Leading young scholars present a collection of wide-ranging essays covering central problems in meta-aesthetics and aesthetic issues in the philosophy of mind, as well as offering analyses of key aesthetic concepts, new perspectives on the history of aesthetics, and specialized treatment of individual art forms.

Kant's Critique of Judgment represents one of the most important texts in modern philosophy. However, while its importance for 19th-century philosophy has been widely acknowledged, scholars have often overlooked its far-reaching influence on 20th-century thought. This book aims to account for the various interpretations of Kant's notion of aesthetic judgment formulated in the last century. The book approaches the subject matter from both a historical and a theoretical point of view and in relation to different cultural contexts, also exploring in an unprecedented way its influence on some very up-to-date philosophical developments and trends. It represents the first choral and comprehensive study on this missing piece in the history of modern and contemporary philosophy, capable of cutting in a unique way across different traditions, movements and geographical areas. All main themes of Kant's aesthetics are investigated in this book, while at the same time showing how they have been interpreted in very different ways in the 20th century. With contributions by Alessandro Bertinetto, Patrice Canivez, Dario Cecchi, Diarmuid Costello, Nicola Emery, Serena Feloj, Gunter Figal, Tom Huhn, Hans-Peter Kruger, Thomas W. Leddy, Stefano Marino, Claudio Paolucci, Anne Sauvagnargues, Dennis J. Schmidt, Arno Schubbach, Scott R. Stroud, Thomas Teufel, and Pietro Terzi.

Schelling is often thought to be a protean thinker whose work is difficult to approach or interpret. Devin Zane Shaw shows that the philosophy of art is the guiding thread to understanding Schelling's philosophical development from his early works in 1795-1796 through his theological turn in 1809-1810. Schelling's philosophy of art is the keystone of the system; it unifies his idea of freedom and his philosophy of nature. Schelling's idea of freedom is developed through a critique of the formalism of Kant's and Fichte's practical philosophies, and his nature-philosophy is developed to show how subjectivity and objectivity emerge from a common source in nature. The philosophy of art plays a dual role in the system. First, Schelling argues that artistic activity produces through the artwork a sensible realization of the ideas of philosophy. Second, he argues that artistic production creates the possibility of a new mythology that can overcome the socio-political divisions that structure the relationships between individuals and society. Shaw's careful analysis shows how art, for Schelling, is the highest expression of human freedom.

Sarah A. Mattice explores contemporary philosophical activity and the way in which one aspect of language-metaphor-gives shape and boundary to the landscape of the discipline. The book examines metaphors of combat, play, and aesthetic experience and emphasizes how the choices we make in philosophical language are deeply intertwined with what we think philosophy is and how it should be practiced. Drawing on a broad range of resources, from cognitive linguistics and hermeneutics to aesthetics and Chinese philosophy, Mattice's argument provides insight into the evolution and future of philosophy itself.

An expressive dialogue between Deleuze's philosophical writings on cinema and Beckett's innovative film and television work, the book explores the relationship between the birth of the event - itself a simultaneous invention and erasure - and Beckett's attempts to create an incommensurable space within the interstices of language as a (W)hole.

What is depiction? A new answer is given to this venerable question by providing a syncretistic theory of depiction that tries to combine the merits of the previous theories on the matter while dropping their defects. Thus, not only perceptual, but also both conventional and causal factors contribute in making something a picture of something else.

This unique introduction fully engages and clearly explains pragmatism, an approach to knowledge and philosophy that rejects outmoded conceptions of objectivity while avoiding relativism and subjectivism. It follows pragmatism's focus on the process of inquiry rather than on abstract justifications meant to appease the skeptic. According to pragmatists, getting to know the world is a creative human enterprise, wherein we fashion our concepts in terms of how they affect us practically, including in future inquiry. This book fully illuminates that enterprise and the resulting radical rethinking of basic philosophical conceptions like truth, reality, and reason. Author Cornelis de Waal helps the reader recognize, understand, and assess classical and current pragmatist contributions-from Charles S. Peirce to Cornel West-evaluate existing views from a pragmatist angle, formulate pragmatist critiques, and develop a pragmatist viewpoint on a specific issue. The book discusses: Classical pragmatists, including Peirce, James, Dewey, and Addams; Contemporary figures, including Rorty, Putnam, Haack, and West; Connections with other twentieth-century approaches, including phenomenology, critical theory, and logical positivism; Peirce's pragmatic maxim and its relation to James's Will to Believe; Applications to philosophy of law, feminism, and issues of race and racism.

The Dialectic of Taste examines the aesthetic economy in the context of economic crises. It explains how a new concern for aesthetics, seen in artisan markets, was born out of the ashes of McDonaldization to become a potent force today, capable of both regulating social identity and sparking social change.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that feeling is part of the system of the mind. Judgments of taste based on feeling are a unique kind of judgment, and the feeling that is their foundation forms an independent third power of the mind. Feeling has a special role within this system in that it also provides a transition between the other two powers of the mind, cognition and desire. Matthews argues that feeling, our experience of beauty, provides a transition because it orients humans in a sensible world. Judgments of taste help overcome the difficulties that arise when rational cognitive and moral ends must be pursued in a sensible world. Matthews demonstrates how feeling, disassociated from rational activities in Kant's earlier works, is now central in reaching rational ends and understanding humans as unified rational beings. Audience: This book would be of interest to research libraries and university libraries, philosophers, historians and aestheticians.

In this major reinterpretation of the Victorian Aesthetic Movement, Linda Dowling argues that such classic works of Victorian art writing as Ruskin's Stones of Venice or Morris's Lectures on Art or Wilde's Critic as Artist become wholly intelligible only within the larger ideological context of the Whig aesthetic tradition. Tracing the genealogy of Victorian Aestheticism back to the first great crisis of the Whig polity in the earlier eighteenth century, Dowling locates the source of the Victorians' utopian hopes for art in the "moral sense" theory of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury's theory of a universal moral sense, argues The Vulgarization of Art, became the transcendental basis for the new Whig polity that proposed itself as an alternative to older theories of natural law and divine right. It would then sustain the Victorians' hope that their own nightmare landscape of commercial modernity and mass taste might be transformed by a universal pleasure in art and beauty. The Vulgarization of Art goes on to explore the tragic consequences for the Aesthetic Movement when a repressed and irresolvable conflict between Shaftesbury's assumption of "aristocratic soul" and the Victorian ideal of "aesthetic democracy" repeatedly shatters the hopes of such writers as Ruskin, Morris, Pater, and Wilde for social transformation through the aesthetic sense.

What do we really mean when we call something "graphic"? In American Graphic, Rebecca Clark examines the "graphic" as a term tellingly at odds with itself. On the one hand, it seems to evoke the grotesque; on the other hand, it promises the geometrically streamlined in the form of graphs, diagrams, and user interfaces. Clark's innovation is to ask what happens when the same moment in a work of literature is graphic in both ways at once. Her answer suggests the graphic turn in contemporary literature is intimately implicated in the fraught dynamics of identification. As Clark reveals, this double graphic indexes the unseemliness of a lust-in our current culture of information-for cool epistemological mastery over the bodies of others. Clark analyzes the contemporary graphic along three specific axes: the ethnographic, the pornographic, and the infographic. In each chapter, Clark's explication of the double graphic reads a canonical author against literary, visual and/or performance works by Black and/or female creators. Pairing works by Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon with pieces by Mat Johnson, Kara Walker, Fran Ross, Narcissister, and Teju Cole, Clark tests the effects and affects of the double graphic across racialized and gendered axes of differences. American Graphic forces us to face how closely and uncomfortably yoked together disgust and data have become in our increasingly graph-ick world.

Awarded an Honourable Mention by the Association for Israeli Studies. Exploring the politics of the image in the context of Israeli militarized visual culture, Civic Aesthetics examines both the omnipresence of militarism in Israeli culture and society and the way in which this omnipresence is articulated, enhanced, and contested within local contemporary visual art. Looking at a range of contemporary artworks through the lens of "civilian militarism", Roei employs the theory of various fields, including memory studies, gender studies, landscape theory, and aesthetics, to explore the potential of visual art to communicate military excesses to its viewers. This study builds on the specific sociological concerns of the chosen cases to discuss the complexities of visuality, the visible and non-visible, arguing for art's capacity to expose the scopic regimes that construct their visibility. Images and artworks are often read either out of context, on purely aesthetic or art-historical ground, or as cultural artefacts whose aesthetics play a minor role in their significance. This book breaks with both traditions as it approaches all art, both high and popular art, as part of the surrounding visual culture in which it is created and presented. This approach allows a new theory of the image to come forth, where the relation between the political and the aesthetic is one of exchange, rather than exclusion.

Is it merely an accident of English etymology that 'imagination' is cognate with 'image'? Despite the iconoclasm shared to a greater or lesser extent by all Abrahamic faiths, theism tends to assert a link between beauty, goodness and truth, all of which are viewed as Divine attributes. Douglas Hedley argues that religious ideas can be presented in a sensory form, especially in aesthetic works. Drawing explicitly on a Platonic metaphysics of the image as a bearer of transcendence, The Iconic Imagination shows the singular capacity and power of images to represent the transcendent in the traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam. In opposition to cold abstraction and narrow asceticism, Hedley shows that the image furnishes a vision of the eternal through the visible and temporal.

First published in 1927, Science and Philosophy: And Other Essays is a collection of individual papers written by Bernard Bosanquet during his highly industrious philosophical life. The collection was put together by Bosanquet's wife after the death of the writer and remains mostly unaltered with just a few papers added and the order of entries improved. The papers here displayed consist of various contributions Bosanquet made to Mind, the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, the International Journal of Ethics and other periodicals, as well as work from volumes of lectures and essays under his own or other editorship. Throughout the collection, Bosanquet considers the relationship between science and philosophy. The two subject areas became increasingly intertwined during Bosanquet's lifetime as scientific writers grew more interested in the philosophical investigation of the concepts which underlined their work and philosophical thinkers recognised the importance of the relationship between mathematics and logic as well as that between physics and metaphysics. The first essay in this volume discusses this idea explicitly and all subsequent articles may be regarded as essays in support of the main discussion with which the volume opens.

Roman Ingarden's very extensive philosophical work in metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics con tinues to attract increasing attention both in Poland and in North America. Further work left uncompleted at his death is appearing. Major bibliographies of his work as well as of studies about his work are now in print. Ingar den's scattered articles on various questions in philosophy are being collected. And conferences devoted to his work are now held regularly. These diverse activities might suggest a similar diver sity in Ingarden's philosophical legacy. But such a sugges tion would be misleading. For interest in Ingarden's work has continued to centre on the one area which is arguably at the core of his achievement, namely the complex prob lems of aesthetics. In this field Ingarden seemed to pull together his various interests in ontology and epistemology especially. Here he brought those interests to focus on a set of issues that would occupy him creatively throughout the vicissitudes of his long and difficult scholarly life. More over, aesthetics is also the field where Ingarden perhaps most succeeded in orchestrating the many themes he owed to his phenomenological training while finally transposing the central issues into something original, something dis tinctively his own that philosophers can no longer identify as merely phenomenological. Ingarden's aesthetics not surprisingly has captured the interest today of many scholars in different fields."

This volume adopts a varied approach to the study of the "material world" in the French literature, thought and visual arts of the 19th century. Beginning with more purely philosphical definitions of materialism, seen as a topic within the history of ideas, it moves to a broader, more general treatment of materialism - and examines the political, social and cultural repercussions of the emergence of this consumer society.;In particular, the book tackles the question of how things, objects and the material surface of the world - for so long disdained and excluded by a deeply entrenched Neo-classical cultural tradition - came to be fully incorporated into the literature and visual arts of the period. Contributors look not only at the Romantic and Realist transcendence of the Neo-classical heritage of abstraction and idealism, but also adopt modern critical perspectives to analyze central themes such as urbanization, fetishism and the representation of the female body. By the author of "Popular Culture in Modern France: A Study of Cultural Discourse" and co-editor (with N. Hewitt) of "France and the Mass Media".

Animation - Process, Cognition and Actuality presents a uniquely philosophical and multi-disciplinary approach to the scholarly study of animation, by using the principles of process philosophy and Deleuzian film aesthetics to discuss animation practices, from early optical devices to contemporary urban design and installations. Some of the original theories presented are a process-philosophy based theory of animation; a cognitive theory of animation; a new theoretical approach to the animated documentary; an original investigative approach to animation; and unique considerations as to the convergence of animation and actuality. Numerous animated examples (from all eras and representing a wide range of techniques and approaches - including television shows and video games) are examined, such as Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Madame Tutli-Putli (2007), Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), The Peanuts Movie (2015), Grand Theft Auto V (2013) and Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist (1995-2000). Divided into three sections, each to build logically upon each other, Dan Torre first considers animation in terms of process and process philosophy, which allows the reader to contemplate animation in a number of unique ways. Torre then examines animation in more conceptual terms in comparing it to the processes of human cognition. This is followed by an exploration of some of the ways in which we might interpret or 'read' particular aspects of animation, such as animated performance, stop-motion, anthropomorphism, video games, and various hybrid forms of animation. He finishes by guiding the discussion of animation back to the more tangible and concrete as it considers animation within the context of the actual world. With a genuinely distinctive approach to the study of animation, Torre offers fresh philosophical and practical insights that prompt an engagement with the definitions and dynamics of the form, and its current literature.

This book examines evangelical dieting and fitness programs and provides a systematic approach of this diverse field with its wide variety of programs. When evangelical Christians engage in fitness and dieting classes in order to "glorify God," they often face skepticism. This book approaches devotional fitness culture in North America from a religious studies perspective, outlining the basic structures, ideas, and practices of the field. Starting with the historical backgrounds of this current, the book approaches both practice and ideology, highlighting how devotional fitness programs construe their identity in the face of various competing offers in religious and non-religious sectors of society. The book suggests a nuanced and complex understanding of the relationship between sports and religion, beyond 'simple' functional equivalency. It provides insights into the formation of secular and religious body ideals and the way these body ideals are sacralized in the frame of an evangelical worldview.

This book draws on the theatrical thinking of Samuel Beckett and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to propose a method for research undertaken at the borders of performance and philosophy. Exploring how Beckett fabricates encounters with the impossible and the unthinkable in performance, it asks how philosophy can approach what cannot be thought while honouring and preserving its alterity. Employing its method, it creates a series of encounters between aspects of Beckett's theatrical practice and a range of concepts drawn from Deleuze's philosophy. Through the force of these encounters, a new range of concepts is invented. These provide novel ways of thinking affect and the body in performance; the possibility of theatrical automation; and the importance of failure and invention in our attempts to respond to performance encounters. Further, this book includes new approaches to Beckett's later theatrical work and provides an overview of Deleuze's conception of philosophical practice as an ongoing struggle to think with immanence.

This book explores the ways in which music can engender religious experience, by virtue of its ability to evoke the ineffable and affect how the world is open to us. Arguing against approaches that limit the religious significance of music to an illustrative function, The Extravagance of Music sets out a more expansive and optimistic vision, which suggests that there is an 'excess' or 'extravagance' in both music and the divine that can open up revelatory and transformative possibilities. In Part I, David Brown argues that even in the absence of words, classical instrumental music can disclose something of the divine nature that allows us to speak of an experience analogous to contemplative prayer. In Part II, Gavin Hopps contends that, far from being a wasteland of mind-closing triviality, popular music frequently aspires to elicit the imaginative engagement of the listener and is capable of evoking intimations of transcendence. Filled with fresh and accessible discussions of diverse examples and forms of music, this ground-breaking book affirms the disclosive and affective capacities of music, and shows how it can help to awaken, vivify, and sustain a sense of the divine in everyday life.

In this stimulating, lucid and insightful inquiry, philosopher Elisabeth Schellekens invites readers to reflect on their own opinions about art and morality.Aesthetic and moral value are often seen to go hand in hand. They do so not only practically, such as in our everyday assessments of artworks that raise moral questions, but also theoretically, such as in Kant's theory that beauty is the symbol of morality. Some philosophers have argued that it is in the relation between aesthetic and moral value that the key to an adequate understanding of either notion lies. But difficult questions abound. Must a work of art be morally admirable in order to be aesthetically valuable? How, if at all, do our moral values shape our aesthetic judgements - and vice versa?"Aesthetics and Morality" is a stimulating and insightful inquiry into precisely this set of questions. Elisabeth Schellekens explores the main ideas and debates at the intersection of aesthetics and moral philosophy. She invites readers to reflect on the nature of beauty, art and morality, and provides the philosophical knowledge to render such reflection more rigorous. This original, inspiring and entertaining book sheds valuable new light on a notably complex and challenging area of thought."The Continuum Aesthetics" series looks at the aesthetic questions and issues raised by all major art forms. Stimulating, engaging and accessible, the series offers food for thought not only for students of aesthetics, but also for anyone with an interest in philosophy and the arts.

Aesthetic Order challenges contemporary theories of aesthetics, offering the idea of beauty as quantitative yet different from the traditional discursive order. It will be of importance to all interested in aesthetic theory.

Although various sections of this work have been published separately in various journals and volumes their separate publication is wholly attributable to the exigencies of life in academia: the work was devised as and is supposed to constitute something of an organic unity. Part II of 'The Cow with the Subtile Nose' was published under the title 'A Creative Use of Language' in New Literary History (Autumn, 1972), pp. 108-18. 'The Cow on the Roof' appeared in The Journal oj Philosophy LXX, No. 19 (November 8, 1973), pp. 713-23. 'A Fine Forehand' appeared in the Journal oj the Philosophy oj Sport, Vol. 1 (September, 1974), pp. 92-109. 'Quote: Judgements from Our Brain' appeared in Perspectives on the Philosophy oj Wittgenstein, ed. by I. Block (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 201-211. 'Art and Sociobiology' appeared in Mind (1981), Vol. XC, pp. 505-520. 'Anything Viewed'appeared in Essays in Honour oj Jaakko Hintikka, ed. by Esa Saarinen, Risto Hilpinen, Illkka Niiniluoto and Merrill Provence Hintikka (Dordrecht, Holland and Boston, Massachusetts: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1979), pp. 285-293. 'How I See Philosophy' appeared in The Owl oj Minerva, ed. by C. J. Bontempo and S. Jack Odell (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1975), pp. 223-5. All the remaining parts are also forthcoming in various journals and volumes. I am grateful to Bradley E. Wilson for the preparation of the index.