This book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is at work in a substantial section of contemporary philosophical thought and cultural representations. Spectres of pessimism can be found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives-from ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noe, Denis Villeneuve and Lars von Trier.

This book reflects the most recent research devoted to a systematized perspective and a critical (re)construction of previous theoretical attempts of explaining, justifying and continuing Kuhn's ingenious hypothesis in arts. Hofstadter, Clignet and Habermas revealed to be the most engaged scholars in solving this aesthetic "puzzled-problem". In this context, the structural similarities between science and arts are attentively evaluated, thus satisfying an older concern attributed to the historical Kuhn-Kubler dispute, extensively commented along the pages of this book. How can we track the matter of rationality and truth in art and aesthetics, inspired by scientific perspectives? Are artistic styles similar to scientific paradigms? Are we entitled to pursue paradigms and masterpieces as rational models in science, respectively in arts? On what possible grounds can we borrow from science notions such as progress and predictability, in the study of the evolution of art and its aesthetic backgrounds? Are the historical dynamics of science and art affected by political factors in the same manner? This book will be of interest to philosophers, but also to historians of science and historians of art alike in the reassessment it provides of recent debates on reshaping the art world using Kuhn's "paradigm shift".

Emotion in Aesthetics is the first book on aesthetics to provide an extensive theory of emotion; application of the cognitive-emotive theory to aesthetics; analysis of the relationship between aesthetics, metaphor and emotion; a full theory of meaning and its application to aesthetics; discussion of the relationship between aesthetics, music and language in terms of phonetics, phonology and intonation; an analysis of humanistic aesthetics; a well-developed naturalistic theory of ethics as applied to aesthetics and emotion. Stress is placed on the views of contemporary philosophers as well as some of the main historical accounts of emotion in aesthetics. The important recent work on emotion has not hitherto been applied to aesthetics. As a result there is still much confusion in aesthetics about aesthetic emotion and related concepts, such as the expression theory of emotion. The present book has been written to show how the theory can be used to clarify the issue, resulting in a major breakthrough in aesthetics. In addition, the theory presented is valuable in relating aesthetics to ethics and humanism.

First released in 1901, Thought-Forms was an in-depth exploration on the visual manifestations of thoughts and the notion that they exist as objects. Conceived by renowned theosophists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, the book consists of 58 illustrations based on Besant and Leadbeater's clairvoyant observations on how music, emotions, experiences, and colors affect thought forms. Expanding beyond its original readership, the book would have great influence on twentieth-century art and go on to inspire many artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint, Piet Mondrian, and Paul Klee. This updated edition features a new introduction by famed occult author, Mitch Horowitz.

This book makes a compelling case for utilising experiences of resonance in various academic and societal fields. The concept of resonance was first introduced by Hartmut Rosa to foreground the importance of affective, emotional, transformative and uncontrollable experiences in socio-political contexts that he characterizes as alienating. Based on a critical reading of Rosa's theory and further developed through engagement with Theodor W. Adorno, Gilles Deleuze, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler and others, this book introduces the notion of a 'spectrum of resonance' which encompasses both critical resonance and affirmationist resonance. This spectrum of resonance is used to analyse various forms of aesthetic experience illustrated with reference to Edgar Reitz's film Heimat and the music of Nick Cave and Kayhan Kalhor. The spectrum is also deployed in the fields of museum, memory and trauma studies to show how experiences of resonance contribute to the constitution of political and social identities. The focus here is on memory practices in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and the book seeks to decolonize resonance theory.

This book, The Kyoto Post-COVID Manifesto for Global Economics (KM-PC), is a sequel to our 2018 book, The Kyoto Manifesto for Global Economics (KM-I, 2018). It further exposes the failures of a global economic regime that, based on self-interest, has led to the enormously unequal and fragmented society of today and our decreased ability to respond and recover from the critical worldwide consequences of such a regime over time - notably, climate change. At stake is our very survival beyond the twenty-first century. The fundamental tenet of this book is that our power to heal our currently fractured society lies in the depth of our humanity - in our shared human spirit and spirituality. What is sacred or of imperishable supreme value is what we can be as a human race: empowered, fulfilled individuals, living in harmony, deeply sharing and caring for one another and the environment that sustains us across our distinct cultures and worlds in which we live. Thus, the norms in our economic relations do not have to be those of self-interest that separates us, the ever-watchful distrust represented by "the deal" and immediate economic advantage for me. Instead, we can build an economic frame for our society based on mindfulness, care, mutual human benefit, and trust - on our shared humanity. Our argument was complete and we were ready to publish. But then, suddenly, from the dawning of 2020, everything changed. COVID-19 invaded and the world as we knew it simply stopped. No one saw it coming. As authors, we waited to watch and seek to understand. The result is that the book captures the COVID trauma and, against the fractures based on self-interest already visible in today's society, assesses the impact of COVID-19 now and for the future. Focusing on a humanity-based economics is even more important now, and this book shows why. Chapter 15 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Hegel gave lecture series on aesthetics or the philosophy of art in various university terms, but never published a book of his own on this topic. His student, H. G. Hotho, compiled auditors' transcripts from these separate lecture series and produced from them the three volumes on aesthetics in the standard edition of Hegel's collected works. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert has now published one of these transcripts, the Hotho transcript of the 1823 lecture series, and accompanied it with a very extensive introductory essay treating many issues pertinent to a proper understanding of Hegel's views on art. She persuasively argues that the evidence shows Hegel never finalized his views on the philosophy of art, but modified them in significant ways from one lecture series to the next. In addition, she makes the case that Hotho's compilation not only concealed this circumstance, by the harmony he created out of diverse source materials, but also imposed some of his own views on aesthetics, views that differ from Hegel's and that the ongoing interpretation of the aesthetics part of Hegel's philosophy has unfortunately taken to be Hegel's own. This translation of the German volume, which contains the first publication of the Hotho transcript and Gethmann-Siefert's essay, makes these important materials accessible to the English reader, materials that should put the English-speaking world's future understanding and interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of art on a sounder footing.

From the first stirrings of modernism to contemporary poetics, the modernist aesthetic project could be described as a form of phenomenological reduction that attempts to return to the invisible and unsayable foundations of human perception and expression, prior to objective points of view and scientific notions. It is this aspect of modernism that this book brings to the fore. The essays presented here bring into focus the contemporary face of ongoing debates about phenomenology and modernism. The contributors forcefully underline the intertwining of modernism and phenomenology and the extent to which the latter offers a clue to the former. The book presents the viewpoints of a range of internationally distinguished critics and scholars, with diverse but closely related essays covering a wide range of fields, including literature, architecture, philosophy and musicology. The collection addresses critical questions regarding the relationship between phenomenology and modernism, with reference to thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Michel Henry and Paul Ricoeur. By examining the contemporary philosophical debates, this cross-disciplinary body of research reveals the pervasive and far-reaching influence of phenomenology, which emerges as a heuristic method to articulate modernist aesthetic concerns.

This book rethinks the concept of community taking Jean-Luc Nancy's influential essay "La communaute desoeuvree" as its starting point, tracing subsequent scholarship on community and adding new insights on avant-garde aesthetics and politics. Extensively exploring the communitarian dimension of avant-garde aesthetics and politics (focusing on artistic groups, intellectual circles and theoretical collectives), the author aims to bring literature and art into a philosophical examination of the paradoxical and complex idea of community.

Beauty in African Thought: A Critique of the Western Idea of Development investigates how the concept of beauty in African philosophy and related qualitative social sciences may contribute to a richer intercultural exchange on the idea of development. While working within frameworks created in post-colonial and arguably neo-colonial times, African thinkers have reacted against the mainstream view that restricts the meaning and scope of good development to economic growth and western-style education. These thinkers have worked toward a critical self-understanding of the potentials inherent in cultural, spiritual, and political traditions since pre-colonial times. Edited by Bolaji Bateye, Mahmoud Masaeli, Louise Muller, and Angela Roothaan, this collection explores branches of thought from wisdom or oral traditions to political thought and philosophy of culture. This book is urgent reading material for any policy maker, scholar, or student wishing to attend to the voices of African(ist) thinkers who search for alternative approaches to global questions of development in a time of climate change and increasing socio-economic inequality.

It is commonplace to regard many great works of literature-poems, dramas, works of fiction-as in some sense philosophical, yet ever since Plato, there has been a tension between the kind of abstract theorizing that goes on in philosophy and the focus on concrete particulars that occurs in poetry and fiction. Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable elaborates on and addresses this Platonic tension, asking in what sense, if any, literature in the form of poetry, drama, short stories, and novels can contribute significantly to our philosophical understanding. Timothy Cleveland suggests there is something in certain poems, novels, and stories that makes them especially, perhaps even best, suited to expanding our awareness and understanding into the nature of things otherwise unsayable and unconceived. Such literary works do philosophy, showing us something that a theoretical-scientific or philosophical-discourse cannot literally say.

This book analyzes the relation between the flow time and poetic speech in drama and rhetoric. It begins with the classical understanding of time as flux, and its problems and paradoxes entailing from Aristotle, Augustine, Kant and Husserl. The reader will see how these problems unfold and find resolutions through dramatic speech and rhetoric which has an essential relation to the flow of time. It covers elements in poetic speech such as affect, rhythm, metaphor, and syntax. It uses examples from classical rhetorical theories by Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, dramatic speeches from Shakespeare, as well as other modern dramatic texts by Chekhov, Beckett, Jelinek and Sarah Kane. This book appeals to students and academic researchers working in the philosophical fields of aesthetics and phenomenology as well those working in theater and the performing arts.

This book is an anthology of the varied strategies of spatial transgressions and how they have been implemented through the arts as a means to resist, rejuvenate, reclaim, critique or cohabitate. The book is divided into two sections - Displacements and Disruptions. The first section discusses the ramifications of the spatial displacements of bodies, organizations, groups of people and ethnicities, and explores how artists, theorists and arts organizations have an attentive history of revealing and reacting to the displacement of peoples and how their presence or absence radically reconfigures the value, identity, and uses of place. In the second section, each author considers how aesthetic strategies have been utilized to disrupt expected spatial experiences and logic. Many of these strategies form radical alternative methodologies that include transgressions, geographies of resistance, and psychogeographies. These spatial performances of disruption set into motion a critical exchange between the subject, space and materiality, in which ideology and experience are both produced/spatialized and deconstructed/destabilized.

Phenomenology was one of the twentieth century's major philosophical movements, and it continues to be a vibrant and widely studied subject today with relevance beyond philosophy in areas such as medicine and cognitive sciences. The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy is an outstanding guide to this important and fascinating topic. Its focus on phenomenology's historical and systematic dimensions makes it a unique and valuable reference source. Moreover, its innovative approach includes entries that don't simply reflect the state-of-the-art but in many cases advance it. Comprising seventy-five chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook offers unparalleled coverage and discussion of the subject, and is divided into five clear parts: * Phenomenology and the history of philosophy * Issues and concepts in phenomenology * Major figures in phenomenology * Intersections * Phenomenology in the world. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy studying phenomenology, The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy is also suitable for those in related disciplines such as psychology, religion, literature, sociology and anthropology.

This book outlines the evolution of our political nature over two million years and explores many of the rituals, plays, films, and other performances that gave voice and legitimacy to various political regimes in our species' history. Our genetic and cultural evolution during the Pleistocene Epoch bestowed a wide range of predispositions on our species that continue to shape the politics we support and the performances we enjoy. The book's case studies range from an initiation ritual in the Mbendjela tribe in the Congo to a 1947 drama by Bertolt Brecht and include a popular puppet play in Tokugawa Japan. A final section examines the gradual disintegration of social cohesion underlying the rise of polarized politics in the USA after 1965, as such films as The Godfather, Independence Day, The Dark Knight Rises, and Joker accelerated the nation's slide toward authoritarian Trumpism.

This book investigates the ontological state of relations in a unique way. Starting with the notion of system, it shows that the system can be understood as a relational structure, and that relations can be assessed within themselves, with no need to transform relations in elements. "Relations" are understood in contrast to "relational property": without a relation there is no identity, therefore no existence. What allows us to do that without hypostatizing the relation, and without immediately taking it simply as a causal relation, can be better grasped, possibly, in reference to a few entities that make best display of their systemic nature, for example images, works of art, and virtual bodies. This book shows how virtual bodies are ontological hybrids representing a type of entity that has never appeared in the world before. This entity becomes a phenomenon in interactivity and evades the dichotomy between "external" and "internal"; it is neither a cognitive product of the consciousness, nor an image of the mind. The user is well aware of experiencing anotherreality, also in the sense of a paradoxical reduplication of perceptual synthesis. The virtual body-environment is therefore simultaneously external and internal, with virtual bodies-environments to be seen as artificial windows to an intermediary world. In this intermediary world, the space itself is the result of interactivity; the world takes place in the sense or feeling of immersion experienced by the user; and the body, perceived as "other", takes upon itself the sense of its reality, of its effectiveness, as an imaginary and pathic incision, as a production of desire and emotion, to the point that the feeling of reality conveyed by a virtual environment will rely significantly on how this environment produces emotions in the users.

Why do we readily dispose of some things, whereas we keep and maintain others for years, despite their obvious wear and tear? Can a greater understanding of aesthetic value lead to a more strategic and sustainable approach to product design? Aesthetic Sustainability: Product Design and Sustainable Usage offers guidelines for ways to reduce, rethink, and reform consumption. Its focus on aesthetics adds a new dimension to the creation, as well as the consumption, of sustainable products. The chapters offer innovative ways of working with expressional durability in the design process. Aesthetic Sustainability: Product Design and Sustainable Usage is related to emotional durability in the sense that the focus is on the psychological and sensuous bond between subject and object. But the subject-object connection is based on more than emotions: aesthetically sustainable objects continuously add nourishment to human life. This book explores the difference between sentimental value and aesthetic value, and it offers suggestions for operational approaches that can be implemented in the design process to increase aesthetic sustainability. This book also offers a thorough presentation of aesthetics, focusing on the correlation between the philosophical approach to the aesthetic experience and the durable design experience. The book is of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of design, arts, the humanities and social sciences; additionally, it will speak to designers and other professionals with an interest in sustainability and aesthetic value.

Aesthetics and the philosophy of art are about things in the world - things like the Mona Lisa, but also things like horror movies, things like the ugliest dog in the world, and things like wallpaper. There's a surprising amount of philosophical content to be found in wallpaper. Using a case-driven approach, Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art is grounded in real-world examples that propel thought, debate, and discussion about the nature of art and beauty. Now in its third edition, this tried-and-tested text features fresh cases and new activities. Hands-on Do Aesthetics! activities pepper the text, and Challenge Cases appear at the end of each chapter to test intuitions, to complicate the field of discussion, and to set a path forward. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" serves as a recurring case throughout, and this edition includes the full text of this classic short story. From classical debates that continue to bother philosophers today, to emerging problems of identity, appropriation, and morality, this introduction is designed to engage you in a field that itself engages with so much of the world around you. Here is everything you need to know about the history, themes, thinkers and theories to get you started on aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

Rhythm is the fundamental pulse that animates poetry, music, and dance across all cultures. And yet the recent explosion of scholarly interest across disciplines in the aural dimensions of aesthetic experience-particularly in sociology, cultural and media theory, and literary studies-has yet to explore this fundamental category. This book furthers the discussion of rhythm beyond the discrete conceptual domains and technical vocabularies of musicology and prosody. With original essays by philosophers, psychologists, musicians, literary theorists, and ethno-musicologists, The Philosophy of Rhythm opens up wider-and plural-perspectives, examining formal affinities between the historically interconnected fields of music, dance, and poetry, while addressing key concepts such as embodiment, movement, pulse, and performance. Volume editors Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison bring together a range of key questions: What is the distinction between rhythm and pulse? What is the relationship between everyday embodied experience, and the specific experience of music, dance, and poetry? Can aesthetics offer an understanding of rhythm that helps inform our responses to visual and other arts, as well as music, dance, and poetry? And, what is the relation between psychological conceptions of entrainment, and the humane concept of rhythm and meter? Overall, The Philosophy of Rhythm appeals across disciplinary boundaries, providing a unique overview of a neglected aspect of aesthetic experience.

When we think of Iris Murdoch's relationship with art forms, the visual arts come most readily to mind. However, music and other sounds are equally important. Soundscapes - music and other types of sound - contribute to the richly textured atmosphere and moral tenor of Murdoch's novels. This book will help readers to appreciate anew the sensuous nature of Iris Murdoch's prose, and to listen for all kinds of music, sounds and silences in her novels, opening up a new sub-field in Murdoch studies in line with the emerging field of Word and Music Studies. This study is supported by close readings of selected novels exemplifying the subtle variety of ways she deploys music, sounds and silence in her fiction. It also covers Murdoch's knowledge of music and her allusions to music throughout her work, and includes a survey of musical settings of her words by various composers.

The philosophical thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein continues to have a profound influence that transcends barriers between philosophical disciplines and reaches beyond philosophy itself. Less than one hundred years after their publication, his early masterpiece 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' and the posthumously published 'Philosophical Investigations' have emerged as two classic philosophical texts, each of which has elicited widely divergent readings and spawned contesting schools of interpretation. This collection of original essays by leading experts offers deep insights into the forces that shaped and influenced Wittgenstein's thought on a broad variety of topics. It also contains the text - in both the original German and an English translation by Juliet Floyd and Burton Dreben - of letters and cards sent to Wittgenstein by the philosopher and logician Gottlob Frege, which shed light on their interaction during the crucial period when Wittgenstein completed work on the 'Tractatus'. This important record of a philosophical friendship is complemented by a scholarly apparatus and an introduction. Other essays featured in this volume document and discuss Wittgenstein's thinking on music and religion as well as issues that take center stage in the 'Investigations' such as Wittgenstein's account of rule-following. The volume provides an invaluable research tool not only for students of the history of philosophy and for scholars of both Wittgenstein and Frege but also for anyone interested in the intellectual history of the first half of the twentieth century.

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and the painter Harry Weinberger engaged in over twenty years of close friendship and intellectual discourse, centred on sustained discussion of the practice, teaching and morality of art. This book presents a reappraisal of Murdoch's novels - chiefly, three mature novels, The Sea, The Sea (1978), Nuns and Soldiers (1980) and The Good Apprentice (1985), and two enigmatic late novels, The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson's Dilemma (1995) - which are perceived through the prism of her discourse with Weinberger. It draws on a run of almost 400 letters from Murdoch to Weinberger, and on Murdoch's philosophical writings, Weinberger's private writings, the remarks of both artists in interviews, and other material relating to their views on art and art history, much of which is unpublished and has received no previous critical attention. Scrutiny of their shared values, methods and the imagistic dialogue that takes place in their art provides original perspectives on Murdoch's creativity, and new ways of understanding her experimentation with the visual arts. This book offers a new line of enquiry into Murdoch's novels, and into the relationship between literature and the visual arts.

What is aesthetic value? A property in an object? An experience of a perceiving person? An ideal object existing in a mysterious sphere, inaccessible to normal cognition? Does it appear in one form only, or in many forms, perhaps infinitely many? Is it something constant, immutable, or rather something susceptible to change, depending on the individual, the cultural milieu, or the epoch? Is a rational defence of aesthetic value judgements possible, or is any discussion of this topic meaningless? The above questions arise out of the most complicated philosophic problems. Volumes have been written on each of them. The discussions which continue over the centuries, the plurality of views and suggested solutions, indicate that all issues are controversial and contestable. Each view can adduce some arguments supporting it; each has some weaknesses. Another source of difficulty is the vagueness and ambiguity of the language in which the problems are discussed. This makes it hard to understand the ideas of particular thinkers and sometimes makes it impossible to decide whether different formulations express the actual divergence of views or only the verbal preferences of their authors. Let us add that this imperfection does not simply spring from inaccuracy on the part of scholars, but also results from the complexity of the problems themselves. The matter is further complicated by important factors of a social character.