Philosophy: aesthetics Books

What are the different contours of defining a subject? How does a subject form in the act of resilience? This multi-author book explores the concept of a wandering subject, especially in the context of resilience. The wandering subject can be understood...

Hans-Georg Gadamer was one of the greatest intellectual figures of the twentieth century. As a philosopher trained in phenomenology, he established philosophical hermeneutics as one of the leading traditions of contemporary philosophy and opened new...

The Material Mind: A Writer's Philosophical Journal is a piecemeal collection, with an explanatory introduction, of the thoughts of an elderly writer who has abandoned his art of fiction late in life for the modern realities of metaphysics and...

Milo Yiannopoulos is not straight, but that’s never stopped him from handing out excellent advice. And let’s face it, heterosexuals need it. Milo has spent his entire life advocating for the most brutally repressed minority on the...

Hungry Ghosts in the Machine: Digital Capitalism and the Search for Self examines the ways in which social and other digital media utilize nostalgia to heighten anxiety, depression and alienation while offering fleeting cures which only ultimately lead...

Tymieniecka's phenomenology of life reverses current priorities, stressing the primogenital role of aesthetic enjoyment, rather than cognition, as typifying the Human Condition. The present collection offers clues to a...

In reflecting on this book and the process of writing it, the most pervasive theme I find is that of confluence. I drew much of the energy needed to write the book from the energy that resides at the confluence, or nexus, of...

Regardless of the subject matter, our studies are always searching for a sense of the universal in the specific. Drawing, etchings and paintings are a way of communicating ideas and emotions. The key word here is to communicate...

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that feeling is part of the system of the mind. Judgments of taste based on feeling are a unique kind of judgment, and the feeling that is their foundation forms an independent third...

Among the multiple, subliminal passions that inspire our life in innumerable ways, literature shows us one that seems to play a particularly penetrating role in human concerns. This passion, which Tymieniecka calls an...

Building upon Husserl's challenge to oppositions such as those between form and content and between constituting and constituted, The Concept of Passivity in Husserl's Phenomenology construes activity and passivity not as reciprocally exclusive terms but...

In this book, perspectives in psychology, aesthetics, history and philosophy are drawn upon to survey the value given to sad music by human societies throughout history and today. Why do we love listening to music that makes us cry? This mystery has...

In a world awash in awesome, sensual technological experiences, wonder has diverse powers, including awakening us to unexpected ecological intimacies and entanglements. Yet this deeply felt experience-at once cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical-has been...

A contribution to the field of theological aesthetics, this book explores the arts in and around the Pentecostal and charismatic renewal movements.  It proposes a pneumatological model for creativity and the arts, and discusses different art...

This book presents a pioneering critical study of Complicite's work throughout the years. Drawing on an extensive overview of the available research material - including interviews, manuscripts and the company's own archive - the book is framed within a...

This book explores the interactions between science and music in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century. It examines and evaluates the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, Max Planck, Shohé Tanaka, and Adriaan Fokker, leading physicists and...

This book offers intriguing philosophical inquiries into biotechnological art and the life sciences, addressing their convergences as well as their epistemic and functional divergences. Rooted on a thorough understanding of the history of philosophy,...

This books delineates the seismic shifts of the twentieth century humanities by way of a close examination of the dynamic landscape of modern language, criticism and philosophy. In this manner, it argues that both philosophy and literary criticism have...

This book illuminates the aesthetically underrated meaningfulness of particular elements in works of art and aesthetic experiences generally. Beginning from the idea of "hooks" in popular song, the book identifies experiences of special liveliness that...

The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and the painter Harry Weinberger engaged in over twenty years of close friendship and intellectual discourse, centred on sustained discussion of the practice, teaching and morality of art. This book presents a...

The book explores the liminal aesthetics of U.S. cultural and literary practice. Interrogating the notion of a presumptive unity of the American experience, Moveable Designs argues that inner conflict, divisiveness, and contradiction...

This book outlines the evolution of our political nature over two million years and explores many of the rituals, plays, films, and other performances that gave voice and legitimacy to various political regimes in our species' history. Our genetic and...

This book presents a chronology of thirty definitions attributed to the word, term, phrase, and concept of "documentary" between the years 1895 and 1959. The book dedicates one chapter to each of the thirty definitions, scrutinizing their idiosyncratic...

This book addresses how Plato, Kant, and Iris Murdoch (each in different ways) view the connection aesthetic experience has to morality. While offering an examination of Iris Murdoch's philosophy, it analyses deeply the suggestive links (as well as...

In What's Wrong With the World Gilbert K. Chesterton identified many things wrong with the world, including social evil, prejudices that stop people from discussing social solutions in open and honest forums, an inability to learn from the past, the...

In this book, Alison Ross engages in a detailed study of Walter Benjamin's concept of the image, exploring the significant shifts in Benjamin's approach to the topic over the course of his career. Using Kant's treatment of the topic of sensuous form in...

Originally published in 2001, this intriguing volume brings together professionals working in architecture, planning, urban design and social policy with academics from both humanities and social sciences to provide a broad-based and insightful...

Originally published in 1995, this title is a result of an interdisciplinary study in architectural theory, psychology and philosophy and the author's experience as a practicing architect. It tries to relate theories of aesthetics and recent advances in...

This book explores the aesthetic consciousness of the Shang Dynasty and its influence on Chinese aesthetic development and contemporary aesthetic creation.

​This book gathers research and writings that reflect on traditional and current global issues related to art and aesthetics, gender perspectives, body theories, knowledge and learning. It illustrates these core dimensions, which are bringing together...

​This book explores in detail the issues of ecological civilization development, ecological philosophy, ecological criticism, environmental aesthetics, and the ecological wisdom of traditional Chinese culture related to ecological aesthetics. Drawing on...

The book deals with philosophical issues concerning the understanding of the literary text and its distinctive nature, meaning, and relevance to life. It also provides an occasion to revisit many of the seminal ideas towards these ends by contextualizing...

Second volume in the Homo Mimeticus mini-series, which advances the emerging transdisciplinary field of mimetic studiesAfter the linguistic and the affective turns, the new materialist and the performative turns, the cognitive and the posthuman turns, it...

This notable collection provides an interdisciplinary platform for prominent thinkers who have all made significant recent contributions to exploring the nexus of philosophy and narrative. It includes the latest assessments of several key positions in...

Roman Ingarden's very extensive philosophical work in metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics con­ tinues to attract increasing attention both in Poland and in North America. Further work left uncompleted at his...

The history of aesthetics, like the histories of other sciences, may be treated in a two-fold manner: as the history of the men who created the field of study, or as the history of the questions that have been raised and...

The present work addresses itself to the question of the nature of appraisive concepts such as were the subject of investigation in The Concepts of Value* and The Concepts of Criticism. ** Many problems of prime importance in...

The work of the Kyoto School represents one of the few streams of philosophy that originate in Japan. Following the cultural renaissance of the Meiji Restoration after Japan's period of closure to the outside world (1600-1868), this distinctly Japanese...

Critical Communities and Aesthetic Practices brings together eminent international philosophers to discuss the inter-dependence of critical communities and aesthetic practices. Their contributions share a hermeneutical commitment to dialogue, both as a...

"There is no greater gift to man than to understand nothing of his fate", declares poet-philosopher Paul Valery. And yet the searching human being seeks ceaselessly to disentangle the networks of experiences, desires, inward promptings, personal...

The Metaphysics.- The Basic Problem.- Goodman's Nominalism.- The Consequences of Goodman's Nominalism for his Terminology.- The Epistemology.- Twentieth Century Epistemology.- Constructionalism.- The Effects of Goodman's Nominalist Constructionalism on...

Representation is a concern crucial to the sciences and the arts alike. Scientists devote substantial time to devising and exploring representations of all kinds. From photographs and computer-generated images to diagrams, charts, and graphs; from scale...

This volume consists of papers given to the Royal Institute of Philos­ ophy Conference on 'Philosophy and the Visual Arts: Seeing and Abstracting' given at the University of Bristol in September 1985. The contributors here come...

0. 1. GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEMATIC This study is devoted to an examination of a concept of crucial significance for Soviet aesthetics - the concept of the aesthetic (esteticeskoe). Soviet aestheticians have for some...