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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Aesthetics
The relevance of painting has been questioned many times over the last century, by the arrival of photography, installation art and digital technologies. But rather than accept the death of painting, Mark Titmarsh traces a paradoxical interface between this art form and its opposing forces to define a new practice known as 'expanded painting' giving the term historical context, theoretical structure and an important place in contemporary practice. As the formal boundaries tumble, the being of painting expands to become a kind of total art incorporating all other media including sculpture, video and performance. Painting is considered from three different perspectives: ethnology, art theory and ontology. From an ethnological point of view, painting is one of any number of activities that takes place within a culture. In art theory terms, painting is understood to produce objects of interest for humanities disciplines. Yet painting as a medium often challenges both its object and image status, 'expanding' and creating hybrid works between painting, objects, screen media and text. Ontologically, painting is understood as an object of aesthetic discourse that in turn reflects historical states of being. Thus, Expanded Painting delivers a new kind of saying, a post-aesthetic discourse that is attuned to an uncanny tension between the presence and absence of painting.
Aristotle's Poetics is the first philosophical account of an art form and the foundational text in aesthetics. The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Poetics is an accessible guide to this often dense and cryptic work. Angela Curran introduces and assesses: Aristotle's life and the background to the Poetics the ideas and text of the Poetics the continuing importance of Aristotle's work to philosophy today.
This book explores how Modernist movements all across the Mediterranean basin differed from those of other regions. The chapters show how the political and economic turmoil of a period marked by world war, revolution, decolonization, nationalism, and the rapid advance of new technologies compelled artists, writers, and other intellectuals to create a new hybrid Mediterranean Modernist aesthetic which sought to balance the tensions between local and foreign, tradition and innovation, and colonial and postcolonial.
When was photography invented, in 1826 with the first permanent photograph? If we depart from the technologically oriented accounts and consider photography as a philosophical discourse an alternative history appears, one which examines the human impulse to reconstruct the photographic or "the evoking of light". It's significance throughout the history of ideas is explored via the Platonic Dialogues, Iamblichus' theurgic writings, and Marsilio Ficino's texts. This alternative history is not a replacement of other narratives of photographic history but rather offers a way of rethinking photography's ontological instability.
Why is film becoming increasingly important to philosophers? Is it because it can be a helpful tool in teaching philosophy, in illustrating it? Or is it because film can also think for itself, because it can create its own philosophy? In fact, a popular claim amongst film philosophers is that film is no mere handmaiden to philosophy, that it does more than simply illustrate philosophical texts: rather, film itself can philosophise in direct audio-visual terms. Approaches that purport to grant to film the possibility of being more than illustrative can be found in the subtractive ontology of Alain Badiou, the Wittgensteinian analyses of Stanley Cavell, and the materialist semiotics of Gilles Deleuze. In each case there is a claim that film can think in its own way. Too often, however, when philosophers claim to find indigenous philosophical value in film, it is only on account of refracting it through their own thought: film philosophizes because it accords with a favored kind of extant philosophy. "Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image" is the first book to examine all the central issues surrounding the vexed relationship between the film image and philosophy. In it, John Mullarkey tackles the work of particular philosophers and theorists (Zizek, Deleuze, Cavell, Bordwell, Badiou, Branigan, Ranciere, Frampton, and many others) as well as general philosophical positions (Analytical and Continental, Cognitivist and Culturalist, Psychoanalytic and Phenomenological). Moreover, he also offers an incisive analysis and explanation of several prominent forms of film theorizing, providing a metalogical account of their mutual advantages and deficiencies that will prove immensely useful to anyone interested in the details of particular theories of film presently circulating, as well as correcting, revising, and revisioning the field of film theory as a whole. Throughout, Mullarkey asks whether the reduction of film to text is unavoidable. In particular: must philosophy (and theory) always transform film into pretexts for illustration? What would it take to imagine how film might itself theorize without reducing it to standard forms of thought and philosophy? Finally, and fundamentally, must we change our definition of philosophy and even of thought itself in order to accommodate the specificities that come with the claim that film can produce philosophical theory? If a 'non-philosophy' like film can think philosophically, what does that imply for orthodox theory and philosophy?
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.
This book demonstrates that theory in literary and cultural studies has moved beyond overarching master theories towards a greater awareness of particularity and contingency - including its own. What is the place of literary and cultural theory after the Age of Theory has ended? Grouping its chapters into rubrics of metatheory, cultural theory, critical theory and textual theory, the collection demonstrates that the practice of "doing theory" has neither lost its vitality nor can it be in any way dispensable. Current directions covered include the renewed interest in phenomenology, the increased acknowledgement of the importance of media history for all cultural practices and formations, complexity studies, new narratology, literary ethics, cultural ecology, and an intensified interest in textual as well as cultural matter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This volume advances a comprehensive transdisciplinary approach to the affective lives of institutions - theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and critical. With this approach, the volume foregrounds the role of affect in sustaining as well as transforming institutional arrangements that are deeply problematic. As part of its analysis, this book develops a novel understanding of institutional affect. It explores how institutions produce, frame, and condition affective dynamics and emotional repertoires, in ways that engender conformance or resistance to institutional requirements. This collection of works will be important for scholars and students of interdisciplinary affect and emotion studies from a wide range of disciplines, including social sciences, cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, organizational and institution studies, media studies, social philosophy, aesthetics, and critical theory.
This book explores environments where art, imagination, and creative practice meet urban spaces at the point where they connect to the digital world. It investigates relationships between urban visualizations, aesthetics, and politics in the context of new technologies, and social and urban challenges toward the Sustainable Development Goals. Responding to questions stemming from critical theory, the book focuses on an interdisciplinary actualization of technological developments and social challenges. It demonstrates how art, architecture, and design can transform culture, society, and nature through artistic and cultural achievements, integration, and new developments. The book begins with the theoretical framework of social aesthetics theories before discussing global contemporary visual culture and technological evolution. Across the 12 chapters, it looks at how architecture and design play significant roles in causing and solving complex environmental transformations in the digital turn. By fostering transdisciplinary encounters between architecture, design, visual arts, and cinematography, this book presents different theoretical approaches to how the arts' interplay with the environment responds to the logic of the constructions of reality. This book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and upper-level students in aesthetics, philosophy, visual cultural studies, communication studies, and media studies with a particular interest in sociopolitical and environmental discussions.
Nietzsche and Irish Modernism demonstrates how the ideas of the controversial German philosopher played a crucial role in the emergence and evolution of a distinctly Irish brand of modernist culture. Making an essential new contribution to the history of modernism, the book traces the circulation of these ideas through the writings of George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, as well as through minor works of literature, magazine articles, newspaper debates, public lectures, and private correspondence. These materials reveal a response to Nietzsche that created abiding tensions between Irish cultural production and reigning religious and nationalist orthodoxies, during an anxious period of Home Rule agitation, world war, revolution, civil war, and state building. With its wealth of detail, the book greatly enriches our understanding of modernist culture as a site of convergence between art and politics, indigenous concerns and foreign perspectives. -- .
This achingly jawdropping book follows the evolution of dentistry throughout the world from the Bronze Age to the present day, presenting captivating and grim illustrations of the tools and techniques of dentistry through the ages. Organized chronologically, The Smile Stealers interleaves beautiful and gruesome technical illustrations and paintings from the Wellcome Collection's unique archive of material from Europe, America and the Far East with seven authoritative and eloquent themed articles from medical historian Richard Barnett. A comprehensive review of the development of the trade and discipline of dentistry, it covers topics as diverse as the very first dentures (produced by the Etruscans in the seventh century bce); the smile revolution in 18th-century portraiture; and the role of dentistry in forensic science - all in one beautifully illustrated volume. Extending the cult of the medically macabre begun by its predecessors The Sick Rose and Crucial Interventions, The Smile Stealers is guaranteed to appeal to lovers of the horrific and the beautiful alike as it probes the growth of dentistry - from pulling out bad teeth to reconstructing jaws, and from painful action to pain-free interventions and the pursuit of the perfect smile.
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.
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.
Adrian Bardon's A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time is a short yet thorough introduction to the history, philosophy, and science of the study of time-from the pre-Socratic philosophers through Einstein and beyond. Its treatment is roughly chronological, starting with the ancient Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides and proceeding through the history of Western philosophy and science up to the present. Using illustrations and keeping technical language to a minimum, A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time covers subjects such as time and change, the experience of time, physical and metaphysical approaches to the nature of time, the direction of time, time-travel, time and freedom of the will, and scientific and philosophical approaches to eternity and the beginning of time. Bardon brings the resources of over 2500 years of philosophy and science to bear on some of humanity's most fundamental and enduring questions.
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.
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. |
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