introducing the history that underpins them. This is an ideal starting point for anyone looking to better understand 21st century art and aesthetics. Beginning with globalization and the nature of global art markets today, Daniel Herwitz offers new insight into postcolonial aesthetics, colonial legacies, cultural property, the problems of global communication and aesthetic diversity, and the uneasy connection between aesthetics and politics, before providing a crucial grounding in 18th and 19th century aesthetics, with discussion of the three great modern aestheticians David Hume, Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel.

Noise is so often a 'stench in the ear' - an unpleasant disturbance or an unwelcome distraction. But there is much more to noise than what greets the ear as unwanted sound. Beyond Unwanted Sound is about noise and how we talk about it. Weaving together affect theory with cybernetics, media histories, acoustic ecology, geo-politics, sonic art practices and a range of noises, Marie Thompson critiques both the conservative politics of silence and transgressive poetics of noise music, each of which position noise as a negative phenomenon. Beyond Unwanted Sound instead aims to account for a broader spectrum of noise, ranging from the exceptional to the banal; the overwhelming to the inaudible; and the destructive to the generative. What connects these various and variable manifestations of noise is not negativity but affectivity. Building on the Spinozist assertion that to exist is to be affected, Beyond Unwanted Sound asserts that to exist is to be affected by noise.

Despite the recent upsurge of interest in Theodor Adorno's work, his literary writings remain generally neglected. Yet literature is a central element in his aesthetic theory. Building on the current emergent interest in modern philosophical aesthetics, this book offers a wide-ranging account of the literary components of Adorno's thinking. Bringing together original essays from a distinguished international group of contributors, it offers the reader a user-friendly path through the major areas of Adorno's work in this area. It is divided into three sections, dealing with the concept of literature, with poetry and poetics, and with modernity, drama and the novel respectively. At the same time, the book provides a clear sense of the unique qualities of Adorno's philosophy of literature by critically relating his work to a number of other influential theorists and theories including contemporary postmodernist thought and cultural studies.

Man has always had a weakness for aesthetics, which secretly catch, enchant and seize the attention. Size and colour, form and rhythm affect the desire to say yes or no.
In modern society art is pure and ruthless. But a price has been paid for this freedom: art has become irrelevant.
The opposite of pure art is applied art, which not only must be aesthetically satisfying, but must also fulfil economic, political or religious considerations.

Aesthetic communication explores how organizations use aesthetics. Beginning with an exciting chapter on aesthetic art and applied art it follows with an in-depth analysis of the different fields of organizational aesthetics;
- Image, or the creation of an attractive veil;
- rhetoric, or the use of words to affect people;
- narrative, or the construction of seducing contexts;
- design, or how to impregnate ordinary things with attraction and identity;
- advertisement, or how to insert products in a heavenly world; and
- architecture or how to use buildings to tell about greatness and power.

In this volume the philosophy of perception and observation is discussed by leading philosophers with implications in the philosophy of mind, in epistemology, and in philosophy of science. In the last years the philosophy of perception underwent substantial changes and new views appeared: the intentionality of perception has been contested by relational theories of perception (direct realism), a richer view of perceptual content has emerged, new theories of intentionality have been defended against naturalistic theories of representation (e. g. phenomenal intentionality). These theoretical changes reflect also new insights coming from psychological theories of perception. These changes have substantial consequences for the epistemic role of perception and for its role in scientific observation. In the present volume, leading philosophers of perception discuss these new views and show their implications in the philosophy of mind, in epistemology and in philosophy of science. A special focus is laid on Franz Brentano and Ludwig Wittgenstein. A reference volume for all scholars and students of the history, psychology and philosophy of perception, and cognitive science.

This book provides a unique, philosophical interpretation of a significant twentieth-century painter - Wassily Kandinsky. Michel Henry was one of the leading French philosophers of the twentieth century. His numerous works of philosophy are all organized around the theme of life. In contrast to the scientific understanding of life as a biological process, Henry's philosophy develops a conception of life as an immediate feeling of one's own living."Seeing the Invisible" marks Henry's most sustained engagement in the field of aesthetics. Through an analysis of the life and works of Wassily Kandinsky, Henry uncovers the philosophical significance of Kandinsky's revolution in painting: that abstract art reveals the invisible essence of life. Henry shows that Kandinsky separates colour and line from the constraints of visible form and, in so doing, conveys the invisible intensity of life - a force rooted in the corporeity and pathos of all living beings. More than just a study of art history, this book presents Kandinsky as an artist who is engaged in the project of painting the invisible and thus offers invaluable methodological clues for Henry's own phenomenology of the invisible.

This text offers a series of critical commentaries on, and forced encounters between, different thinkers. At stake in this philosophical and psychoanalytical enquiry is the drawing of a series of diagrams of the finite/infinite relation, and the mapping out of the contours for a speculative and pragmatic production of subjectivity.

Is self-consciousness a condition of possibility for knowledge? Does Kant's theory of self-consciousness commit us to transcendental idealism? How convincing is Kant's theory of self-consciousness? How should we understand transcendental idealism? What is Hegel's alternative? How do Kant and Hegel conceive of the beautiful? How do their conceptions of beauty relate to their metaphysics? In this volume, some of the world's most renowned Kant and Hegel scholars seek to provide answers.

This book examines animal welfare themes in fiction, and considers how authors of the last two centuries undermine dominative attitudes toward the nonhuman. Appearing alongside the emerging humane movements of the nineteenth century and beyond is a kind of storytelling sympathetic to protectionist efforts well-described as a literature of protest. Compassion-inclined tales like the Dolittle adventures by Hugh Lofting educate readers on a wide range of ethical questions, empathize with the vulnerable, and envision peaceful coexistence with other species. Memorable characters like Black Beauty and Beautiful Joe, Ivan the gorilla and Louis the trumpeter swan, Hazel and Cheeta, Mr. Bultitude and Doctor Rat do not merely amuse. They are voices from the margins who speak with moral urgency to those with ears to hear. This broad survey of ethical themes in animal fiction highlights the unique contributions creative writers make toward animal welfare efforts.