Portraits are everywhere. One finds them not only in museums and galleries, but also in newspapers and magazines, in the homes of people and in the boardrooms of companies, on stamps and coins, on millions of cell phones and computers. Despite its huge popularity, however, portraiture hasn't received much philosophical attention. While there are countless art historical studies of portraiture, contemporary philosophy has largely remained silent on the subject. This book aims to address that lacuna. It brings together philosophers (and philosophically minded historians) with different areas of expertise to discuss this enduring and continuously fascinating genre. The chapters in this collection are ranged under five broad themes. Part I examines the general nature of portraiture and what makes it distinctive as a genre. Part II looks at some of the subgenres of portraiture, such as double portraiture, and at some special cases, such as sport card portraits and portraits of people not present. How emotions are expressed and evoked by portraits is the central focus of Part III, while Part IV explores the relation between portraiture, fiction, and depiction more generally. Finally, in Part V, some of the ethical issues surrounding portraiture are addressed. The book closes with an epilogue about portraits of philosophers. Portraits and Philosophy tangles with deep questions about the nature and effects of portraiture in ways that will substantially advance the scholarly discussion of the genre. It will be of interest to scholars and students working in philosophy of art, history of art, and the visual arts.

This book investigates the pictorial figurations, aesthetic styles and visual tactics through which visual art and popular culture attempt to appeal to "all of us". One key figure these practices bring into play-the "everybody" (which stands for "all of us" and is sometimes a "new man" or a "new woman")-is discussed in an interdisciplinary way involving scholars from several European countries. A key aspect is how popularisation and communication practices-which can assume populist forms-operate in contemporary democracies and where their genealogies lie. A second focus is on the ambivalences of attraction, i.e. on the ways in which visual creations can evoke desire as well as hatred.

This volume builds on two recent developments in philosophy on the relationship between art and science: the notion of representation and the role of values in theory choice and the development of scientific theories. Its aim is to address questions regarding scientific creativity and imagination, the status of scientific performances-such as thought experiments and visual aids-and the role of aesthetic considerations in the context of discovery and justification of scientific theories. Several contributions focus on the concept of beauty as employed by practising scientists, the aesthetic factors at play in science and their role in decision making. Other essays address the question of scientific creativity and how aesthetic judgment resolves the problem of theory choice by employing aesthetic criteria and incorporating insights from both objectivism and subjectivism. The volume also features original perspectives on the role of the sublime in science and sheds light on the empirical work studying the experience of the sublime in science and its relation to the experience of understanding. The Aesthetics of Science tackles these topics from a variety of novel and thought-provoking angles. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in philosophy of science and aesthetics, as well as other subdisciplines such as epistemology and philosophy of mathematics.

The notion of human dignity is frequently, yet enigmatically, invoked in legal and political debates on sex work, where many people use it without much elaboration on exactly what they mean by it. Sex Work and Human Dignity: Law, Politics and Discourse sheds light on this enigma, by exploring how dignity-based discourses are used by those who write and talk about prostitution and also what role these discourses may play in shaping wider cultural understandings of sex work and sex workers. The book draws on political discourse theory and is international in its scope, with analysis of legal cases, textual sources, and empirical data gathered through interviews with activists from several different countries in the Global North and South. The book traces how the concept of dignity is used in a range of legal and political discourses on sex work and ultimately asks to what extent dignity-based discourses help to advance, or hinder, sex workers' social inclusion. This book will appeal to students and researchers interested in sex work and feminism, as well as those who study human dignity. Its interdisciplinary nature means it will appeal to those working in a range of disciplines, including law, sociology, philosophy, and political theory.

This Handbook covers the most urgent, controversial, and important topics in the philosophy of sex. It is both philosophically rigorous and yet accessible to specialists and non-specialists, covering ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of language, and featuring interactions with neighboring disciplines such as psychology, bioethics, sociology, and anthropology. The volume's 40 chapters, written by an international team of both respected senior researchers and essential emerging scholars, are divided into eight parts: I. What is Sex? Is Sex Good? II. Sexual Orientations III. Sexual Autonomy and Consent IV. Regulating Sexual Relationships V. Pathologizing Sex and Sexuality VI. Contested Desires VII. Objectification and Commercialized Sex VIII. Technology and the Future of Sex The broad scope of coverage, depth in insight and research, and accessibility in language make The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality a comprehensive introduction for newcomers to the subject as well as an invaluable reference work for advanced students and researchers in the field.

Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture: Aesthetics and Anxiety in the 1890s rewrites the story of early modernist literature and culture by drawing out the tensions underlying its simultaneous engagement with Decadence and Symbolism, the unsustainable combination of this world and the other. With a broadly framed literary and cultural approach, Jonathan Stone examines a shift in perspective that explodes the notion of reality and showcases the uneasy relationship between the tangible and intangible aspects of the surrounding world. Modernism quenches a growing fascination with the ephemeral and that which cannot be seen while also doubling down on the significance of the material world and finding profound meaning in the physical and the corporeal. Decadence and Symbolism complement the broader historical trajectory of the fin de siecle by affirming the novelty of a modernist mindset and offering an alternative to the empirical and positivistic atmosphere of the nineteenth century. Stone seeks to recreate a significant historical and cultural moment in the development of modernity, a moment that embraces the concept of Decadence while repurposing its aesthetic and social import to help navigate the fundamental changes that accompanied the dawn of the twentieth century.

A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education: The Play of the In-Between explores the ways in which both play and poetry orient us toward what surpasses us. Catherine Homan develops an original account of poetic education that builds on Friedrich Hoelderlin's idea of poetry as a teacher of humanity. Whereas aesthetic education emphasizes judgments of taste and rational autonomy, poetic education foregrounds self-formation and openness to the other. Critically engaging the works of Eugen Fink, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Celan, this book argues that poetry and play call for a particular stance in the world and with others. Open toward the infinite while simultaneously reaching toward its own finitude, the poetic work addresses us and invites our response. Poetry reveals the human condition as "in-between" and dialogical, even at the limits of language. Although many philosophers mistakenly view play as frivolous, Homan takes play seriously. Play--spontaneous and creative--resists mastery and instead requires an active attunement to the to-and-fro movement of the world, of others, and ourselves. A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education demonstrates that poetic education, as learning to listen, provides vital resources for responding to alterity in meaningful ways that resist totalization.

This book offers a sustained, interdisciplinary examination of taste. It addresses a range of topics that have been at the heart of lively debates in philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and experimental philosophy. Our everyday lives are suffused with discussions about taste. We are quick to offer familiar platitudes about taste, but we struggle when facing the questions that matter-what taste is, how it is related to subjectivity, what distinguishes good from bad taste, why it is valuable to make and evaluate judgments about matters of taste, and what, exactly, we mean in speaking about these matters. The essays in this volume open up new, intersecting lines of research about these questions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. They address the notion of aesthetic taste; connections between taste and the natures of truth, disagreement, assertion, belief, retraction, linguistic context-sensitivity, and the semantics/pragmatics interface; experimental inquiry about taste; and metaphysical questions underlying ongoing discussions about taste. Perspectives on Taste will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, and experimental philosophy.

This book radically rethinks the philosophical basis of copyright in the arts. The author reflects on the ontology of art to argue that current copyright laws cannot be justified. The book begins by identifying two problems that result from current copyright laws: (1) creativity is restricted and (2) they primarily serve the interests of large corporations over those of the artists and general public. Against this background, the author presents an account of the ontology of artworks and explains what metaphysics can tell us about ownership in the arts. Next, he makes a moral argument that copyright terms should be shorter and that corporations should not own copyrights. The remaining chapters tackle questions regarding the appropriation of tokens of artworks, pattern types, and artistic elements. The result is a sweeping reinterpretation of copyright in the arts that rests on sound ontological and moral foundations. Radically Rethinking Copyright in the Arts will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics and philosophy of art, metaphysics, philosophy of law, and intellectual property law.

Amanda Glauert revisits Beethoven's songs and studies his profound engagement with the aesthetics of the poets he was setting, particularly those of Herder and Goethe. The book offers readers a rich exploration of the poetical and philosophical context in which Beethoven found himself when composing songs. It also offers detailed commentaries on possible responses to specific songs, responses designed to open up new ways for performing, hearing and appreciating this provocative song repertoire. This study will be of great interest to researchers of Beethoven; German song; aesthetics of words and music.

The book delves into the affective, embodied, and sensory dimensions of traffic and urban mobility. It brings together key phenomenological and post-phenomenological readings to challenge taken for granted assumptions of urban traffic. Through the experiences of traffic users in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, the book provides fascinating pathways into structures and processes that make up phenomenal traffic worlds. It explores the nature of the traffic experience, modalities of existence within it, and the wide spectrum of awarenesses involved in making sense from non-sense. The book offers rich theoretical insights on how we feel our way through our affect-laden worlds. Through empirical examples from the urban traffic in Ho Chi Minh City, the book explores this fluid, constantly changing complex collective of ongoing negotiations we call 'traffic,' often emotional, involving and producing all kinds of entities. It develops a range of philosophical concepts in order to better understand the complex relationships between humans and non-humans in everyday settings. Offering innovative insights into the structures, authorities, materialities and forms of power that shape our experiences of traffic, this book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners interested in philosophy, cultural geography, mobilities, transport studies, cultural studies, and urban studies.

How do cultural changes such as the increasing lustful possibilities of our liquid modernity affect 'romantic' values as psychotherapists and counsellors - and, in turn, affect how they work through their clients' relationships? Do they embody values from a previous era that are inappropriate for the era we are in now, which some term 'post-romantic'? For example, do they really privilege monogamous relationships? There again, do those psychotherapists who advocate polygamy really want others to legitimize their own desire to have affairs? How wary should one be of accepting such prevailing theories as Freud's nuclear family romance and his 'ordinary unhappiness'? Is anyone value-free regarding romanticism/post-romanticism and should they be? Is 'to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part' still an ideal worth working towards or more an ideological imprisonment? This book seeks to explore recent research on how notions of romanticism and post-romanticism affect therapeutic practices. Love, Sex and Psychotherapy in a Post-Romantic Era is a significant new contribution to psychotherapy, and will be a great resource for prospective and current clients, trainee and professional therapists, academics, researchers, and advanced students of Psychology, Psychotherapy, Philosophy and Human Behaviour. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling.

Experimental philosophy has blossomed into a variety of philosophical fields including ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. But there has been very little experimental philosophical research in the domain of philosophical aesthetics. Advances to Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics introduces this burgeoning research field, presenting it both in its unity and diversity, and determining the nature and methods of an experimental philosophy of aesthetics. Addressing a wide variety of empirical claims that are of interest to philosophers and psychologists, a team of authors from different disciplines tackle traditional and new problems in aesthetics, including the nature of aesthetic properties and norms, the possibility of aesthetic testimony, the role of emotions and moral judgment in art appreciation, the link between art and language, and the role of intuitions in philosophical aesthetics. Interacting with other disciplines such as moral psychology and linguistics, it demonstrates how philosophical aesthetics can integrate empirical methods and discover new ways of approaching core problems. Advances to Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics is an important contribution to understanding aesthetics in the 21st century.

`... this book, which along with the many other contributions Hanna Segal has made to psychoanalysis in the course of a long and productive professional life, will stand as a further testament to her creative capacity. - Psychoanalytic Quarterly Vol 3 Vol LXII

One of the most difficult problems challenging the human mind is knowledge of the world in its human, natural, and supra-natural dimensions: what is the nature of this multidimensional reality? How do we know and verify the truth of our knowledge claims of this reality? A contemporary Polish philosopher, Malgorzata Czarnocka, has advanced one of the most comprehensive and insightful studies of the cognitive act and the conditions under which it takes place. The proposition explicated in this book is that Czarnocka's analysis of perception functions as a model of explanation in our attempt to know the nature of the being that underlies the universe. This analysis becomes the basis of the author's discussion of symbolic truth as a model of explanation and its other applications.

This book is aimed to explain the creation of artworks and their evaluation, and offers a new concept of aesthetics and beauty of artworks. Following and reconstructing Peircean realist epistemology, Aesthetics is one of the three normative sciences, along with Logic (Theoretic) and Ethics, which are the three different modes of representing reality. Aesthetics is the mode of artistic representation of reality, and the created artworks are judged beautiful when proven as an aesthetic true representation of reality. Artists aim to represent reality truly, and hence, beautifully, in order to enhance our knowledge of it and to afford us insights on how to better conduct our life in society.

Addressing objective and subjective views of the self and the world in philosophy and poetry, this collection brings together a chronology of John Koethe's thoughts on the connections between the two forms and makes a significant contribution to unsettling the oppositions that separate them. The essays traverse the philosophical conception of the self in modern poetry and locate connections between poets including William Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery alongside philosophers including Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. Koethe pays special attention to romantic poetry and notions of the sublime, which he maps onto subjective individual experience and the objective perspective on the natural world. Koethe further explores this theme in a new essay on romanticism and the sublime in relation to the mind-body problem. Using an associative and impressionistic style to write philosophically about poetry, Koethe defends his own approach that such writing cannot and should not aim for the rigor of philosophical argumentation.

This book builds a new understanding of the body and its relationship to images and technology, using a framework where novel writings of pragmatist somaesthetics and phenomenology meet new research on bodily reactions. Max Ryynanen gives an overview of the topic by collecting the existing information of our bodies gazing at visual culture and the philosophies supporting these phenomena, and examines the way the gaze and the body come together in our relationship to culture. Themes covered include somatic film; the body in artistic documentation of activist art; body parts (and their mutilation or surgeries) in contemporary art and film; robot cars and our visual relationship to them; the usefulness of Indian rasa philosophy in explaining digital culture; and an examination of Mario Perniola's work about the idea that we, human beings, are increasingly experiencing ourselves to be simply "things." The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, aesthetics, cultural philosophy, film studies, technology studies, media studies, cultural studies, and visual studies.

John Dewey was the most celebrated and publicly engaged American philosopher in the twentieth century. His naturalistic theory of "experience" generated new approaches to education and democracy and re-grounded philosophy's search for truth in the needs of life as it is shared and lived. However, interpretations of Dewey after the linguistic turn have either obscured or rejected the considerable role that he gives to the non-discursive dimension of experience. In Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious: The Vital Depths of Experience, Bethany Henning argues that much classical American philosophy implicitly recognizes an unconscious dimension of mind that is distinct from Freud's theory. Although the unconscious that emerges within American thought has never been treated systematically, it found its fullest expression in Dewey's work, particularly in his theory of aesthetic experience. This dimension of mind illuminates the continuity between nature and culture, and it provides us with an account of why artwork is often successful at communicating meanings from the ecological and intimate dimensions of life, where discourse often fails. If the relationship between the human and the organic world has emerged as the definitive question of twenty-first century life, then the aesthetic unconscious stands as a resource for our ecological and intimate well-being.

Peter Sloterdijk is an internationally renowned philosopher and thinker whose work is now seen as increasingly relevant to our contemporary world situation and the multiple crises that punctuate it, including those within ethical, political, economic, technological, and ecological realms. This volume focuses upon one of his central ideas, anthropotechnics. Broadly speaking, anthropotechnics refers to the technological constitution of the human as its fundamental mode of existence, which is characterized by the ability to create dwelling places that 'immunize' human beings from exterior threats while at the same time instituting practices and exercises that call on humanity to transcend itself 'ascetically'. The essays included in this volume enter a critical dialogue with Sloterdijk and his many philosophical interlocutors in order to interrogate the many implications of anthropotechnics in relation to some of the most pressing issues of our time, including and especially the question of the future of humanity in relation to globalism and modernization, climate change, the post-secular, neoliberalism, and artificial intelligence. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

This book interrogates the concept of the subject in the poem, against the broader background of literary-theoretical issues related to the lyric subject. Specifically, what kind of subject is the subject in the poem? What relation does it have to other forms of subjectivation that human beings experience in their life practices? What is its singularity? "The Lyric Subject is a most impressive achievement: a shrewd evaluation of a wide range of writings (philosophical, linguistic, literary) bearing on the question of the lyric subject. With myriad poetic examples, Varja Balz alorsky Antic develops a rich, multileveled mapping of the various forms of subjectivity and agency in the lyric." Jonathan Culler, Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Deleuze and the Diagram charts Deleuze's corpus according to aesthetic concepts such as the map, the sketch and the drawing to bring out a comprehensive concept of the diagram. In his interrogation of Deleuze's visualaesthetic theory, Jakub Zdebik focuses on artists that hold an important place in Deleuze's system. The art of Paul Klee and Francis Bacon is presented as the visual manifestation of Deleuze's philosophy and yields novel ways of assessing visual culture. Zdebik goes on to compare Deleuze's philosophy with the visual theories of Foucault, Lyotard and Simondon, as well as the aesthetic philosophy of Heidegger and Kant. He shows how the visual and aesthetic elements of the diagram shed new light on Deleuze's writings.Deleuze conceptualized his theory as a form of painting, saying that, like art, it needed to shift from figuration to abstraction. This book focuses on the visual devices in Deleuze's work and uses the concept of the diagram to describe the relationship between philosophy and art and to formulate a way to think about philosophy through art.

This book examines post-war surrealist cinema in relation to surrealism's change in direction towards myth and magic following World War II. Intermedial and interdisciplinary, the book unites cinema studies with art history and the study of Western esotericism, closely engaging with a wide range of primary sources, including surrealist journals, art, exhibitions, and writings. Kristoffer Noheden looks to the Danish surrealist artist Wilhelm Freddie's forays into the experimental short film, the French poet Benjamin Peret's contribution to the documentary film L'Invention du monde, the Argentinean-born filmmaker Nelly Kaplan's feature films, and the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer's work in short and feature films. The book traces a continuous engagement with myth and magic throughout these films, uncovering a previously unknown strain of occult imagery in surrealist cinema. It broadens the scope of the study of not only surrealist cinema, but of surrealism across the art forms. Surrealism, Cinema, and the Search for a New Myth will appeal to film scholars, art historians, and those interested in the impact of occultism on modern culture, film, and the arts.

Through a close re-examination of Eugene O'Neill's oeuvre, from minor plays to his Pulitzer-winning works, this study proposes that O'Neill's vision of tragedy privileges a particular emotional response over a more "rational" one among his audience members. In addition to offering a new paradigm through which to interpret O'Neill's work, this book argues that O'Neill's theory of tragedy is a robust account of the value of difficult theatre as a whole, with more explanatory scope and power than its cognitivist counterparts. This paradigm reshapes our understanding of live theatrical tragedy's impact and significance for our lives. The book enters the discussion of tragic value by way of the plays of Eugene O'Neill, and through this study, Killian makes the case that O'Neill has refused to allow Plato to define the terms of tragedy's merit, as the cognitivists have. He argues that O'Neill's theory of tragedy is non-cognitive and locates the value of a play in its ability to trigger certain emotional responses from the audience. This would be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, literature and philosophy.