Philosophy: aesthetics Books

This book addresses the complex conceptual, historical, and philosophical questions posed by Eduard Hanslick's influential aesthetic treatise, On the Musically Beautiful (1854). The contributions reveal the philosophical foundations and subtleties of his...

Scientists often try to understand the world by creating simplified or idealised models of it. And yet modelling is hard to make sense of, not least because it seems to involve learning about things that don't exist, like ideal oscillators or perfect...

Michael Mann's films receive a detailed analysis as existential dramas, includingHeat, Collateral, The Last of the Mohicans and Public Enemies. Thebook demonstrates that Mann's films perform critical engagement with existentialism, illustrating the...

This volume offers an aesthetic reading of the Muqaddima by Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), a text that has been studied up to the present as a work on historiography. It argues that the Muqaddima is also a comprehensive treatise on classical Arab-Islamic culture...

Nietzsche is one of the most important modern philosophers and his writings on the nature of art are amongst the most influential of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This GuideBook introduces and assesses:Nietzsche's life and the...

This book probes the psychic and social roots of artistic scenarios of loss.

In a series of philosophical discussions and artistic case studies, this volume develops a materialist and immanent approach to modern and contemporary art. The argument is made for a return to aesthetics--an aesthetics of effect--and for the...

Using an approach deeply informed by philosophy of art, art history and perceptual psychology, this book places seeing at the centre of an original theory of pictorial representation and explores the ramifications such a theory has for the visual arts.

How might we produce our subjectivity differently? Indeed, what are we capable of becoming? This book addresses these questions with a particular eye to ethics, understood as a practice of living, and aesthetics, understood as creative experimentation...

Surely you've experienced it before: you're listening to a piece of music and all of a sudden you find a lump in your throat, a tear in your eye, or a chill down your spine. Whether it's Beethoven's Choral Symphony or The Verve's 'Bittersweet Symphony',...

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the focus of philosophy shifted from objective notions of beauty to the subjective concept of taste. In this book, George Dickie traces the development and decline of this mode of thought, critically evaluating...

In this unprecedented collection, over twenty of the world's most prominent thinkers on the subject including Arthur Danto, Stephen Melville, Wendy Steiner, Alexander Nehamas, and Jay Bernstein ponder the disconnect between these two disciplines. The...

Art or Porn? The popular media will often choose this heading when reviewing the latest sexually explicit novel, film, or art exhibition. The underlying assumption seems to be that the work under discussion has to be one or the other, and cannot be both...

Suffering Art Gladly is concerned with the ostensibly paradoxical phenomenon of negative emotions involved in the experience of art: how can we explain the pleasure felt or satisfaction taken in such experience when it is the vehicle of negative...

This unique collection of essays focuses on various aspects of Plato's Philosophy of Art, not only in The Republic, but in the Phaedrus, Symposium, Laws and related dialogues. The range of issues addressed includes the contest between philosophy and...

Scruton's Aesthetics is a comprehensive critical evaluation of one of the major aestheticians of our age. The lead essay by Scruton is followed by fourteen essays by international commentators plus Scruton's reply. All discuss matters of enduring...

New Waves in Philosophy of Science captures the diverse array of issues in the rapidly developing area of philosophy of science by bringing together a pool of talented young philosophers from across the globe to debate the field and show where it's...