Aesthetics
From Metaphysical Representations to Aesthetic Life
Reevaluates Western and Chinese philosophical traditions to question the boundaries of entrenched conceptual frameworks.
The Other Synaesthesia
Reconsiders the figure of synaesthesia, understood as the combination of the senses and of the arts, in philosophy and literature.
Life Above the Clouds
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.
Wonder Strikes
The first book-length examination of the prominent contemporary philosopher William Desmond's approach to aesthetics, art, and literature.
Cognition and Practice
Explores the aesthetic theory of one of China's most important and influential contemporary philosophers.
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.
Critique in German Philosophy
Traces a conceptual history of critique in German philosophy from the eighteenth century to the present.
The Aesthetic Clinic
Examines experimental art and literature by women alongside psychoanalysis and philosophy to develop a new understanding of sublimation and aesthetic experience.
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.
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.
Merleau-Ponty and Nishida
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.
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.
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
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
Articulates an imaginationist solution to the question of how purely instrumental music can be perceived by a listener as having emotional content.
Expressing the Heart's Intent
Using Li Zehou’s theories of aesthetics, argues for the importance of the arts to philosophy.
Beyond Beauty
Traces the decline of beauty as an ideal from early German romanticism to the twentieth century.
Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka, and Scientific Imagination
Explores the science and creative process behind Poe’s cosmological treatise.
Brechtian Cinemas
Explores the influence of Bertolt Brecht’s ideas on the practice and study of cinema.
Quasi-Things
An aesthetic and phenomenological account of feelings.
Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World
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
Synthesizes the most important recent work on wonder and brings a number of disciplines into conversation.
B Is for Bad Cinema
Considers films that lurk on the boundaries of acceptability in taste, style, and politics.
Social Contract, Masochist Contract
Provocative reading of the role masochism plays in structuring the aesthetics and political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
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.
Figures of Simplicity
A fascinating comparison of the work of Heinrich von Kleist and Herman Melville.
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.).
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.
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.
Bergson-Deleuze Encounters
Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.
The Problem of Free Harmony in Kant's Aesthetics
A study of the first half of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
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
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.
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.
Art, Origins, Otherness
Addresses the end of art and the task of metaphysics.
Vision's Invisibles
Examines the construction of vision in the works of Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Nancy, and Derrida.
Neoplatonism and Western Aesthetics
Shows how the aesthetic views of Plotinus and later Neoplatonists have played a role in the history of Western art.
Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit
Employs Derrida's critique of Hegel as the impetus for a new understanding of Hegel's concept of "spirit."
Hegel and Aesthetics
Leading scholars consider Hegel's philosophy of art and its contemporary significance.
Mediterranean Perspectives
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.
Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art
Examines the role of the sacred in art and makes a compelling case for its continued contemporary relevance.
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
Fragments of the Feminine Sublime in Friedrich Schlegel and James Joyce
Traces the early German Romantic origins of Joyce's modern and postmodern innovation of the novel.
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.
Dali and Postmodernism
Demonstrates that Dali's Surrealism anticipates postmodern tactics, and inaugurates "New Dali Studies" by offering an original interpretation of his relationship with the Surrealist canon.
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.
Stylistics
Presents a systematic theory of the artforms (symbolic, classical, and romantic), providing a way of addressing contemporary art and sketching a theory of the individual arts.
Nietzsche's Aesthetic Turn
Focuses on Nietzsche’s later writings, where he appears unsystematic and indifferent to questions of truth.
The Orphic Moment
This book examines Orpheus as a figure who bridges the experience of the Greek tribal shaman and the modern poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the father of modernism. First mentioned in 600 B.C., Orpheus was ...
The Gothic Sublime
This book reads the Gothic corpus with a thoroughly postmodern critical apparatus, pointing out that the Gothic Sublime anticipates our own doomed desire to pass beyond the hyperreal. A highly sophisticated ...
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.
Remaining in Light
This is the first sustained, critical examination of the work of Edward Hopper, a major twentieth-century American painter. It is a sequence of meditations on his painting "A Woman in the Sun." Each meditation, ...
Contextual Authority and Aesthetic Truth
This book explores the relationship between authority and context and attempts to establish the ways in which authority is a function of a particular agent or set of agents, and the degree to which it ...
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 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 ...