USE FIRST TWO PARAGRAPHS ONLY FOR GENERAL CATALOGS... This volume offers a response to three ongoing needs:
* to develop the main composition principles pertinent to the visual commmunication medium of television;
* to establish the field of television aesthetics as an extension of the broader field of visual literacy; and
* to promote television aesthetics to both students and consumers of television.
Based on effective empirical research from three axes -- perception, cognition, and composition -- the aesthetic principles of television images presented are drawn from converging research in academic disciplines such as psychology (perceptual, cognitive, and experimental), neurophysiology, and the fine arts (painting, photography, film, theater, music, and more). Although the aesthetics of the fine arts were traditionally built on contextual theories that relied heavily on subjective evaluation, on critical analyses, and on descriptive research methods, the aesthetics of today's visual communication media consider equally valuable empirical methodologies found in all sciences. Investigations in these different academic disciplines have provided the constructs and strengthened the foundations of the theory of television aesthetics offered in this book.
Special features include:
* a great variety of pictures supporting the topics discussed;
* a thorough, up-to-date, and specifically related bibliography for each of the major parts of the book;
* computer drawings illustrating the concepts examined in the text;
* scientific data -- tables and charts -- documenting the research findings cited;
* simplified explanations of the processes of visual, auditory, and motion perceptions of images, enhanced by specific diagrams;
* detailed analyses of the threefold process of stimulation, perception, and recognition of televised images; and
* workable, easy-to-understand and use rules of picture composition, visual image evaluations, and television program appreciation.

This integrated study of the emerging interdisciplinary field of environmental aesthetics takes the reader through a brief history of both aesthetics and taste, then discusses the psychology of human-environment relations, the influences of literary, artistic and legal activism on city, countryside and wilderness, and concludes with an analysis of the roles of public policy and of planning. Clearly written and illustrated, the book brings together the ideas, method and practices of a range of academic and professional disciplines. The book should be a useful introduction to those interested in how the experience of city (and country) life can and should be improved.

This book explores how speculative thinking is shaping how we relate to our entangled social, mental, and environmental ecologies. It examines how speculative philosophies and concepts are changing geographical research methods and techniques, whilst also developing how speculative thinking transforms the way human, non-human, and more-than-human things are conceptualised in research practices across the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Offering the first dedicated compendium of geographical engagements with speculation and speculative thinking, the chapters in this edited collection advance debates about how affective, imperceptible, and infra-sensible qualities of environments might be written about through alternative registers and ontologies of experience. Organised around the themes of Ethics, Technologies, and Aesthetics, the book will appeal to those engaging with architecture, Black political theory, fiction, cinema, children's geographies, biotechnologies, philosophy, rural studies, arts practice, and nuclear waste studies as speculative research practices appropriate for addressing contemporary ecological problems. Chapters 1, 3 and 4 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This collection aims to map a diversity of approaches to the artform by creating a 360° view on the circus. Three sections of the book, Aesthetics, Practice, Culture, approach aesthetic developments, issues of artistic practice, and the circus’ role within society. This book consists of a collection of articles from renowned circus researchers, junior researchers, and artists. It also provides the core statements and discussions of the conference UpSideDown—Circus and Space in a graphic recording format. Hence, it allows a clear entry into the field of circus research and emphasizes the diversity of approaches that are well balanced between theoretical and artistic point of views. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of circus studies, emerging disciples of circus and performance.

This book presents an experiential, aesthetic-affective approach to the study of institutions. Drawing on institutional sociology, hermeneutics, phenomenology and process philosophy, it conceptualises institutions as collective experiences with their own self-promoting and self-propelling powers. Instead of seeing institutional emergence, change and decline as the result of actors' interests and manipulations, this book re-establishes the importance of factors beyond human design and intervention. Drawing on process theory, it shows how ideas, norms and values can form self-stabilising configurations that affect people without conscious realisation. It complements current thinking about institutions by showing how institutions constitute people long before people constitute them. With the help of authors as diverse as Antonio Damasio, A.N. Whitehead, J.W. von Goethe and Max Weber, Elke Weik crafts a perspective that allows us to understand institutions as aesthetic and affective powers in their own right. This book is for researchers interested in process theory, institutional and organisational studies, hermeneutics, and aesthetics.

Georg Simmel predicted that he would have no followers after his death. However he is now widely recognized as the father of the sociology of Modernity. His ideas on the metropolis, consumer culture, social space and aesthetics are at the crux of contemporary debate in sociology. This collection brings together the essential secondary literature on Simmel. It is selected and edited by David Frisby - a scholar who has perhaps done more than anyone else to rehabilitate Simmel's reputation in the English speaking world. What emerges is the most concise yet comprehensive view of this astonishingly prescient and penetrating sociologist. The volumes will be of interest to graduate students and anyone with a serious interest in Simmel.

This book illuminates the aesthetically underrated meaningfulness of particular elements in works of art and aesthetic experiences generally. Beginning from the idea of "hooks" in popular song, the book identifies experiences of special liveliness that are of enduring interest, supporting contemplation and probing discussion. When hooks are placed in the foreground of aesthetic experience, so is an enthusiastic "grabbing back" by the experiencer who forms a quasi-personal bond with the beloved singular moment and is probably inclined to share this still-evolving realization of value with others. This book presents numerous models of enthusiastic "grabbing back" that are art-critically motivated to explain how hooks achieve their effects and philosophically motivated to discover how hooks and hook appreciation contribute to a more ideally desirable life. Framing hook appreciation with a defensible general model of aesthetic experience, this book gives an unprecedented demonstration of the substantial aesthetic and philosophical interest of hook-centered inquiry.

Ethical musicality addresses the crossroads between music and ethics, combining philosophical knowledge, theoretical reflection, and practical understanding. When tied together, music and ethics link profoundly, offering real-life perspectives that would otherwise be inaccessible to us. The first part elucidates music and ethics through some influential and selected scholars ranging from antiquity via modern philosophy to contemporary voices. In the second part, different roles and arenas are illustrated and explored through various music practices in real-life encounters for the musician, the music educator, the music therapist, the musicologist, the 'lay' musician, and the music researcher. The third part unfolds an ethical musicality focusing on the body, relationship, time, and space. Following these fundamental existentials, ethical musicality expands our lifeworld, including context, involvement, power, responsibility, sustainability, and hope. Such an ethical musicality meets us with a calling to humanity-offering hope of a 'good life'.

Richard Linklater's celebrated Before trilogy chronicles the love of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) who first meet up in Before Sunrise, later reconnect in Before Sunset and finally experience a fall-out in Before Midnight. Not only do these films present storylines and dilemmas that invite philosophical discussion, but philosophical discussion itself is at the very heart of the trilogy. This book, containing specially commissioned chapters by a roster of international contributors, explores the many philosophical themes that feature so vividly in the interactions between Celine and Jesse, including: the nature of love, romanticism and marriage the passage and experience of time the meaning of life the art of conversation the narrative self gender death Including an interview with Julie Delpy in which she discusses her involvement in the films and the importance of studying philosophy, Before Sunrise. Before Sunset. Before Midnight: A Philosophical Exploration is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy, aesthetics, gender studies, and film studies.

In Zhu Guangqian and Benedetto Croce on Aesthetic Thought, Mario Sabattini analyses Croce's influence on the aesthetic thought of Zhu Guangqian. Zhu Guangqian is one of the most representative figures of contemporary Chinese aesthetics. Since the '30s, he had an active role in China both on the literary and philosophical scenes, and, through his writings, he exerted an important influence in the moulding of numerous generations of intellectuals. Some of his works have been widely read, and they still provoke considerable interest in China, on the mainland as well as in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The volume also presents a revised translation of Zhu Guangqian's Wenyi xinlixue (Psychology of Art and Literature).

This book considers the experience of enchantment in art. Considering the essential characteristics, dynamics and conditions of the experience of enchantment in relation to art, including liminality, it offers studies of different kinds of artistic experience and activity, including painting, music, fiction and poetry, before exploring the possibility of a life oriented to enchantment as the activity of art itself. With attention to the complex relationship between wonder in art and the programmatic disenchantment to which it is often subject, the author draws on the thought of a diverse range of philosophers, sociological theorists and artists, to offer an understanding of art through the idea of enchantment, and enchantment through art. An accessible study, richly illustrated with experience - both that of the author and others - Art and Enchantment will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and anyone with interests in the nature of aesthetic experience.

Art has always been central to moments of great social change. From the avant-garde to the ages of revolution, the act of rebellious creation has been crucial to bringing people and ideas together. However, in an increasingly fractured world characterised by upheaval and crisis, what role can art play in ushering in transformation? Malcolm Miles offers a guide to contemporary art and activism, setting it firmly within the context of the avant garde and its legacies in the postwar period. He explores the rise of direct action to replace representational politics in organizations like Occupy and Extinction Rebellion, and in the movements to destroy or remove statues of slavers, and finds parallels in anti-institutional art practices. By engaging with the significant theoretical innovations of the last 50 years - modernism, postmodernism and contemporary critical thinking - Miles provides both an overview of political aesthetics and an introduction to how art activism works in its most memorable moments in history. Art Rebellion argues that beauty is radically other to the dominant society; that power relations can be transformed; that protest cultures and contemporary art grow together; and that art has a crucial interruptive role in forming new, more equal and just, realities.

This transdisciplinary project represents the most comprehensive study of imagination to date. The eclectic group of international scholars who comprise this volume propose bold and innovative theoretical frameworks for (re-) conceptualizing imagination in all of its divergent forms. Imagination and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory explores the complex nuances, paradoxes, and aporias related to the plethora of artistic mediums in which the human imagination manifests itself. As a fundamental attribute of our species, which other organisms also seem to possess with varying degrees of sophistication, imagination is the very fabric of what it means to be human into which everything is woven. This edited collection demonstrates that imagination is the resin that binds human civilization together for better or worse.

"In his Phenomenology of Cognition, Cassirer provides a comprehensive and systematic account of the dynamic process involved in the whole of human culture as it progresses from the world of myth and its feeling of social belonging to the highest abstractions of mathematics, logic and theoretical physics. Cassirer engages with the most sophisticated and cutting-edge work in fields ranging from ethnology to classics, egyptology and assyriology to ethology, brain science and psychology to logic, mathematics and theoretical physics. His command of philosophy, literature, and the arts is superb. Echoing his work on Kant, Cassirer begins The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms with the problem posed by the meaning of being for philosophy since Plato. But Cassirer also shows that this problem gains new significance with Kant and with the development of modern culture. Cassirer weaves his conception of the development of knowledge into a broadly Kantian and German idealist dynamic-historical conception of significance and of experience that refuses to accept a fundamental opposition between literary, philosophical and scientific culture. In consequence of his great vision grounded in careful reflection and argument, Cassirer's systematic conception of the Copernican cosmopolitan-cosmological revolution is still philosophically and scientifically unmatched in contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic and of the Pacific." Pierre Keller, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside, USA. This new translation makes Cassirer's seminal work available to a new generation of scholars. Each volume includes a translator's introduction by Steve G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter E. Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and an index.

"The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is a milestone in twentieth century philosophy. Promoting a philosophical vision informed by Kant, it incorporates the philosophical advances achieved in the nineteenth century by German Idealism and Neo-Kantianism, whilst acknowledging the contributions made by his contemporary phenomenologists. It also encompasses empirical and historical research on culture and the most contemporary work on myth, linguistics and psychopathology. As such, it ranks in philosophical importance along with other major works of the twentieth century, such as Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In the first volume, Cassirer explores the symbolic form of language. Already recognized by thinkers in the tradition of German Idealism, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, language is the primary medium by which we interact with others and form a common world. As Cassirer emphasizes in the famous Davos Debate with Heidegger, 'there is one objective human world, in which a bridge is built from individual to individual. That I find in the primal phenomenon of language.' The famous trias Cassirer discerns in the functioning of language - the functions of expression (Ausdruck), presentation (Darstellung), and signification (Bedeutung) - has become paradigmatic for accounts of language, philosophical, linguistic, and anthropological alike." Sebastian Luft, Professor of Philosophy, Marquette University, USA. This new translation makes Cassirer's seminal work available to a new generation of scholars. Each volume includes a translator's introduction by Steve G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter E. Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and an index.

Adorno's aesthetics are one of the most important philosophical analyses of the 20th century, but their development remains unclear. Adorno, Aesthetics, Dissonance is the first book to provide a detailed study of how Adorno's thinking of aesthetics developed and to show the different dimensions that came together to make it uniquely powerful. Principal among these dimensions are his intense interest in music and his historical and materialist approach. In addition, by studying how Adorno's aesthetics arose through interactions with different thinkers, particularly Kracauer, Horkheimer, and Schoenberg, it becomes clear that his thought changes in its relation to dialectics. As a result, Adorno's thinking comes to broaden the understanding of aesthetics to include the sphere of sensuality, and in doing so transforms both aesthetics and dialectics through a notion of dissonance, which in turn has substantial implications for the relation of his thinking to praxis.

Tracing embodied transformation in the context of Gaga, the Israeli dance improvisation practice, this book demystifies what Lina Aschenbrenner coins as "neo-spiritual aesthetics." This book takes the reader on an analytical journey through a Gaga class, outlining the effective aesthetics of Gaga as an example for the broader field of neo-spiritualities. It distinguishes a threefold effect of Gaga practice-from a momentary extraordinary experience, to a lasting therapeutic effect, and finally Gaga's worldview potential. It situates the effect in an assemblage of interrelating aesthetics of environment, movement, and bodies. The book shows why seemingly leisure time activities such as Gaga form fruitful research objects to an academic study of religion and opens up research on neo-spiritual practices. In understanding the sensory effect of practice and its cultural and social implications, the book follows an Aesthetics of Religion approach. It departs from the idea that cognition is embodied and that the body is thus central to understanding cultural and social phenomena. Drawing upon a wide array of data gathered in the context of Gaga at the Suzanne Dellal Center in Tel Aviv, the book weaves together different methods of discourse, ritual, movement, body knowledge, and narrative analysis, while acknowledging insights from neuroscience and cognitive science.

In this book, Shay Welch expands on the contemporary cognitive thinking-in-movement framework, which has its roots in the work of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone but extends and develops within contemporary embodied cognition theory. Welch believes that dance can be used to ask questions, and this book offers a method of how critical inquiry can be embodied. First, she presents the theoretical underpinnings of what this process is and how it can work; second, she introduces the empirical method as a tool that can be used by movers for the purpose of doing embodied inquiry. Exploring the role of embodied cognition and embodied metaphors in mining the body for questions, Welch demonstrates how to utilize movement to explore embodied practices of knowing. She argues that our creative embodied movements facilitate our ability to bodily engage in critical analysis about the world.

This book develops a philosophy of the predominant yet obtrusive aspects of digital culture, arguing that what seems like insignificant distractions of digital technology - such as video games, mindless browsing, cute animal imagery, political memes, and trolling - are actually keyed into fundamental aspects of evolution. These elements are commonly framed as distractions in an economy of attention and this book approaches them with the prospect of understanding their attraction, from the starting point of diversions. Diversions designate not simply shifting states of attention but characterize the direction of any system on a different course, a theoretical perspective which makes it possible to investigate distractions as not only by-products of contemporary media and human attention. The perspective shifts from distractions as the unwanted and inconsequential to considering instead the function of diversions in the process of evolutionary development. Grounded in media theory but drawing from diverse interdisciplinary perspectives in biology, philosophy, and systems theory, this book provocatively theorizes the process of diversions - of the playful, stupid, cute, and funny - as significant for the evolution of a range of organisms.

The post humanist movement which currently traverses various disciplines in the arts and humanities, as well as the role that the thought of Deleuze and Guattari has had in the course of this movement, has given rise to new practices in architecture and urban theory. This interdisciplinary volume brings together architects, urban designers and planners, and asks them to reflect and report on the (built) place and the city to come in the wake of Deleuze and Guattari.

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. -- .

A compelling guide to the fundamental place of humour and comedy within Western culture-by one of its greatest exponents Written by an acknowledged master of comedy, this study reflects on the nature of humour and the functions it serves. Why do we laugh? What are we to make of the sheer variety of laughter, from braying and cackling to sniggering and chortling? Is humour subversive, or can it defuse dissent? Can we define wit? Packed with illuminating ideas and a good many excellent jokes, the book critically examines various well-known theories of humour, including the idea that it springs from incongruity and the view that it reflects a mildly sadistic form of superiority to others. Drawing on a wide range of literary and philosophical sources, Terry Eagleton moves from Aristotle and Aquinas to Hobbes, Freud, and Bakhtin, looking in particular at the psychoanalytical mechanisms underlying humour and its social and political evolution over the centuries.

Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of culture has been much discussed in recent years. However, it remains unclear how it evolved from his older theory of knowledge. This study deals with this question on the basis of Cassirer's 'disposition' of a 'philosophy of the symbolic', reconstructed here for the first time. This text shows that the 'symbolic' refers to culture as a whole and to its inherent diversity. Therefore, 'the symbolic' includes the relationship between the general transcendental conditions of culture and its empirical specificities in language and languages, art and the arts, myth and myths, science and disciplines. Cassirer does not comprehend this empirical and specific reality of symbolization depending on pre-existing transcendental conditions. Instead, he proceeds from the empirical diversity of the symbolisations and reflects on their simultaneously general and specific conditions. Thus, Cassirer embarks on a path that he finds paved in Kant's "Critique of Judgement": He consequently defines 'the symbolic' as the horizon for a reflective approach based on empirical findings - and not as the foundation of a systematic derivation of the diversity of culture in the style of the idealistic tradition.