Philosophy: aesthetics Books

This book provides an original treatment of the concept of good and beauty in ancient Egypt. It seeks to examine the dimensions of nefer, the term used to describe the good and the beautiful, within the context of ordinary life. Because the book is...

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time has long fascinated philosophers for its complex accounts of time, personal identity and narrative, amongst many other themes. Proust as Philosopher: The Art of Metaphor is the first book to try and connect Proust's...

Do aesthetic appeals to senses and emotions in political debate necessarily marginalise political reason and reduce citizens to consumers - thus dangerously undermining democracy? Or is sensuous-emotional engagement, on the contrary, a basic fact of the...

The spiritual crisis of the twenty-first century is overload boredom. There is more information, content, and stimulation than ever before, and none of it is waiting passively to be consumed. The demands exceed our capacities.The Spiritual Significance...

This is a fascinating and beautifully written book on what philosophy can tell us about humour and about what it is to be human. It will fascinate and intrigue anyone with a sense of humour.

Bogue provides a systematic overview and introduction to Deleuze's writings on music and painting, and an assessment of their position within his aesthetics as a whole. Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts breaks new ground in the scholarship on...

This is the first book to present an aesthetics of virtual reality media. It situates virtual reality media in terms of the philosophy of the arts, comparing them to more familiar media such as painting, film and photography.

Why do painters paint? Obviously, there are numerous possible reasons. They paint to create images for others' enjoyment, to solve visual problems, to convey ideas, and to contribute to a rich artistic tradition. This book argues that there is yet...

Argument and imagination are often interdependent. The Aesthetics of Argument is concerned with how this relationship may bear on argument's concern with truth, not just persuasion, and with the enhancement of understanding such interdependence may bring...

This volume brings together philosophical and interdisciplinary perspectives on improvisation. The contributions connect the theoretical dimensions of improvisation with different viewpoints on its practice in the arts and the classroom. The chapters...

This innovative study re-evaluates the philosophical significance of aesthetics in the context of contemporary debates on the nature of philosophy. Lewis's main argument is that contemporary conceptions of meaning and truth have been reified, and that...

The Intellectual Imagination unfolds a sweeping vision of the form, meaning, and value of intellectual practice. The book breaks new ground in offering a comprehensive vision of the intellectual vocation. Omedi Ochieng argues that robust and rigorous...

This book explores the transformation of ideas of the material in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century musical composition. New music of this era is argued to reflect a historical moment when the idea of materiality itself is in flux...

In the late 19th and early 20th century Peter Lamborn Wilson hosted The Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade on WBAI-FM in NYC, where he would read his essays as "Radio Sermonettes." One of these, “Utopian Trails in Central Park,” was...

This volume re-examines traditional interpretations of the rise of modern aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain and Germany. It provides a new account that connects aesthetic experience with morality, science, and political society. In doing so, it...

The Re-enchantment of the World is a philosophical exploration of the role of art and religion as sources of meaning in an increasingly material world dominated by science. Gordon Graham takes as his starting point Max Weber's idea that contemporary...

Oedipus presents ceaseless paradoxes that have fascinated readers for centuries. He is proud of his intellect, but he does not know himself and succumbs easily to self-deceptions. As a ruler he expresses the greatest good will toward his people, but as...

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this volume, Zangwill develops a view of the nature of music and our experience of music that foregrounds the aesthetic properties of music. He focuses on metaphysical issues about aesthetic properties of music, psychological issues about the nature...

Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) originated much of twentieth- and twenty-first-century theology's renewed interest in aesthetics. Von Balthasar's theology is both poetic and philosophical, and while this combination is often...

This is the first comprehensive introduction to Deleuze's work on literature. It provides thorough treatments of Deleuze's early book on Proust and his seminal volume on Kafka and minor literature. Deleuze on Literature situates those studies and many...

In Aesthetics and Material Beauty, Jennifer A. McMahon develops a new aesthetic theory she terms Critical Aesthetic Realism - taking Kantian aesthetics as a starting point and drawing upon contemporary theories of mind from philosophy, psychology, and...

Notions of the sublime are most often associated with the extraordinary, and include the intra-psychic, high-cultural and exceptional occurrences of elation and exaltation as part of the experience. Using psychoanalytic and aesthetic theories, this...

Philosophy of art is traditionally concerned with the definition, appreciation and value of art. Through a close examination of art from recent centuries, Art and Phenomenology is one of the first books to explore visual art as a mode of experiencing the...

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...

This is an in-depth analysis of dramatization as method in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. It provides an account of the value of this method for the study of the political with particular emphasis on the relationship between politics and art.

Foreword: T.J.Diffey Acknowledgements Nelson Goodman Book Abbreviations Questions in Aesthetics: Symbols and their Systems, Linguistic and Non-linguistic Languages, The Extension of Meaning, Art and the Codification of Meaning, Practice and Tradition in...

This is the first major response to the new challenge of neuroscience to religion. There have been limited responses from a purely Christian point of view, but this takes account of eastern as well as western forms of religious experience. It challenges...

If the advancement toward the administered world is nearing completion, if spectacularised societies, industrialised cultures, and reified consciousness have taken control, then, Adorno and Art shows how radical and revolutionary Adorno's aesthetic...

The current economic crisis is causing large impact on the behavior of financial markets and institutions. Crisis, Risk and Stability in Modern Banking presents an indepth insight into key topics related to the behavior of financial institutions in the...

This book is a conceptualization of the literary aesthetic in relation to ethics, in particular, an ethics for a concern for the Self. Bringing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's constructivist thinking into a practical domain, Sabrina Achilles rethinks...

Very Little ... Almost Nothing puts the question of the meaning of life back at the centre of intellectual debate. Its central concern is how we can find a meaning to human finitude without recourse to anything that transcends that finitude. A profound...

In the course of its long and tumultuous history the sublime has alternated between spatial and temporal definitions, from its conceptualization in terms of the grandeur and infinity of Nature (spatial), to its postmodern redefinition as an "event"...

Almost all of us would agree that the experience of art is deeply rewarding. Why this is the case remains a puzzle; nor does it explain why many of us find works of art much more important than other sources of pleasure. Art and Knowledge argues that...

Hume's Aesthetic Theory examines the neglected area of the development of aesthetics in empiricist thinking, exploring the link between the empiricist background of aesthetics in the eighteenth century and the work of David Hume.This is a major...

From its very beginnings, theatre has been both an art and a public space, shared by actors and spectators. As a result, its entity and history is intimately tied to politics: a politics of inclusion and exclusion, of distributions and placements, of...

Presenting a fascinating analysis of the idea of what can't be said, this book ascertains whether the notion of there being a truth, or a state of affairs, or knowledge that can't be expressed linguistically is a coherent notion. The author...

Feminist approaches to art are extremely influential and widely studied across a variety of disciplines, including art theory, cultural and visual studies, and philosophy. Gender and Aesthetics is an introduction to the major theories and thinkers within...