Aesthetics

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Is Harpo Free?

Examines how philosophical concepts like free will, personal identity, and goodness are given an artistic life in films and television programs.

Value, Beauty, and Nature

Argues that, to make progress within environmental ethics, philosophers must explicitly engage in environmental metaphysics.

The Human Figure on Film

Offers a fresh approach to the problem of the human figure in an age of digital cinema.

The Emergence of Value

Argues that truth, moral right, political right, and aesthetic value may be understood as arising out of a naturalist account of humanity, if naturalism is rightly conceived.

The Other Synaesthesia

Reconsiders the figure of synaesthesia, understood as the combination of the senses and of the arts, in philosophy and literature.

From Metaphysical Representations to Aesthetic Life

Reevaluates Western and Chinese philosophical traditions to question the boundaries of entrenched conceptual frameworks.

Life Above the Clouds

Edited by Steven DeLay
Subjects: Philosophy

The definitive philosophical exploration of the work of pioneering filmmaker Terrence Malick.

The Touch of the Present

Explores the importance of the body and the senses in educational encounters, drawing out the aesthetic and political dimensions of educational practices.

Philosophical Archaeology

Explores the potential for a novel philosophy of history to be uncovered by tracing the connections between Giorgio Agamben's work (theoretical practice) and contemporary art (artistic practice).

The Holiday in His Eye

Presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell's oeuvre, one that takes his kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies.

Cognition and Practice

Explores the aesthetic theory of one of China's most important and influential contemporary philosophers.

Wonder Strikes

By Steven E. Knepper
Foreword by William Desmond
Subjects: Philosophy

The first book-length examination of the prominent contemporary philosopher William Desmond's approach to aesthetics, art, and literature.

Between Celan and Heidegger

Probing reassessment of the relation between Celan's poetry and Heidegger's thought.

Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters

A novel fusing of multiple approaches and range of examples exploring the dimensions, objects, and import of aesthetic encounters.

Reconsidering the Life of Power

Offers a compelling intercultural perspective on body, art, self, and society.

Tastemakers and Tastemaking

Considers how and why taste persists in the analysis of Mexican film and television by looking at key figures and their impact on the curation of violence.

The Aesthetic Clinic

Examines experimental art and literature by women alongside psychoanalysis and philosophy to develop a new understanding of sublimation and aesthetic experience.

Critique in German Philosophy

Traces a conceptual history of critique in German philosophy from the eighteenth century to the present.

Capital in the Mirror

Analyzes contemporary capitalism through the products of culture and art for fresh insight into emancipatory possibilities concealed within capitalism’s darkest dynamics.

Merleau-Ponty at the Gallery

A study of the significance of the visual arts in Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics in relation to the work of five artists not known or discussed by him.

American Aesthetics

Proposes a distinctly American approach to aesthetic judgment and practice.

Hyperthematics

Presents a new and unique method for developing principles to be applied in creating and increasing value.

Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy

Assesses the importance of Merleau-Ponty to current and ongoing concerns in contemporary philosophy.

Merleau-Ponty and Nishida

By Adam Loughnane
Subjects: Philosophy

Places the phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty and Nishida in dialogue and uncovers a demand for a motor-perceptual form of faith in both philosophers’ meditations on artistic expression.

Philosophy-Screens

Draws from twentieth-century French thought on film and aesthetics to address the philosophical significance of the pervasiveness of screens in contemporary technological life as well as the mutation of philosophy that such a pervasiveness seems to require.

Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom

Shows the relevance of Schiller’s thought for contemporary philosophy, particularly aesthetics, ethics, and politics.

Thinking the Inexhaustible

Essays address the major themes of Pareyson’s hermeneutic philosophy in the context of his existentialist approach to personhood.

Unmaking The Making of Americans

By E. L. McCallum
Subjects: Philosophy

Develops the sustained, relational, dynamic, and reflective attention demanded by Gertrude Stein’s novel into a theory of reading and critical analysis.

Adorno's Poetics of Form

A critical study of the concept of form in Adorno’s writings on art and literature.

Beautiful, Bright, and Blinding

Phenomenological analysis of beauty and art across various aspects of lived experience and culture.

Imagination, Music, and the Emotions

By Saam Trivedi
Subjects: Philosophy

Articulates an imaginationist solution to the question of how purely instrumental music can be perceived by a listener as having emotional content.

Beyond Beauty

Traces the decline of beauty as an ideal from early German romanticism to the twentieth century.

Expressing the Heart's Intent

Using Li Zehou’s theories of aesthetics, argues for the importance of the arts to philosophy.

Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka, and Scientific Imagination

Explores the science and creative process behind Poe’s cosmological treatise.

Quasi-Things

An aesthetic and phenomenological account of feelings.

Brechtian Cinemas

Explores the influence of Bertolt Brecht’s ideas on the practice and study of cinema.

Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

By Glen A. Mazis
Subjects: Philosophy

Assesses Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to ethics as calling for a poetic interplay between perception and imagination, and between silence and solidarity, that reveals our place in the world, and our obligations to ourselves and others.

The Tragedy of Philosophy

Reframes philosophical understanding of, and engagement with, tragedy.

Merleau-Ponty and the Art of Perception

Philosophers and artists consider the relevance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for understanding art and aesthetic experience.

Encounters with Godard

A wide-ranging and accessible approach to Godard’s later work, and a major intervention in the study of film and ethics.

The Flesh of Images

Highlights Merleau-Ponty’s interest in film and connects it to his aesthetic theory.

Wonder

By Sophia Vasalou
Subjects: History

Synthesizes the most important recent work on wonder and brings a number of disciplines into conversation.

Social Contract, Masochist Contract

By Fayçal Falaky
Subjects: Literature

Provocative reading of the role masochism plays in structuring the aesthetics and political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

B Is for Bad Cinema

Considers films that lurk on the boundaries of acceptability in taste, style, and politics.

How to Escape

Passionate and rollicking personal and intellectual essays by philosopher Crispin Sartwell.

Redeeming Words

Probing study of how literature can redeem the revelatory, redemptive powers of language.

Dramatic Experiments

A major new interpretation of the philosophical significance of the oeuvre of Denis Diderot.

Hegel's Theory of Imagination

A comprehensive account of the role of the imagination in Hegel's philosophy.

Aesthetics of the Virtual

Reconfigures classic aesthetic concepts in relation to the novelty introduced by virtual bodies.

Enchanting

Explores how we might think and live in the enchantment of the secular, modern world.

Mimesis and Reason

Excavates the experiential structure of Habermas’s communicative action.

The Unconcept

Explores the conceptualization of the Freudian uncanny in various late-twentieth-century theoretical and critical discourses (literary studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, art history, trauma studies, architecture, etc.).

Figures of Simplicity

A fascinating comparison of the work of Heinrich von Kleist and Herman Melville.

Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Beyond of Language

Explores why American Romantic writers and contemporary continental thinkers turn to art when writing about ethics.

Mediumism

Explores the contemporary pedagogical significance of modernism.

The Medusa Effect

Examines images of horror in Victorian fiction, criticism, and philosophy.

Aesthetics of Anxiety

Places anxiety at the heart of the aesthetic experience.

Sense and Finitude

Takes Heidegger’s later thought as a point of departure for exploring the boundaries of post-conceptual thinking.

The Problem of Free Harmony in Kant's Aesthetics

A study of the first half of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

Bergson-Deleuze Encounters

Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.

Three Documentary Filmmakers

Uses new critical approaches to demonstrate deep affinities in these vastly different filmmakers’ philosophies on film, fantasy, and reality.

Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul

Explores the theme of aesthetic agency and its potential for social and political progress.

The Japanese Arts and Self-Cultivation

By Robert E. Carter
Foreword by Eliot Deutsch
Subjects: Asian Studies

Explores how spiritual values are learned and mind and body developed through the practice of the Japanese arts.

Words in Blood, Like Flowers

A philosophical exploration of the power that poetry, music, and the erotic have on us.

Epochal Discordance

Examines the German poet Hölderlin’s philosophical insights into tragedy.

Acting Beautifully

Addresses ethical and aesthetic issues in three major works by Henry James.

The Wind and the Source

Explores the role of a significant yet elusive feature of the French landscape in literature, philosophy, and art.

Between Transcendence and Historicism

Argues that the concept of the ethical is central to Hegel’s philosophy of art.

Lyrical and Ethical Subjects

A wide-ranging attempt to develop a theory of ethical life from a hermeneutic understanding of language.

Cavell on Film

Edited by William Rothman
Introduction by William Rothman
Subjects: Philosophy
Series: SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema

Stanley Cavell's most important writings on cinema, collected together for the first time in one volume.

Doing Philosophy at the Movies

Explores philosophical ideas through an examination of popular film.

Aftereffects of Knowledge in Modernity

Examines the relations among knowledge, politics, aesthetics, and individuality.

Deleuze's Wake

Focuses on Deleuze's style, his conception of the self, and his understanding of philosophy's relationship to the arts.

Chinese Aesthetics and Literature

Featuring the work of renowned scholars, this anthology provides an introduction to Chinese aesthetics and literature.

Vision's Invisibles

Examines the construction of vision in the works of Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Nancy, and Derrida.

Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought

Leading scholars relate Neoplatonism to contemporary social theory, aesthetics, and spirituality.

Hegel and Aesthetics

Leading scholars consider Hegel's philosophy of art and its contemporary significance.

Mediterranean Perspectives

Edited by Robert M. Berchman
Subjects: Philosophy

Characterize several lines of intellectual development by which some of the fundamental features of ancient, medieval, and modern pictures of God, Nature, Beauty, the State, and the Self came to be accepted as common knowledge in the Mediterranean world today.

The Kantian Subject

Argues that the importance of Kant's aesthetic theory must be understood in the context of a radical critique of subjectivity.

Adorno's Nietzschean Narratives

By Karin Bauer
Subjects: Philosophy

Investigates the intellectual affinities of Adorno and Nietzsche, culminating in a discussion of their readings of Wagner, who serves as a medium and supplement for their critiques of modern culture.

Creativity and Spirituality

Drawing from six living faiths, this book philosophically analyzes relations between art and religion in order to explain how the concepts "art," "beauty," "creativity," and "aesthetic experience" find their place or counterparts in religious discourse and experience.

Tragedy and Comedy

The first evaluation and critique of Hegel's theory of tragedy and comedy, this book also develops an original theory of both genres.

Agonistics

Focuses on a very significant psycho-cultural concept (that of "agonistics" or "contestatory creativity") with ramifications in several areas of the postmodern debate: cultural philosophy, psychologies of race, gender and the body, and narratology.

The Gift of Truth

Reexamines the good, tracing the history of the idea of truth as an ethical movement, and interpreting the good as nature's abundance, giving beauty and truth as gifts.

Postmodernism - Local Effects, Global Flows

Offers readable case studies in postmodern economics, philosophy, literary criticism, feminism, pedagogy, poetry, painting, historiography, and cultural studies, showing disorganization as characteristic of postmodern times.

The Art of Living

This is a multicultural philosophy of art applied to common American and European experience and discussed in relation to Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Native American, and African traditions.

Nietzsche's Aesthetic Turn

Focuses on Nietzsche’s later writings, where he appears unsystematic and indifferent to questions of truth.

Gods of Play

This book studies the close connections between politics, culture, art, and philosophy in seventeenth-century Europe. As an emblem of this interrelationship, the author has chosen the phenomenon of the ...

Art and Its Significance

Edited by Stephen David Ross
Subjects: Philosophy

This anthology has been significantly expanded for this edition to include a wider range of contemporary issues. The most important addition is a new section on multicultural theory, including important ...

The Poetics of the Common Knowledge

The Poetics of Common Knowledge focuses on Descartes, Hegel, Freud, and the information theorists, on the one hand, and the poets of the American avant-garde, on the other. This book is a call literally ...

Critifiction

Examines how, beginning in the 1960s up to the present, a new type of fiction was created in America, but also in Europe and Latin America, in response to the cultural, social, and political turmoil of the time.

The Garden as an Art

By Mara Miller
Subjects: Philosophy

In this book Miller challenges contemporary aesthetic theory to include gardens in an expanded definition of art. She provides a radical critique of three central tenets within current intellectual debate: ...

Philosophy and Its Others

Philosophy and its Others responds to the widespread sense that philosophy must renew its intellectual community with other significant ways of being and mind. The author articulates philosophy's community ...

The Value(s) of Literature

Discusses the ethical aspects of literature.

The Aesthetics of Excess

This book investigates the reciprocal and often transgressive relations between rhetorical figures and libidinal activity. The works of Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille, Klossowski, and Sade are reconsidered ...

Art and the Absolute

Art and the Absolute restores Hegel's aesthetics to a place of central importance in the Hegelian system. In so doing, it brings Hegel into direct relation with the central thrust of contemporary philosophy. ...

The Nature of Aesthetic Value

The Nature of Aesthetic Value proposes that aesthetic goodness, the property in virtue of which works of art are valuable, is a matter of their capacity in appropriate circumstances to give satisfaction. ...

Experience as Art

Joseph Kupfer removes aesthetics from the exclusive province of museums, concert halls, and the periphery of human interests to reveal the impact of aesthetic experience on daily living. He combines philosophical ...