Artistic creation has proven remarkably resistant to philosophical analysis. Artists have long struggled to explain how they do what they do, and philosophers have struggled along with them. This study does not attempt to offer a comprehensive account of all creativity or all art. Instead it tries to identify an essential feature of an activity that has been cloaked in mystery for as long as history records. Jeff Mitscherling and Paul Fairfield argue that the process by which art is created has a good deal in common with the experience of the audience of a work, and that both experiences may be described phenomenologically in ways that show surprising affinities with what artists themselves often report.

Artistic creation has proven remarkably resistant to philosophical analysis. Artists have long struggled to explain how they do what they do, and philosophers have struggled along with them. This study does not attempt to offer a comprehensive account of all creativity or all art. Instead it tries to identify an essential feature of an activity that has been cloaked in mystery for as long as history records. Jeff Mitscherling and Paul Fairfield argue that the process by which art is created has a good deal in common with the experience of the audience of a work, and that both experiences may be described phenomenologically in ways that show surprising affinities with what artists themselves often report.

In Aesthetic Genesis, the author argues for a reversal of the most fundamental tenet of phenomenology-namely, that all consciousness is intentional (that is, directed toward an object). Mitscherling suggests, as a new "Copernican hypothesis," that intentionality (i.e., directionality) gives rise to consciousness. This book describes not only the origin, or "genesis," of human cognition in sensation, but also the genesis of sensation from intentional structures belonging to nature itself. A phenomenological examination of our experience leads to the conclusion that the two sorts of being generally recognized by contemporary science and philosophy-that is, material being and ideal being-prove ontologically inadequate to account for this experience. Mitscherling rehabilitates the pre-modern concepts of "intentional being" and "formal causality" and employs them in the construction of a comprehensive phenomenological analysis of embodiment, aesthetic experience, the interpretation of texts, moral behavior, and cognition in general.

At the end of the twentieth century literary theorists find themselves reflecting on their discipline. Since at least 1969, the humanities and social sciences have seen the rise of Marxist critical theory, Foucault (or discourse and the new historicism), various schools of American and European cultural studies, deconstruction, and poststructuralism. One of the major coups of the last 30 years, from which all of the previously mentioned theoretical camps benefited, was the attack on and subsequent death of authorial intentionality. In, The Author's Intention co-authors DiTommaso, Mitscherling, and Nayed divert the current philosophical misrepresentation of authorial intention. Implicitly challenging a second-generation theoretical approach to literature that dismisses the possibility of truth, coherent narratives, and, of course, intentionality the authors breathe new life back into "the author" and, also, literary theory. This book is essential reading for anyone in the humanities who has an interest in critical thought, hermeneutics, and all forms of interpretive technique.