At first sight, tattoos, nudity, and veils do not seem to have much in common except for the fact that all three have become more frequent, more visible, and more dominant in connection with aesthetic presentations of women over the past thirty years. No longer restricted to biker and sailor culture, tattoos have been sanctioned by the mainstream of liberal societies. Nudity has become more visible than ever on European beaches or on the internet. The increased use of the veil by women in Muslim and non-Muslim countries has developed in parallel with the aforementioned phenomena and is just as striking. Through the means of conceptual analysis, Veils, Nudity, and Tattoos: The New Feminine Aesthetics reveals that these three phenomena can be both private and public, humiliating and empowering, and backward and progressive. This unorthodox approach is traced by the three's similar social and psychological patterns, and by doing so, Veils, Nudity, and Tattoos hopes to sketch the image of a woman who is not only sexually emancipated and confident, but also more and more aware of her cultural heritage.

The "organic" is by now a venerable concept within aesthetics, architecture, and art history, but what might such a term mean within the spatialities and temporalities of film? By way of an answer, this concise and innovative study locates organicity in the work of Bela Tarr, the renowned Hungarian filmmaker and pioneer of the "slow cinema" movement. Through a wholly original analysis of the long take and other signature features of Tarr's work, author Thorsten Botz-Bornstein establishes compelling links between the seemingly remote spheres of film and architecture, revealing shared organic principles that emphasize the transcendence of boundaries.

Through empirical analysis and theoretical reflection, this book shows that the aesthetics and politics of the Islamic State is "futurist." ISIS overcomes postmodern pessimism and joins the modern, techno-oriented, and optimistic attitude propagated by Italian Futurism in the early twentieth century. The Islamic State does not only excel through the extensive use of high-tech weapons, social media, commercial bot, and automated text systems. By putting forward the presence of speeding cars and tanks, mobile phones, and computers, ISIS presents jihad life as connected to modern urban culture. Futurism praised violence as a means of leaving behind imitations of the past in order to project itself most efficiently into the future. A profound sense of crisis produces in both Futurism and jihadism a nihilistic attitude toward the present state of society that will be overcome through an exaltation of technology. Futurists were opposed to parliamentary democracy and sympathized with nationalism and colonialism. ISIS jihadism suggests a similarly curious combination of modernism and conservative values. The most obvious modern characteristic of this new image of fundamentalism is the highly aestheticized recruiting material.

At first sight, tattoos, nudity, and veils do not seem to have much in common except for the fact that all three have become more frequent, more visible, and more dominant in connection with aesthetic presentations of women over the past thirty years. No longer restricted to biker and sailor culture, tattoos have been sanctioned by the mainstream of liberal societies. Nudity has become more visible than ever on European beaches or on the internet. The increased use of the veil by women in Muslim and non-Muslim countries has developed in parallel with the aforementioned phenomena and is just as striking. Through the means of conceptual analysis, Veils, Nudity, and Tattoos: The New Feminine Aesthetics reveals that these three phenomena can be both private and public, humiliating and empowering, and backward and progressive. This unorthodox approach is traced by the three's similar social and psychological patterns, and by doing so, Veils, Nudity, and Tattoos hopes to sketch the image of a woman who is not only sexually emancipated and confident, but also more and more aware of her cultural heritage.

The "organic" is by now a venerable concept within aesthetics, architecture, and art history, but what might such a term mean within the spatialities and temporalities of film? By way of an answer, this concise and innovative study locates organicity in the work of Bela Tarr, the renowned Hungarian filmmaker and pioneer of the "slow cinema" movement. Through a wholly original analysis of the long take and other signature features of Tarr's work, author Thorsten Botz-Bornstein establishes compelling links between the seemingly remote spheres of film and architecture, revealing shared organic principles that emphasize the transcendence of boundaries.

This multidisciplinary volume highlights the transformed nature of the relationship between higher education and society in the 21st century. In particular, it argues that the development of the global university, especially in the non-western world, has transformed the traditional understanding of the relationship between higher education and society. This has important implications for the relations of state, as education has not only become an object of national development policy but for many states an important export. The history of the university reflects the decisive social transformations which have given definition and identity to both new nations and modern societies. In the post-war period, universities in the industrialized world underwent a radical shift. The mass expansion of higher education ensured that universities were no longer centers designed to train youth to assume the leadership positions held by previous generations. Instead universities were to become centers where job skills could be imparted and knowledge produced, refined and used in the newly emerging Cold War economies, and where students could develop the skills necessary for employment in a changing world. Rather than focusing on the refinement of future leaders, the task of the university became linked to the development of economically exploitable technical knowledge. A shift of comparable magnitude is now ongoing in the nature of higher education itself. Globalization has led to the growth of knowledge communities around the world, mirroring the rise of centers for global finance in previous decades. In the Middle East and Asia the demands of the knowledge-based economy have led to the opening of new indigenous universities and branch campuses and partnerships with established European and North American universities. Education City in Qatar, for instance, has received or been pledged more than 200 billion dollars since its inception. The growth of new indigenous universities has altered the traditional role of the university further, increasing the emphasis on courses which are close to the marketplace. These new partnerships have contributed to the creation of what is now referred to as the global university.

At the turn of the millennium, international youth culture is dominated by mainly two types of aesthetics: the African American cool, which, propelled by Hip-Hop music, has become the world's favorite youth culture; and the Japanese aesthetics of kawaii or cute, that is distributed internationally by Japan's powerful anime industry. The USA and Japan are cultural superpowers and global trendsetters because they make use of two particular concepts that hide complex structures under their simple surfaces and are difficult to define, but continue to fascinate the world: cool and kawaii. The Cool-Kawaii: Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity, by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, analyzes these attitudes and explains the intrinsic powers that are leading to a fusion of both aesthetics. Cool and kawaii are expressions set against the oppressive homogenizations that occur within official modern cultures, but they are also catalysts of modernity. Cool and kawaii do not refer us back to a pre-modern ethnic past. Just like the cool African American man has almost no relationship with traditional African ideas about masculinity, the kawaii shojo is not the personification of the traditional Japanese ideal of the feminine, but signifies an ideological institution of women based on Japanese modernity in the Meiji period, that is, a feminine image based on westernization. At the same time, cool and kawaii do not transport us into a futuristic, impersonal world of hypermodernity based on assumptions of constant modernization. Cool and kawaii stand for another type of modernity, which is not technocratic, but rather "Dandyist" and closely related to the search for human dignity and liberation."

Aesthetics and Politics of Space in Russia and Japan: A Comparative Philosophical Study examines the parallels between Russian and Japanese philosophies and religions by revealing a common concept of space in Russian and Japanese aesthetics and political theories. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein shows points of convergence between the two traditions regarding the treatment of space within the realm of identity (both individual and communal), and in formulations of the relationship between regionalism, localism and globalism. Russian and Japanese philosophers like Nishida, Watsuji, Trubetzkoy, and the Eurasianists transformed the traditional notion of communal space, which has always been seen as an organic time-space unity, into a sophisticated element very well described as "time-space development." Botz-Bornstein's comparative study also leads to an analysis of contemporary themes. Reflections on Noh-plays and icons, for example, permit him to untangle the relationships between the virtual, the dream, the imaginary, and reality. Virtual reality, as an environment that pulls users into itself, makes use of strategies that are also common in Noh-plays and icons, both of which share a particular conception of space. The "non-Western" alternatives presented in Aesthetics and Politics of Space in Russia and Japan can be considered as useful additions to contemporary political and aesthetic discourses.

Films and Dreams considers the essential link between films and the world of dreams. To discuss dream theory in the context of film studies means moving from the original, clinical context within which dream theory was originally developed to an environment established by primarily aesthetic concerns. Botz-Bornstein deals with dreams as 'self-sufficient' phenomena that are interesting not because of their contents but because of the 'dreamtense' through which they deploy their being. A diverse selection of films are examined in this light: Tarkovsky's anti-realism exploring the domain of the improbable between symbolization, representation and alienation; Sokurov's subversive attacks on the modern image ideology; Arthur Schnitzler's shifting of the familiar to the uncanny and Kubrick's avoidance of this structural model in Eyes Wide Shut; and Wong Kar-Wai's dreamlike panorama of parodied capitalism.

Films and Dreams considers the essential link between films and the world of dreams. To discuss dream theory in the context of film studies means moving from the original, clinical context within which dream theory was originally developed to an environment established by primarily aesthetic concerns. Botz-Bornstein deals with dreams as "self-sufficient" phenomena that are interesting not because of their contents but because of the "dreamtense" through which they deploy their being. A diverse selection of films are examined in this light: Tarkovsky's anti-realism exploring the domain of the improbable between symbolization, representation and alienation; Sokurov's subversive attacks on the modern image ideology; Arthur Schnitzler's shifting of the familiar to the uncanny and Kubrick's avoidance of this structural model in Eyes Wide Shut; and Wong Kar-Wai's dreamlike panorama of parodied capitalism.

Critical Regionalism is a notion which gained popularity in architectural debate as a synthesis of universal, 'modern' elements and individualistic elements derived from local cultures. This book shifts the focus from Critical Regionalism towards a broader concept of 'Transcultural Architecture' and defines Critical Regionalism as a subgroup of the latter. One of the benefits that this change of perspective brings about is that a large part of the political agenda of Critical Regionalism, which consists of resisting attitudes forged by typically Western experiences, is 'softened' and negotiated according to premises provided by local circumstances. A further benefit is that several responses dependent on factors that initial definitions of Critical Regionalism never took into account can now be considered. At the book's centre is an analysis of Reima and Raili PietilA's Sief Palace Area project in Kuwait. Further cases of modern architecture in China, Korea, and Saudi Arabia show that the critique, which holds that Critical Regionalism is a typical 'western' exercise, is not sound in all circumstances. The book argues that there are different Critical Regionalisms and not all of them impose Western paradigms on non-Western cultures. Non-Western regionalists can also successfully participate in the Western enlightened discourse, even when they do not directly and consciously act against Western models. Furthermore, the book proposes that a certain 'architectural rationality' can be contained in architecture itself - not imposed by outside parameters like aesthetics, comfort, or even tradition, but flowing out of a social game of which architecture is a part. The key concept is that of the 'form of life', as developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose thoughts are here linked to Critical Regionalism. Kenneth Frampton argues that Critical Regionalism offers something well beyond comfort and accommodation. What he has in mind are ethical prescripts closely linked to a

This book offers a philosophical exploration of lines in art and culture, and traces their history from Antiquity onwards. Lines can be physical phenomena, cognitive responses to observed processes, or both at the same time. Based on this assumption, the book describes the "philosophy of lines" in art, architecture, and science. The book compares Western and Eastern traditions. It examines lines in the works of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Henri Michaux, as well as in Chinese and Japanese art and calligraphy. Lines are not merely a matter of aesthetics but also reflect the psychological states of entire cultures. In the nineteenth century, non-Euclidean geometry sparked the phenomenon of the "self-negating line," which influenced modern art; it also prepared the ground for virtual reality. Straight lines, distorted lines, blurred lines, hot and cold lines, dynamic lines, lines of force, virtual lines, and on and on, lines narrate the development of human civilization.

The Veil in Kuwait explores the complex reasons behind why women veil and how they are perceived by those that do not veil. Religion, culture, family, tradition, and fashion are all explored to provide insight into this fascinating phenomenon that has received global interest.

Critical Regionalism is a notion which gained popularity in architectural debate as a synthesis of universal, 'modern' elements and individualistic elements derived from local cultures. This book shifts the focus from Critical Regionalism towards a broader concept of 'Transcultural Architecture' and defines Critical Regionalism as a subgroup of the latter. One of the benefits that this change of perspective brings about is that a large part of the political agenda of Critical Regionalism, which consists of resisting attitudes forged by typically Western experiences, is 'softened' and negotiated according to premises provided by local circumstances. A further benefit is that several responses dependent on factors that initial definitions of Critical Regionalism never took into account can now be considered. At the book's centre is an analysis of Reima and Raili PietilA's Sief Palace Area project in Kuwait. Further cases of modern architecture in China, Korea, and Saudi Arabia show that the critique, which holds that Critical Regionalism is a typical 'western' exercise, is not sound in all circumstances. The book argues that there are different Critical Regionalisms and not all of them impose Western paradigms on non-Western cultures. Non-Western regionalists can also successfully participate in the Western enlightened discourse, even when they do not directly and consciously act against Western models. Furthermore, the book proposes that a certain 'architectural rationality' can be contained in architecture itself - not imposed by outside parameters like aesthetics, comfort, or even tradition, but flowing out of a social game of which architecture is a part. The key concept is that of the 'form of life', as developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose thoughts are here linked to Critical Regionalism. Kenneth Frampton argues that Critical Regionalism offers something well beyond comfort and accommodation. What he has in mind are ethical prescripts closely linked to a

This book offers a philosophical exploration of lines in art and culture, and traces their history from Antiquity onwards. Lines can be physical phenomena, cognitive responses to observed processes, or both at the same time. Based on this assumption, the book describes the "philosophy of lines" in art, architecture, and science. The book compares Western and Eastern traditions. It examines lines in the works of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Henri Michaux, as well as in Chinese and Japanese art and calligraphy. Lines are not merely a matter of aesthetics but also reflect the psychological states of entire cultures. In the nineteenth century, non-Euclidean geometry sparked the phenomenon of the "self-negating line," which influenced modern art; it also prepared the ground for virtual reality. Straight lines, distorted lines, blurred lines, hot and cold lines, dynamic lines, lines of force, virtual lines, and on and on, lines narrate the development of human civilization.

You have to go deeper. Inception is more than just a nail-biting heist story, more than just one of the greatest movies of all time. The latest neuroscience and philosophy of mind tell us that shared dreams and the invasion of dreams may soon become reality. Inception and Philosophy: Ideas to Die For takes you through the labyrinth, onto the infinite staircase, exploring the movie's hidden architecture, picking up its unexpected clues. How will Inception change your thinking? You can't imagine. How will Inception and Philosophy change your life? You simply have no idea.

What are the predominant aesthetics of the twenty-first century? Thorsten Botz-Bornstein argues that deculturation, embodied by the conspicuous vulgarity of kitsch, is the overriding visual language of our times. Drawing on the work of Islam scholar Olivier Roy, who argued that religious fundamentalism arises when religion is separated from the indigenous cultural values, Botz-Bornstein shows that the production of 'absolute' truths through deculturation also exists in contemporary education. The neoliberal environment has separated learning from culture by emphasizing standardization and quantified learning outcomes. In a globalized environment, the idea of culture is no longer available as a referent; instead we are taught to rely on the culturally neutral term 'excellence'. For Botz-Bornstein, this is an absolute value similar to the 'truth' of religious fundamentalists. Similarly, kitsch is what happens when aesthetic values are separated from cultural contexts. Kitsch is aesthetic fundamentalism. Kitsch aesthetics are an aesthetics of excellence. The consumption of kitsch can be understood as an intrinsically narcissistic impulse, reinforced by social media, individuals recycling their own selves without being confronted with the culture of the "other." The existence of self-centred "alternative truths", fake news and conspiracy theories and selfies are linked together in the fundamentalism-neoliberalism-kitsch pattern. Including analysis of the intersections of 'cute', 'excellent', 'sublime', and 'interesting' in contemporary aesthetic culture, this is a journey through philosophy, psychology and cultural theory, redefining a new aesthetics of deculturation.

Centralization and over-professionalization can lead to the disappearance of a critical environment capable of linking the human sciences to the "real world." The authors of this volume suggest that the humanities need to operate in a concrete cultural environment able to influence procedures on a hic et nunc basis, and that they should not entirely depend on normative criteria whose function is often to hide ignorance behind a pretentious veil of value-neutral objectivity.In sociology, the growth of scientism has fragmented ethical categories and distorted discourse between our inner and outer selves, while philosophy is suffering from an empty professionalism current in many philosophy departments in industrialized and developing countries where boring, ahistorical, and nonpolitical exercises are justified through appeals to false excellence.In all branches of the humanities, absurd evaluation processes foster similar tendencies as they create a sterile atmosphere and prevent interdisciplinarity and creativity. Technicization of theory plays into the hands of technocrats. The authors offer a broad range of approaches and interpretations, reaching from philosophy of education to the re-evaluation of business models for universities.

What are the predominant aesthetics of the twenty-first century? Thorsten Botz-Bornstein argues that deculturation, embodied by the conspicuous vulgarity of kitsch, is the overriding visual language of our times. Drawing on the work of Islam scholar Olivier Roy, who argued that religious fundamentalism arises when religion is separated from the indigenous cultural values, Botz-Bornstein shows that the production of 'absolute' truths through deculturation also exists in contemporary education. The neoliberal environment has separated learning from culture by emphasizing standardization and quantified learning outcomes. In a globalized environment, the idea of culture is no longer available as a referent; instead we are taught to rely on the culturally neutral term 'excellence'. For Botz-Bornstein, this is an absolute value similar to the 'truth' of religious fundamentalists. Similarly, kitsch is what happens when aesthetic values are separated from cultural contexts. Kitsch is aesthetic fundamentalism. Kitsch aesthetics are an aesthetics of excellence. The consumption of kitsch can be understood as an intrinsically narcissistic impulse, reinforced by social media, individuals recycling their own selves without being confronted with the culture of the "other." The existence of self-centred "alternative truths", fake news and conspiracy theories and selfies are linked together in the fundamentalism-neoliberalism-kitsch pattern. Including analysis of the intersections of 'cute', 'excellent', 'sublime', and 'interesting' in contemporary aesthetic culture, this is a journey through philosophy, psychology and cultural theory, redefining a new aesthetics of deculturation.