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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Aesthetics
Marking the 50th anniversary of one among this philosopher’s most
distinguished pieces, Blumenberg’s Rhetoric proffers a decidedly
diversified interaction with the essai polyvalently entitled
‘Anthropological Approach to the Topicality (or Currency,
Relevance, even actualitas) of Rhetoric’ ("Anthropologische
Annäherung an die Aktualität der Rhetorik"), first published in
1971. Following Blumenberg’s lead, the contributors consider and
tackle their topics rhetorically—treating (inter alia) the
variegated discourses of Phenomenology and Truthcraft, of
Intellectual History and Anthropology, as well as the interplay of
methods, from a plurality of viewpoints. The diachronically
extensive, disciplinarily diverse essays of this
publication—notably in the current lingua franca—will
facilitate, and are to conduce to, further scholarship with respect
to Blumenberg and the art of rhetoric. With contributions by Sonja
Feger, Simon Godart, Joachim Küpper, DS Mayfield, Heinrich
Niehues-Pröbsting, Daniel Rudy Hiller, Katrin Trüstedt, Alexander
Waszynski, Friedrich Weber-Steinhaus, Nicola Zambon.
Is virtual reality the latest grand narrative that humanity has
produced? Our civilization is determined by a shift from an
"original event" to a virtual "narrative". This concerns not only
virtual reality but also psychoanalysis, gene-technology, and
globalization. Psychoanalysis transforms the dream into a narrative
and is able to spell out the dream's symbols. Gene-technology
narrates dynamic, self-evolving evolution as a "gene code".
Discourses on "globalization" let the globe appear as once more
globalized because reproduced through narrative. Finally, reality
itself has come to be narrated in the form of a second reality that
is called "virtual". This book attempts to disentangle the
characteristics of human reality and posthuman virtual reality and
asks whether it is possible to reconcile both.
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.
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.
'Incisive and provocative ... a sensitive and probing critique' The
New York Times 'Essential reading ... gripping, inspirational,
beautifully written and highly thought-provoking' Dr Helen Gorrill,
author of Women Can't Paint A bold reconsideration of women in art
- from the 'Old Masters' to the posts of Instagram influencers A
perfect pin-up, a damsel in distress, a saintly mother, a femme
fatale ... Women's identity has long been stifled by a limited set
of archetypes, found everywhere in pictures from art history's
classics to advertising, while women artists have been overlooked
and held back from shaping more empowering roles. In this
impassioned book, art historian Catherine McCormack asks us to look
again at what these images have told us to value, opening up our
most loved images - from those of Titian and Botticelli to Picasso
and the Pre-Raphaelites. She also shows us how women artists - from
Berthe Morisot to Beyonce, Judy Chicago to Kara Walker - have
offered us new ways of thinking about women's identity, sexuality,
race and power. Women in the Picture gives us new ways of seeing
the art of the past and the familiar images of today so that we
might free women from these restrictive roles and embrace the
breadth of women's vision. 'A call to arms in a world where the
misogyny that taints much of the western art canon is still largely
ignored' Financial Times 'It felt like the scales were falling from
my eyes as I read it.' The Herald
Using five case studies of contemporary art, this book uses ideas
of systems and dispersion to understand identity and experience in
late capitalism. This book considers five artists who exemplify
contemporary art practice: Seth Price; Liam Gillick; Martin Creed;
Hito Steyerl and Theaster Gates. Given the diversity of materials
used in art today, once-traditional artistic mediums and practices
have become obsolete in describing what artists do today. Francis
Halsall argues that, in the face of this obsolescence, the ideas of
system and dispersion become very useful in understanding
contemporary art. That is, practitioners now can be seen to be
using whatever systems of distribution and display are available to
them as their creative mediums. The two central arguments are first
that any understanding of what art is will always be underwritten
by a related view of what a human being is; and second that these
both have a particular character in late capitalism or, as is named
here, the Age of Dispersion. The book will be of interest to
scholars and students working in art history, contemporary art,
studio art, and theories of systems and networks.
Who isn't seduced by the idea of an affinity between aging and
aesthetics? Yet, when does aging truly begin? What attributes does
the aesthetic embrace? Looking into startling photographic art of
the past three decades, this book is prompted by such questions and
turns them into a meditation on how aesthetics mediates our
relation to time. The photographic approach of the corporeal is at
the center of the book. Within a phenomenological framework,
Cristofovici brings into focus the physical and the psychic body to
read aging as a process of change and becoming over time. Her
understanding of aging sees beyond difference into larger patterns
of perceptions that we share. Offering valuable insights into aging
as a process of subject construction, this book will be of interest
to students and scholars of visual culture, photography, art
history, age studies, and theories of knowledge. This
cross-disciplinary study that puts theory to the test of life's and
art's paradoxes in an evocative style will also appeal to a wider
readership interested in how photography and aging illuminate each
other.
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.
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.
This new collection of essays re-examines the relationship between
the aesthetic and the human in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century
manifestations of art for art's sake. It treats aestheticism as a
subject of perennial interest in the field. Employing a unique
methodology in approaching the study of aestheticism from a
transnational, comparative standpoint - the volume as a whole
presents readers with a variety of perspectives on the topic, in a
coherent way.This book: includes contributions from a number of
up-and-coming young scholars who are getting a good name (eg,
Yvonne Ivory); addresses the question: 'does art for art's sake
seek to de-humanize or re-humanize art, the artist or the artistic
receptor?' and engages with art, literature, philosophy and
literary and aesthetic theory.Art for art's sake addresses the
relationship between art and life. Although it has long been argued
that aestheticism aims to de-humanize art, this volume seeks to
consider the counterclaim that such de-humanization can also lead
to re-humanization and to a deepened relationship between the
aesthetic sphere and the world at large.
Human beings engage works of the arts in many different ways: they
sing songs while working, they kiss icons, they create and dedicate
memorials. Yet almost all philosophers of art of the modern period
have ignored this variety and focused entirely on just one mode of
engagement, namely, disinterested attention. In the first part of
the book Nicholas Wolterstorff asks why philosophers have
concentrated on just this one mode of engagement. The answer he
proposes is that almost all philosophers have accepted what the
author calls the grand narrative concerning art in the modern
world. It is generally agreed that in the early modern period,
members of the middle class in Western Europe increasingly engaged
works of the arts as objects of disinterested attention. The grand
narrative claims that this change represented the arts coming into
their own, and that works of art, so engaged, are socially other
and transcendent. Wolterstorff argues that the grand narrative has
to be rejected as not fitting the facts. Wolterstorff then offers
an alternative framework for thinking about the arts. Central to
the alternative framework that he proposes are the idea of the arts
as social practices and the idea of works of the arts as having
different meaning in different practices. He goes on to use this
framework to analyse in some detail five distinct social practices
of art and the meaning that works have within those practices: the
practice of memorial art, of art for veneration, of social protest
art, of works songs, and of recent art-reflexive art.
This work presents a rethinking of critical philosophy through the
recovery of a larger sense of aesthetics in Kant. It provides a
unitary reading of the "Critique of Judgement". This is situated in
relation to Kant's attempt to think ends in general. The question
of how to think ends is argued to guide Kant both in his treatment
of aesthetics and teleology and to provide the rationale for
critique itself.
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.
While many studies have chronicled the Romantic legacy of artistic
genius, this book uncovers the roots of the concept of genius in
Kant's third Critique, alongside the development of his
understanding of nature. Paul Bruno addresses a genuine gap in the
existing scholarship by exploring the origins of Kant's thought on
aesthetic judgment and particularly the artist.
The development of the word 'genius' and its intimate association
with the artist played itself out in a rich cultural context, a
context that is inescapably significant in Western thought. Bruno
shows how in many ways we are still interrogating the ways in which
a nature governed by physical laws can be reconciled with a spirit
of human creativity and freedom. This book leads us to a better
understanding of the centrality of understanding the modern
artistic enterprise, characterized as it is by creativity, for
modern conceptions of the self.
This text probes the psychic and social roots of artistic scenarios
of loss. Demonstrating that artistic activity is inextricably
bonded to imaginary scripts of bereavement and these in turn to
patterns of social dominance, the author argues in favor of an
"aesthetics of lessness" that is, postmodern resistance to
imaginary inscriptions of grief and their misogynist sequels. The
book draws on psychoaesthetics, discourse theory and feminist
social critiques to analyse literary visual figurations of loss.
Included in its analysis of the romantic and post-romantic
imaginary are readings of Merimee, Nerval, Hoffmann, H.D., Anne
Hebert, Proust and Beckett, and essays, among others, on Kollwitz,
Glacometti, Bellmer, Klee, Gidal and Oulton.
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.
Awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Society of Professors of
Education Outstanding Book Award Imagining Dewey features
productive (re)interpretations of 21st century experience using the
lens of John Dewey's Art as Experience, through the doubled task of
putting an array of international philosophers, educators, and
artists-researchers in transactional dialogue and on equal footing
in an academic text. This book is a pragmatic attempt to encourage
application of aesthetic learning and living, ekphrasic
interpretation, critical art, and agonist pluralism. There are two
foci: (a) Deweyan philosophy and educational themes with (b)
analysis and examples of how educators, artists, and researchers
envision and enact artful meaning making. This structure meets the
needs of university and high school audiences, who are accustomed
to learning about challenging ideas through multimedia and
aesthetic experience. Contributors are: James M. Albrecht, Adam I.
Attwood, John Baldacchino, Carolyn L. Berenato, M. Cristina Di
Gregori, Holly Fairbank, Jim Garrison, Amanda Gulla, Bethany
Henning, Jessica Heybach, David L. Hildebrand, Ellyn Lyle, Livio
Mattarollo, Christy McConnell Moroye, Maria-Isabel Moreno-Montoro,
Maria Martinez Morales, Stephen M. Noonan, Louise G. Phillips,
Scott L. Pratt, Joaquin Roldan, Leopoldo Rueda, Tadd Ruetenik,
Leisa Sasso, Bruce Uhrmacher, David Vessey, Ricardo Marin Viadel,
Sean Wiebe, Li Xu and Martha Patricia Espiritu Zavalza.
This book analyzes the role that the physical body plays in
foundational Mormon doctrine, and claims that such an analysis
reveals a model of empathy that has significant implications for
the field of Mormon aesthetics. This volume achieves three main
goals: It elucidates the Mormonism's relationship with the body, it
illuminates Mormonism's traditional approaches to understanding and
appreciating art, and it suggests that the body as Mormonism
conceives of it allows for the employment of an aesthetic framework
rooted in bodily empathy rather than traditional Christian or
Mormon moral values per se. In support of this argument, several
chapters of the book apply Mormonism's theology of the body to
paintings and poems by contemporary Mormon artists and writers. An
examination of those works reveals that the seeds of a new Mormon
aesthetic are germinating, but have yet to significantly shift
traditional Mormon thought regarding the role and function of art.
The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture brings
together a respected team of philosophers and architecture scholars
to ask what impact architecture has over today's culture and
society. For three decades critical philosophy has been in
discourse with architecture. Yet following the recent radical turn
in contemporary philosophy, architecture's role in contemporary
culture is rarely addressed. In turn, the architecture discourse in
academia has remained ignorant of recent developments in radical
philosophy. Providing the first platform for a debate between
critics, architects and radical philosophers, this unique
collection unties these two schools of thought. Contributors reason
for or against the claim of the "missed encounter" between
architecture and radical philosophy. They discuss why our prominent
critical philosophers devote stimulating writings to the
ideological impact of arts on the contemporary culture - music,
literature, cinema, opera, theatre - without attempting a similar
comprehensive analysis of architecture. By critically evaluating
recent philosophy in relation to contemporary architecture, The
Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture presents a
thorough understanding of the new relationship between architecture
and radical philosophy.
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'.
Despite numerous publications on the philosophy of technology,
little attention has been paid to the relationship between being
and value in technology, two aspects which are usually treated
separately. This volume addresses this issue by drawing connections
between the ontology of technology on the one hand and technology's
ethical and aesthetic significance on the other. The book first
considers what technology is and what kind of entities it produces.
Then it examines the moral implications of technology. Finally, it
explores the connections between technology and the arts.
Artworld Metaphysics turns a critical eye upon aspects of the
artworld, and articulates some of the problems, principles, and
norms implicit in the actual practices of artistic creation,
interpretation, evaluation, and commodification. Aesthetic theory
is treated as descriptive and explanatory, rather than normative: a
theory that relates to artworld realities as a semantic theory
relates to the fragments of natural language it seeks to describe.
Robert Kraut examines emotional expression, correct interpretation
and objectivity in the context of artworld practice, the relevance
of jazz to aesthetic theory, and the goals of ontology (artworld
and otherwise). He also considers the relation between art and
language, the confusions of postmodern relativism, and the relation
between artistic/critical practice and aesthetic theory.
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