Chance ordained that Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was not only a philosopher, playwright and writer, but also a salonnier. In other words, an art critic. In 1759, his friend Grimm entrusted him with a project that forced him to acquire "thoughtful notions concerning painting and sculpture" and to refine "art terms, so familiar in his words yet so vague in his mind."

Diderot wrote artistic reviews of exhibitions - Salons - that were organized bi-annually at the Louvre by the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. These reviews, published in the Correspondence Litteraire, were Diderot's unique contribution to art criticism in France. He fulfilled his task of salonnier on nine occasions, despite occasional dips in his enthusiasm and self-confidence.

Compiled and presented by Jean Szenec, this anthology helps the contemporary reader to familiarize himself with Diderot's aesthetic thought in all its greatness. It includes eight illustrations and is followed by texts from Jean Starobinski, Michel Delon, and Arthur Cohen.

'On Art and Artists' is translated by John Glaus, professor of French and an amateur expert of the XVIIIth century."

This book offers an analysis of humor, comedy, and laughter as philosophical topics in the 19th Century. It traces the introduction of humor as a new aesthetic category inspired by Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" and shows Sterne's deep influence on German aesthetic theorists of this period. Through differentiating humor from comedy, the book suggests important distinctions within the aesthetic philosophies of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Solger, and Jean Paul Richter. The book links Kant's underdeveloped incongruity theory of laughter to Schopenhauer's more complete account and identifies humor's place in the pessimistic philosophy of Julius Bahnsen. It considers how caricature functioned at the intersection of politics, aesthetics, and ethics in Karl Rosenkranz's work, and how Kierkegaard and Nietzsche made humor central not only to their philosophical content but also to its style. The book concludes with an explication of French philosopher Henri Bergson's claim that laughter is a response to mechanical inelasticity.

Written by an experienced drummer and philosopher, "Groove" is a vivid and exciting study of one of music's most central and relatively unexplored aspects. Tiger C. Roholt explains why grooves, which are forged in music's rhythmic nuances, remain hidden to some listeners. He argues that grooves are not graspable through the intellect nor through mere listening; rather, grooves are disclosed through our "bodily "engagement with music. We grasp a groove bodily by moving with music's pulsations. By invoking the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of "motor intentionality," Roholt shows that the "feel" of a groove, and the understanding of it, are two sides of a coin: to "get" a groove just is to comprehend it bodily and to feel that embodied comprehension.

Identifying quickly illusion with deception, we tend to oppose it to the reality of life. However, investigating in this collection of essays illusion's functions in the Arts, which thrives upon illusion and yet maintains its existential roots and meaningfullness in the real, we might wonder about the nature of reality itself.

Does not illusion open the seeming confines of factual reality into horizons of imagination which transform it? Does it not, like art, belong essentially to the makeup of human reality?

Papers by: Lanfranco Aceti, John Baldacchino, Maria Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, Jo Ann Circosta, Madalina Diaconu, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Brian Grassom, Marguerite Harris, Andrew E. Hershberger, James Carlton Hughes, Lawrence Kimmel, Jung In Kwon, Ruth Ronen, Scott A. Sherer, Joanne Snow-Smith, Max Statkiewicz, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Daniel Unger, James Werner.

Christopher Nolan is the writer and director of Hollywood blockbusters like The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, and also of arthouse films like Memento and Inception. Underlying his staggering commercial success however, is a darker sensibility that questions the veracity of human knowledge, the allure of appearance over reality and the latent disorder in contemporary society. This appreciation of the sinister owes a huge debt to philosophy and especially modern thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. Taking a thematic approach to Nolan's oeuvre, Robbie Goh examines how the director's postmodern inclinations manifest themselves in non-linearity, causal agnosticism, the threat of social anarchy and the frequent use of the mise en abyme, while running counter to these are narratives of heroism, moral responsibility and the dignity of human choice. For Goh, Nolan is a 'reluctant postmodernist'. His films reflect the cynicism of the modern world, but with their representation of heroic moral triumphs, they also resist it.

New Waves in Philosophy of Science captures the diverse array of issues in the rapidly developing area of philosophy of science by bringing together a pool of talented young philosophers from across the globe to debate the field and show where it's heading.

This much acclaimed book has emerged as neo-pragmatism's most significant contribution to contemporary aesthetics. By articulating a deeply embodied notion of aesthetic experience and the art of living, and by providing a compellingly rigorous defense of popular art--crowned by a pioneer study of hip hop--Richard Shusterman reorients aesthetics towards a fresher, more relevant, and socially progressive agenda. The second edition contains an introduction where Shusterman responds to his critics, and it concludes with an added chapter that formulates his novel notion of somaesthetics.

Gerhard Richter examines, in the work of Walter Benjamin, one of the central problems of modernity: the question of how to receive an intellectual inheritance. Covering aspects of Benjamin's complex relationship to the legacies of such writers as Kant, Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Derrida, each chapter attends to a key concern in Benjamin's writing, while reflecting on the challenges that this issue presents for the question of inheritability and transmissibility. Both reading Benjamin and watching himself reading Benjamin, Richter participates in the act of inheriting while also inquiring into the conditions of possibility for inheriting Benjamin's corpus today.

The general aim of this volume is to investigate the nature of the relation between pictorial experience and aesthetic appreciation. In particular, it is concerned with the character and intimacy of this relationship: is there a mere causal connection between pictorial experience and aesthetic appreciation, or are the two relata constitutively associated with one another? The essays in the book's first section investigate important conceptual issues related to the pictorial experience of paintings. In Section II, the essays discuss the notion of styles, techniques, agency, and facture, and also take into account the experience of photographic and cinematic pictures. The Pleasure of Pictures goes substantially beyond current debates in the philosophy of depiction to launch a new area of reflection in philosophical aesthetics.

"Every good giving and every perfect gift is from on high, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning" (James 1:17). This verse conveys a powerful image of God as the source and referent of all beauty. This book demonstrates how the experience of beauty is related to our inherent longing for the God who is reflected in such moments. Richly informed by Junius Johnson's expertise on Bonaventure and von Balthasar, the book offers a robust, full-orbed theology of beauty, showing how it has functioned as a theological concept from biblical times to the present day.

While the field of aesthetics has long been dominated by European philosophy, recent inquiries have expanded the arena to accommodate different cultures as well as different definitions and meanings. Aesthetics often establishes the pattern that connects culture functions in a society. In African and African American societies it functions as the keeper of the traditions. The African aesthetic is visible from popular culture to the classical cultures. In all art forms, including body adornment arts, there emerge symbols, colors, rhythms, styles, and forms that function as artistic instruments and cultural histories. While acknowledging African cultural diversity, the focus here is on the commonalities in the aesthetic that make an Ibo recognize a Kikuyu and a Jamaican recognize a Chewa and an African American recognize a Sotho. The deep structure manifest in African cultures in the diaspora is proof of the aesthetic continuity. The debate continues over the exact nature of African aesthetics, and in this volume scholars and teachers in the fields of African and African American studies approach the subject from a broad range of disciplines. Dance, music, art, theatre, and literature are examined in order fully to appreciate and delineate what the specific qualities and aspects of an African aesthetic might be. Additionally, theoretical concepts and issues are discussed in order to define more clearly what is meant by an African aesthetic. The term African here applies to all Africans, both continental and diasporan, and encompasses historically used terms such as Negro, Black, and Afro-American. This thoughtful and thought-provoking volume will be a valuable addition to the readings of scholars and students in fields ranging from African studies to general philosophy and cultural studies.

This book continues the series Contemporary Philosophy (International Institute of Philosophy), which surveys significant trends in contemporary philosophy. The new volume on Aesthetics, comprising nineteen surveys, shows the variety of approaches to Aesthetics in various cultures. The close connection between aesthetics and religion and between aesthetics and ethics is emphasized in several contributions.

"Using an approach deeply informed by philosophy of art, art history and perceptual psychology, this book places seeing at the centre of an original theory of pictorial representation and explores the ramifications such a theory has for the visual arts"--

A fresh set of concerns face the twenty-first century British novelist. In this study of the four key novelists Zadie Smith, Nadeem Aslam, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell, the the changes in narrative approaches and critical directions of a new post-1989 fiction are explored. Close readings of the writers are informed by a range of contemporary theorists, critics and commentators to reveal the emphases of twenty-first century fiction. Terror, fear, consumerism, multinationalism, and corporatism: the terms circulating in culture and social networks are evident in Smith's faith in ethical living, Aslam's consideration of multiculturalism, the novels Kunzru builds around the politics of identity and in the importance Mitchell places on the interconnectedness of human life. By putting the emergence of a new British literary dynamic in the context of ethical as well as global contexts, this study analyzes the transformed fictional perceptions of a world no longer defined by the stand off of super powers.

This book focuses on a central notion in Theodor. W. Adorno's philosophy: the nonidentical. The nonidentical is what our conceptual framework cannot grasp and must therefore silence, the unexpressed other of our rational engagement with the world. This study presents the nonidentical as the multidimensional centerpiece of Adorno's reflections on subjectivity, truth, suffering, history, art, morality and politics, revealing the intimate relationship between how and what we think. Adorno's work, written in the shadow of Auschwitz, is a quest for a different way of thinking, one that would give the nonidentical a voice - as the somatic in reasoning, the ephemeral in truth, the aesthetic in cognition, the other in society. Adorno's philosophy of the nonidentical reveals itself not only as a powerful hermeneutics of the past, but also as an important tool for the understanding of modern phenomena such as xenophobia, populism, political polarization, identity politics, and systemic racism.

The book proposes a set of original contributions in research areas shared by planning theory, architectural research, design and ethical inquiry. The contributors gathered in 2010 at the Ethics of the Built Environment seminar organized by the editors at Delft University of Technology. Both prominent and emerging scholars presented their researches in the areas of aesthetics, technological risks, planning theory and architecture. The scope of the seminar was highlighting shared lines of ethical inquiry among the themes discussed, in order to identify perspectives of innovative interdisciplinary research. After the seminar all seminar participants have elaborated their proposed contributions. Some of the most prominent international authors in the field were subsequently invited to join in with this inquiry.

Claudia Basta teaches "Network Infrastructures and Mobility" at Wageningen University. Between 2009 and 2011 she worked as Coordinator of the 3TU Centre of Excellence for Ethics and Technology of Delft University, where she completed her post-doc research on the shared areas of investigation between risk theories, planning theories and ethical inquiry. Her main research interests concern the matter of assessing and governing technological risks in relation to sustainable land use planning. She wrote a number of journal articles and contributions to collective books on these themes.

Stefano Moroni teaches Land use ethics and the law at Milan Politecnico. His main research interests concern planning theory and ethics. He is the author of a number of books and journal articles. Recent publications (as co-author): "Contractual Communities in the Self-Organizing City" (Springer 2012).

Like artists, important writers defy unequivocal interpretations. Gao Xingjian, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, is a cosmopolitan writer, deeply rooted in the Chinese past while influenced by paragons of Western Modernity. The present volume is less interested in a general discussion on the multitude of aspects in Gao's works and even less in controversies concerning their aesthetic value than in obtaining a response to the crucial issues of freedom and fate from a clearly defined angle. The very nature of the answer to the question of freedom and fate within Gao Xingjian's works can be called a polyphonic one: thereare affirmative as well as skeptical voices. But polyphony, as embodied by Gao, is an even more multifaceted phenomenon. Most important for our contention is the fact that Gao Xingjian's aesthetic experience embodies prose, theater, painting, and film. Taken together, they form a Gesamtkunstwerk whose diversity of voices characterizes every single one of them.

This cultural study reveals the interdependence between British Aestheticism and late-Victorian social-reform movements. Following their mentor John Ruskin who believed in art's power to civilize the poor, cultural philanthropists promulgated a Religion of Beauty as they advocated practical schemes for tenement reform, university-settlement education, Sunday museum opening, and High Anglican revival. Although subject to novelist's ambivalent, even satirical, representations, missionary aesthetes nevertheless constituted an influential social network, imbuing fin-de-siecle artistic communities with political purpose and political lobbies with aesthetic sensibility.

Wittgenstein's work, early and later, contains the seeds of an original and important rethinking of moral or ethical thought that has, so far, yet to be fully appreciated. The ten essays in this collection, all specially commissioned for this volume, are united in the claim that Wittgenstein's thought has much to contribute to our understanding of this fundamental area of philosophy and of our lives. They take up a variety of different perspectives on this aspect of Wittgenstein's work, and explore the significance of Wittgenstein's moral thought throughout his work, from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and Wittgenstein's startling claim there that there can be no ethical propositions, to the Philosophical Investigations.

"Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement "unravels politics from theatre in order to propose a new means to politicize performance. The last human venue is the location where the sense of one's aliveness, ethical associations, and collective potential is kickstarted through the shock of theatrical affects. Performance analyses ranging from child actors, animals and objects to reflections on the innovative theatre work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Forced Entertainment and Goat Island combine to offer a radical critique of performance studies: the first social science of appearance.

This edited monograph provides a compelling analysis of the interplay between neuroscience and aesthetics. The book broaches a wide spectrum of topics including, but not limited to, mathematics and creator algorithms, neurosciences of artistic creativity, paintings and dynamical systems as well as computational research for architecture. The international authorship is genuinely interdisciplinary and the target audience primarily comprises readers interested in transdisciplinary research between neuroscience and the broad field of aesthetics.

This book presents an extended dialogue in essay form between specialists in the work of Moses Mendelssohn, and experts in important trends in related late-seventeenth and eighteenth century thought. The first group of contributors explores themes in Mendelssohn's metaphysics and aesthetics, presenting both their internal argumentative coherence and their historical context. The second outlines the context of Mendelssohn's views on specific topics, and describes his contribution to the discussion of them.

The essays are organized in four sections. The first pairs two essays on Mendelssohn's theory of language and writing. The second section offers three essays addressing a number of topics in Mathematics and philosophy in Mendelssohn. A group of eight essays follows, dealing with Metaphysics in a historical context. The fourth section presents five essays discussing Mendelssohn's Aesthetics in a historical context.

"Moses Mendelssohn's Metaphysics and Aesthetics" arises from a conference held in Amsterdam in 2009, which gathered numerous authorities to address the central theme. Taken together, these eighteen essays present a sophisticated portrait of Mendelssohn, packed with detail and rich in complexity."