Philosophy: aesthetics Books

Book SynopsisNo one has been more influential in the contemporary practice of art history than Erwin Panofsky, yet many of his early seminal papers remain virtually unknown to art historians. As a result, Michael Ann Holly maintains, art historians today do not...

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Book Synopsis"Jerrold Levinson's new book, Music in the Moment, makes a major contribution to the now flourishing field of philosophy of music. He has a daring thesis about music listening that is going to shake up the experts, and pose for them, and for us all...Trade ReviewA small book, a big question. Does musical understanding require reflective, explicit awareness of large-scale musical structure? Jerrold Levinson's answer is, interestingly, no. As a recovering Schenkerian myself, I am struck by the glorious yet disconcerting heresy of this thesis.... Rarely has a new book in musical aesthetics so rattled my ideas about the actual event of listening. In music academia, any view that denies an architectonic view of how music works at even the most elemental level is practically unthinkable. Yet here it is. Brilliantly argued and cogently presented, Music in the Moment not only muddies the pond, it dashes and splashes about. It will be interesting to see who jumps on it. * British Journal of Aesthetics *Levinson's theory that musical understanding lies in entering the flow of linked musical moments is firmly and compellingly made in his Music in the Moment. This slim, taut book makes the case for its deceptively simple thesis with such clarity and gentle certainty that, at the end, it's hard to understand why anyone would think otherwise. * Washington Times *When a musically sophisticated aesthetician like Levinson feels compelled to polemicize, we do well to pay heed.... Listening is both an experience of occurrent sound and an invitation to contemplation, and such contemplation will engage a wide range of thoughts and memories.... Perhaps, then, Levinson is telling us that... we too often seem to forget that music is, first and foremost, for listening. * Journal of the American Musicological Society *Music in the Moment is a welcome addition to the... list of books in aesthetics and the philosophy of music. * Philosophical Review *Brilliant and compelling.... It is engagingly written and powerfully argued.... This very fine book amply deserves the attention it will receive from both philosophers and musicologists. * Philosophical Quarterly *The conundrum of musical understanding has always been problematic because of music's keen relationship to time: it progresses through time, and therefore does not reveal itself inherently holistically. Jerrold Levinson examines this dichotomy most effectively.... Recommended for general readers and all levels of students. * Choice *

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Book SynopsisFeagin develops a psychological model for understanding how one becomes emotionally engaged with something one knows is fictional.Trade ReviewSusan Feagan's closely and carefully argued book... represents a distinctive and significant contribution.... Valuable, thoughtful, and closely argued,... Reading with Feeling is a work that no one who is interested in the roles played by affective response in out understanding and appreciation of works of art can afford to ignore. -- Alex Neill * Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism *Rewarding.... There is much that is worthwile to ponder in this provocative book. * Philosophical Review *This important book will be a benchmark for future discussions of the topic.... The clarity of its presentation, its agreeable lightness of tone, and the carefulness and detail of its arguments make the book a model for philosophical theorizing, whether about emotions or about literature.... The importance to aesthetics of Reading with Feeling lies... in the thorough grounding it provides for the very idea of emotional response. That is no mean achievement. Philosophers of mind, as well as aestheticians, could learn much from it. -- Peter Lamarque * Mind *

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Book SynopsisMarc Redfield maintains that the literary genre of the Bildungsroman brings into sharp focus the contradictions of aesthetics, and also that aesthetics exemplifies what is called ideology. He combines a wide-ranging account of the history and theory of aesthetics with close readings of novels by Goethe, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert. For...Trade ReviewA thoughtful, complex book that integrates aesthetic philosophy, close textual readings, and literary theories, all of which eventually make a leap to talk about what we mean by culture, history, and humanity, what we do when we read or teach literature, and why the twentieth-century institutionalization of literature has generated the curious phenomenon of ‘literary theory'. -- Lorely French * European Romantic Review *

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Book SynopsisThe first systematic study of the aesthetic evaluations that scientists pass on their theories.Trade ReviewA valuable, important, persuasively argued book. Highly recommended. * Choice *This is a great book. It clearly and concisely does what it sets out to do: it examines the basic philosophical and sociological theories of the role of aesthetics in science, it identifies the critical assumptions and contradictions that differentiate these views, and it provides a carefully reasoned, well-documented and novel approach to the issues. Best of all, the book is eminently readable. Anyone interested in the bases of scientific controversies, the nature of scientific revolutions, or the similarities and differences between the sciences and the arts should definitely read McAllister's book. It may prove to be as fundamental as Thomas S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. * American Scientist *

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Book SynopsisI suggest that although at any given place and moment the aesthetic expressions of a political system just are that political system, the concepts are separable. Typically, aesthetic aspects of political systems shift in their meaning over time, or even are inverted or redeployed with an entirely transformed effect. You cannot understand politics without understanding the aesthetics of politics, but you cannot understand aesthetics as politics. The point is precisely to show the concrete nodes at which two distinct discourses coincide or connive, come apart or coalesce.from Political Aesthetics Juxtaposing and connecting the art of states and the art of art historians with vernacular or popular arts such as reggae and hip-hop, Crispin Sartwell examines the reach and claims of political aesthetics. Most analysts focus on politics as discursive systems, privileging text and reducing other forms of expression to the merely illustrative. He suggests that we need to take muTrade ReviewPolitical aesthetics, called into being by Crispin Sartwell, attends to the aestheticfeatures of political science, that is, such things as political systems, andconstitutions. Understanding politics, which is the place of power, of contestationbetween interests and interest groups, is incomplete without political aesthetics. -- T. J. Diffey * Mind *Sartwell proposes to expound and defend the bold and provocative view that although not all art is political, all politics is aesthetic.... Designed as an unconventional and unorthodox treatment of aesthetics and politics, this book is nicely written without too much jargon and enlivened by flashes of wit and insight. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Idea of Political Aesthetics1. Leni Riefenstahl Meets Charlie Chaplin: Aesthetics of the Third Reich2. Artphilosophical Themes3. Dead Kennedys and Black Flags: Artpolitics of Punk4. Prehistory of Political Aesthetics5. Red, Gold, Black, and Green: Black Nationalist Aesthetics6. Arthistorical Themes7. Political Power and Transcendental Geometry: Republican Classicism in Early AmericaConclusion: Political Styles and Aesthetic IdeologiesAppendix: Riffing on Political Aesthetics: Suggestions for Case Studies and ResearchReferences Index

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Book SynopsisToday, in the era of the spoiler alert, surprise in fiction is primarily associated with an unexpected plot twist, but in earlier usage, the word had darker and more complex meanings. Originally denoting a military ambush or physical assault, surprise went through a major semantic shift in the eighteenth century: from violent attack to pleasurable experience, and from external event to internal feeling. In Surprise, Christopher R. Miller studies that change as it took shape in literature ranging from Paradise Lost through the novels of Jane Austen. Miller argues that writers of the period exploited and arbitrated the dual nature of surprise in its sinister and benign forms. Even as surprise came to be associated with pleasure, it continued to be perceived as a problem: a sign of ignorance or naïveté, an uncontrollable reflex, a paralysis of rationality, and an experience of mere novelty or diversion for its own sake. In close readings of exemplary scenesparticularly thTrade ReviewThis study of surprise, providing new perspectives on familiar and much-discussed literary works of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century England, supplies abundant pleasant surprises of its own. Its complicated history of a commonplace word and of the concepts it engages powerfully supports Christopher Miller's investigation into the emotional life of poetry and fiction.Surprise instructs, delights, and provokes further thought. It is an important achievement.... To think about how the claims ofSurprise might expand provides a way to acknowledge the book's importance. Its intricate argument, revealing a subtle and capacious intelligence, illuminates all it touches. -- Patricia Meyer Spacks * Review 19 *Surprise is a refreshing, thoughtful study that offers insight into the aesthetics of surprise as it developed and changed over the course of the long eighteenth century. Miller's significant text will surely be referenced for many years to come. Those interested in the relationship between aesthetic discourse and the fiction of the period are strongly encouraged to read this important work. -- Joel T. Terranova, University of Louisiana * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *By the end of this book, one is amazed, astonished, thunder-struck, by the long hiostory of this emotiona's centrality to our understanding of psychological experience and the experience of literature. -- Adela Pinch * Modern Philology (114.4) *Placing Austen in the context of a longer literary tradition, Christopher Miller's book, Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen, very clearly defines an area that has until now been overlooked by the affective turn in history and literary criticism. Miller's approach consistently sheds new light on canonical texts, occasionally supplementing more oblique examples with more readily apparent instances from lesser-known contemporary works. An engaging and very wide-ranging study, Surprise takes into account not only the kinds of experiences that might be thought surprising in various historical and literary contexts, but also the struggles of writers to depict their characters' surprise and to surprise their readers. It offers new ways of reading... while it sheds new light on texts that we might have thought incapable of surprising us still. -- Olivia Murphy * European Romantic Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction1. From Aristotle to Emotion Theory2. Being and Feeling: The Surprise Attacks of Paradise Lost3. The Accidental Doctor: Physics and Metaphysics in Robinson Crusoe4. The Purification of Surprise in Pamela5. Fielding's Statues of Surprize6. Northanger Abbey and Gothic Perception: Austen’s Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise7. Wordsworthian Shocks, Gentle and Otherwise8. "Fine Suddenness": Keats’s Sense of a BeginningEpilogue Notes Index

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Book SynopsisElliott Schreiber explores Karl Philipp Moritz's many contributions to the intellectual evolution of the Enlightenment and positions the German thinker as an incisive early observer and theorist of modernity.Trade ReviewSchreiber makes a compelling case that spatial metaphors inform Moritz's understanding of a series of institutions that are each caught up in processes of transformation in the late eighteenth century, and he makes an eloquent case for the modernity of Moritz's thought in these areas. This will prove to be an indispensable book, not just to students of Moritz, but more generally to students of the German eighteenth century, the Age of Goethe, and the European Enlightenment. * The German Quarterly *Karl Philipp Mortiz's peculiar life story, his writing's apparent lack of systematicity, as well as the difficulty to categorize his work all contributed to the relative neglect (especially in the U.S.) of this important eighteenth-century thinker who made major contributions to the eighteenth-century knowledge base. Elliot Schreiber['s] erudite study offers the long-needed response to this neglect. It establishes Moritz as a central voice of Enlightenment who offers a distinctive (and skeptical) perspective on major tenets of his era and across various fields: aesthetics, pedagogy, pyschology, and political theory. * Lessing Yearbook *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Shifting PerspectivesPart I. The Spaces of Art and Myth1. Toward an Aesthetics of the Sublime Augenblick: Moritz Reading Die Leiden des jungen Werthers2. Beyond an Aesthetics of Containment: Trajectories of the Imagination in Moritz and GoethePart II. The Spaces of Cognition and Education3. Laying the Foundation for Independent Thought: Enlightenment Epistemology and Pedagogy4. Thinking inside the Box: Moritz contra PhilanthropismPart III. The Spaces of the Political and the Individual5. Raising (and Razing) the Common House: Moritz and the Ideology of Commonality6. Pressing Matters: Moritz's Models of the Self in the Magazin zur ErfahrungsseelenkundeConclusion: Moritz's Inner-Worldly Critique of ModernityBibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIn order to promote new ways of thinking about musical meaning, this volume brings together scholars in music theory, musicology, and the philosophy of music, disciplines generally treated as separate and distinct. This interdisciplinary collaboration, while respecting differences in perspective, identifies and elaborates shared concerns.This volume focuses on the many and various kinds of meaning in music. Do musical meanings exist exclusively in internal, formal musical relations or might they also be found in the relationship between music and other areas of experience, such as action, emotion, ideas, and values? Also discussed is the vexed question why people listen to and apparently enjoy music which expresses unpleasant emotions, such as melancholy or despair. Among the particular pieces the writers discuss are Mahler''s Ninth Symphony, Shostakovich''s Tenth Symphony, and Schubert''s last sonata. More broadly, they consider the relation of musical meaning and interpretaTrade ReviewReading this book is a satisfying experience since it gives one the impression that progress is being made in the philosophy of music.... Scholars working in the philosophy of music will want to have a copy for ease of reference.... Libraries supporting research on aesthetics will need a copy. * The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism *This collection can be enthusiastically recommended to philosophers who want to hear some of the latest news from musicology. * British Journal of Aesthetics *This excellent collection... is a humanistically rich, argumentatively subtle, and music-analytically accomplished volume, engendering a fuller awareness of the conceptual legacy of the Wagner-Hanslick debate that would place formal analysis in polemical opposition to narrative and emotive content, and taking a great stride towards overcoming that pernicious dichotomy. The book well deserves an enthusiastic recommendation to everyone desiring a fuller comprehension of the complexities of musical experience. * Philosophy in Review *

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Book SynopsisIn his new concluding chapter, Peter Kivy advances his argument on behalf of a distinctive intellectual and musical character of opera before Mozart. He proposes that happy endings were a musical—as opposed to a dramatic—necessity for opera during...Trade ReviewKivy is simply the best philosopher writing about music today.... Here he studies the special problem of opera, how it became both a dramatic and a musical art, and what its underlying aesthetic principles are. He traces opera's philosophical foundations from the imitation theories of Plato and Aristotle, to the representation theory of the Italian Camerata, the mechanistic psychology of Descartes, the doctrine of affektenlehre, and the associationist psychology of the British Enlightenment.... Kivy's writing is honest, insightful, careful, and witty.... There is meat here for philosophers, musicians, music theorists, historians, and social critics. * Choice *Kivy provides close philosophical analysis of texts that underpin the origins of Western European opera and... relates seventeenth and eighteenth-century operatic practice to the philosophical and psychological theories of the times.... In a long and generally excellent discussion Kivy takes as his target those writers... who attempt to deduce a composer's psycho-biography from other librettos he chooses to set.... Kivy's book has a certain acumen and charm. * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisThe first systematic study of the aesthetic evaluations that scientists pass on their theories.Trade ReviewA valuable, important, persuasively argued book. Highly recommended. * Choice *This is a great book. It clearly and concisely does what it sets out to do: it examines the basic philosophical and sociological theories of the role of aesthetics in science, it identifies the critical assumptions and contradictions that differentiate these views, and it provides a carefully reasoned, well-documented and novel approach to the issues. Best of all, the book is eminently readable. Anyone interested in the bases of scientific controversies, the nature of scientific revolutions, or the similarities and differences between the sciences and the arts should definitely read McAllister's book. It may prove to be as fundamental as Thomas S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. * American Scientist *

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Book SynopsisThis bold and persuasive study rereads the works of Hannah Arendt to recuperate her relevance to contemporary politics and to show that her deepest concerns are oriented by her ontology. Kimberley Curtis interprets Arendt's earlier work through the...Trade ReviewCurtis is particularly good in her analysis of Arendt's writing on the relation between thinking and plurality; on the duality of the thinking self in its encounter both with itself and with the material world. -- Norma Claire Moruzzi, University of Illinois at Chicago * International Studies in Philosophy *Curtis's book is not easy reading, but the argument is fascinating and very much in the spirit of Arendt's thinking. * Ethics *In this excellent study, Curtis tries to reconcile the 'consensual-communicative' and 'agonistic-performative' interpretations of Arendt while exploring the ethical side of her theory. Curtis argues that our foremost moral duty, for Arendt, is to recognize and preserve 'plurality.' * Choice *

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Book SynopsisA paradox of surface and depth pervades the field of aesthetics. How can art''s surface meanings and qualities be properly appreciated without understanding the cultural context that shapes their creation and perception? But exploring such underlying cultural conditions challenges the perception of thosequalities and meanings of aesthetic surface that constitute the captivating power of art. If aesthetics deals with both surface and depth, impassioned immediacy yet also critical distance of judgment, how can this doubleness be held together in one philosophical vision?In his new book, Richard Shusterman explores the dialectics of surface and depth by examining key issues in the philosophy of art and culturefrom the logic of interpretation and evaluation to the roots of taste and convention, from the meanings of aesthetic purity and immediacy to the role of nature, theory, and history in our experience and understanding of art. In treating these topics, Shusterman combines the methodTrade ReviewIn Shusterman's discourse, instrumentalities are always parts of the ends they create. His pragmatism is therefore best described as reconstructive, advancing and refashioning the experiential realm.... This is pragmatism at its best, and what this discursive mode accomplishes is a deeper understanding that in turn... leads to better experiences and end results.... The beauty of this methodology is that it intelligent avoids the danger of a naive pragmatism... that is all surface manifesto for action, while it also avoids the danger of a pragmatism that locks itself into deep abstract theory with no sense of how it gets redirected toward practice and experience. Because Surface and Depth manages to do this with such élan and perspicacity, I situate it among the best, most interesting, and thought-provoking philosophical kind of work currently taking place. -- Gustavo Guerra, George Washington University * Journal of Speculative Philosophy *Philosophy texts are not the usual fare on our book review menu. This reviewer now feels that we might wish to broaden our diet. In Shusterman's book we find that rare example of a theoretical text that is palatable, even enjoyable for the non-philosopher reader. But best of all, by constructing a new ground for criticism he provides cogent underpinnings for our studies in vernacular architecture. -- Bryon E. Bronston * Vernacular Architecture Newsletter *Those familiar with Shusterman's work will find here the critical insight, careful argument, and clever prose they expect. Those who have not before had the pleasure of reading him will find there is no one better at distilling and analyzing contemporary aesthetics: the chapters on Croce, Wittgenstein, Alain Locke, T. S. Eliot, and Bourdieu are exempla of analytic sensitivity combined with the principle of charity.... Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above. * Choice *Surface and Depth is an excellent text, combining lucidity and keen analytical thinking with an ability to challenge preconceptions, to make surprising connections and to open up new avenues of enquiry. I would encourage anyone interested in aesthetics, arts criticism, cultural theory and philosophy to read this book and to enter into a richly rewarding engagement with a stimulating and lively mind. -- John Danvers, University of Plymouth, UK * Consciousness, Literature and the Arts *

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Book SynopsisKorsmeyer explains how taste came to occupy so low a place in the hierarchy of senses and why it is deserving of greater philosophical respect and attention.Trade ReviewA book about how the divergent histories of taste and Taste have left us with an impoverished understanding of the former—and thus a deep skepticism about the aesthetic worth of food. Carolyn Korsmeyer suggests that her project will illuminate readers' understanding of food—and observes that it might well illuminate our understanding of art as well. She succeeds on both counts. * Hypatia *Anyone who critiques philosophy's 'venerable preoccupation with the 'mind' over the 'body' and 'matters of universal concern over particular experiences,' should read this book for the approach Korsmeyer uses to make her argument. Personally, I would add that anyone who thinks, who thinks about eating or drinking, who who even eats or drinks, should read it, too. * Leonardo *In this thoroughly researched, well-organized, tightly argued, clearly-written, and stylistic book, Carolyn Korsmeyer has presented enough food for thought to keep all but the most jaded aestheticians engaged for many happy hours. * Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism *It is to Korsmeyer's credit... that she has presented so strong a version of a philosophy of interpretation and shown how well it can be applied to food. As she insightfully establishes, philosophical tradition has not been able to find a place for gustatory taste within its framework, and it is a virtue of Korsmeyer's eloquent little study that she establishes a strong possibility for a cognitively rich philosophy of food. * Gastronomica *Of the five senses, two—sight and hearing—were higher and lent themselves to aesthetic perception, while the remaining three—touch, taste and smell—were lower and non-aesthetic senses. Korsmeyer, in this sensitive and judicious book, explores and exposes the errors misinforming this conventional ranking.... This is an illuminating book. * British Journal of Aesthetics *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1: The Hierarchy of the Senses Chapter 2: Philosophies of Taste: Aesthetic and Nonasethetic Senses Chapter 3: The Science of Taste Chapter 4: The Meaning of Taste and the Taste of Meaning Chapter 5: The Visual Appetite: Representing Taste and Food Chapter 6: Narratives of Eating Index

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Book SynopsisNo one has been more influential in the contemporary practice of art history than Erwin Panofsky, yet many of his early seminal papers remain virtually unknown to art historians. As a result, Michael Ann Holly maintains, art historians today do not...

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Book SynopsisThe various lenses—ethical, political, sexual, religious, andso forth—through which we may view art are often instrumental ingiving us an appreciation of the work.

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Book SynopsisA collection of four essays on aesthetic, ethical, and political issues by Dieter Henrich, the preeminent Kant scholar in Germany today.Trade Review"Henrich is one of today's leading scholars on classical German philosophy. A striking feature of his work is the combination of historical scholarship with deep concern about intellectual and ethical relevance of authors like Kant, Fichte, or Hegel. . . . The essays are clearly written and well translated. . . . Their scholarly mastery will be appreciated by students of Kant and German idealism." -- ChoiceTable of ContentsContents 1. 2. II 3. 4.

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Book SynopsisThis book offers an overview and critique of the conventions surrounding artistic creativity and intellectual endeavor which began with the decline of feudalism in the church.Trade Review"A rare achievement in an age when critical endeavor is still being consumed by theoretically and historically driven polemics. . . . Sussman's The Aesthetic Contract does us a great service by demonstrating the significant level to which critical understanding can rise when it does not reliquish historical specificity in the name of textal astuteness but, through this conbination, seeks to uncover what our more limited modernities have refused to think. In this respect, [the book] makes an extremely strong and convincing argument for the pervasive operation of the aesthetic as both an historically and theoretically significant category."An extremely important work of criticism and historical synthesis. [Sussman's] deepest motivation is not just to get the story straight about Western culture since the sixteenth century, but to explain to himself and to his readers how we got to be the way we are today." -- J. Hillis Miller,University of California * Irvine *Table of ContentsIntroduction: criticism and cartography; Part I. The Emergence of the Artist as Priest in a Secular Art Religion: 1. Portraits of modernity; 2. Framing modernity: Protestant and critical reformations; 3. The knowledge of modernity: tragedy and empiricism; 4. Melancholic borders: from Trauerspiel to 'Michael Kohlhaas'; 5. Kant and the anointment of the modern artist; Part II. Untimely Propositions on the Contracting of Art in Modernity: 6. Corollaries to the aesthetic contract; 7. Maxima moralia: millennial fragments on the public and private dimensions of language; Part III. The World at Large: Systematic Expansionism on the Threshold of Modernity's Realization: 8. From social to aesthetic contract; 9. Between sublimities: Melville, Whaling, and the melodrama of incest; Conclusion: parting shots: final portraits; Notes; Index.

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Book SynopsisPhilosopher, literary critic, translator, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is one of the leading intellectual figures in France. This volume of six essays deals with the relation between philosophy and aesthetics, particularly the role of mimesis in a metaphysics of representation.Trade Review"Typography is a book whose importance has not diminished since its first publication in 1979. The points it makes, the way it approaches the questions of mimesis, fictionality, and figurality, is unique. There are no comparable books, or books that could supersede it." —Rodolphe Gasché, SUNY, BuffaloTable of ContentsIntroduction: Desistance Jacques Derrida 1. Typography 2. The echo of the subject 3. The Caesura of the speculative 4. Holderlin and the Greeks 5. Diderot: paradox and mimesis 6. Transcendence ends in politics Index.

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Book SynopsisThis is a broad-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink aesthetic and literary studies in terms of an "anthropology" of symbolic media generally.

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Book SynopsisThis book explores the uncanny, traumatic weaving together of the living and the dead in art, and the morbid fascination it holds for modern philosophical aesthetics. Beginning with Kant, the author traces how aesthetic theory has been drawn back repeatedly to the moving power of the undead body of the work of art.

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Book SynopsisAt his death in 1992, the eminent philosopher, critic, and theorist Louis Marin left, in addition to a dozen influential books (including Sublime Poussin, Stanford, 1999), a corpus of some three hundred articles and essays published in journals and anthologies. A collection of twenty-two essays that appeared between 1971 and 1992, this book interrogates the theory and practice of representation as it is carried out by both linguistic and graphic signs, and thus the complex relation between language and image, between perception and conception.The essays are grouped in four parts that reflect the continuity and coherence of Marin''s interests in semiology, narrative, visuality, and painting. The interdisciplinary horizon of the book draws on multiple scholarly resourcesthe cultural history of the seventeenth century, the philosophy of language, the tools of discourse analysis, the history of art and aesthetics, the analysis of receptionto address a stunning diversity of

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Book SynopsisAt his death in 1992, the eminent philosopher, critic, and theorist Louis Marin left, in addition to a dozen influential books (including Sublime Poussin, Stanford, 1999), a corpus of some three hundred articles and essays published in journals and anthologies. A collection of twenty-two essays that appeared between 1971 and 1992, this book interrogates the theory and practice of representation as it is carried out by both linguistic and graphic signs, and thus the complex relation between language and image, between perception and conception.The essays are grouped in four parts that reflect the continuity and coherence of Marin''s interests in semiology, narrative, visuality, and painting. The interdisciplinary horizon of the book draws on multiple scholarly resourcesthe cultural history of the seventeenth century, the philosophy of language, the tools of discourse analysis, the history of art and aesthetics, the analysis of receptionto address a stunning diversity of

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Book SynopsisThis book proposes that aesthetics begin not with concepts of being or semblance, but with a concept of appearing. Appearing bespeaks of the reality that all aesthetic objects share, however different they may otherwise be. For Martin Seel, appearing plays its part everywhere in the aesthetic realm, in all aesthetic activity.In his book, Seel examines the existential and cultural meaning of aesthetic experience. In doing so, he brings aesthetics and philosophy of art together again, which in continental as well as analytical thinking have been more and more separated in the recent decades. Within Seel''s framework, to apprehend things and events with respect to how they appear momentarily and simultaneously to our senses represents a genuine way for human beings to encounter the world. The consciousness that emerges here is an anthropologically central faculty. In perceiving the unfathomable particularity of a sensuously given we gain insight into the indTrade Review"...the broad vision and range of aesthetic topics addressed on a persistently high level deserves not only attention but respect...The fact that the book is also a joy to read makes it even more refreshing." —Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative LiteratureTable of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc4:Preface @toc2:I.A Rough History of Modern Aesthetics @toc3:1.Eight Short Stories @toc3a:Baumgarten Kant Hegel Schopenhauer Nietzsche Valery Heidegger Adorno @toc3:2.Aesthetics as Part of Philosophy @toc2:II.Aesthetics of Appearing @toc3a:Time for the Moment A Situation of Perception The Basic Distinction The Course of Things @toc3:1.What Is Appearing @toc3a:Kinds of Perception Phenomenal Individuality Synaesthesia Recalling Presence Everything, at All Times A Minimal Concept @toc3:2.Being-so and Appearing @toc3a:A Definition Objects of Perception Appearance Appearing Logical and Phenomenal Order Limits of Knowledge Indeterminacy A Different Execution of Perception Event Objects @toc3:3.Appearing and Semblance @toc3a:Two Concepts, Two Steps Deceptive or Supportive Semblance James Turrell: Slow Dissolve Semblance Is Real Not Everything Is Semblance @toc3:4.Appearing and Imagination @toc3a:Imagination Objects of Sensuous Consciousness Aesthetic Imagination Imagination and Semblance An Asymmetry Objects of Imagination Imagination, Interpretation, Reflection Facultative and Constitutive Objects of Imagination A Primacy of Perception @toc3:5.Situations of Appearing @toc3a:Interim Results Three Dimensions Mere Appearing Atmospheric Appearing Artistic Appearing Presences Modes of Acquaintance Aesthetic Consciousness @toc3:6.Constellations of Art @toc3a:The Material and Medium of the Arts Constellational Presentation Valery's and Chandler's Sentence Levels of Sensuousness Danto's Objection Art as Idea as Idea Vertical Earth Kilometer Movements in Literature The Body of Texts The Father of the Thought @toc3:7.A Play for Presence @toc2:III.Flickering and Resonating: Borderline Experiences Outside and Inside Art 000 @toc3a:Kant Nietzsche Transcendence and Immanence Rauschen and Rausch Mere Versus Artistic Resonating An Occurrence Without Something Occurring Formless Reality An Enduring Passing Away Formed Formlessness Some Genres Christoph Marthaler's Faust Being and Revealing Energies of the Artwork Cinematic Resonating The Children of the Dead Elfriede Jelinek's Language A Limit Case of Consciousness @toc2:IV.Thirteen Statements on the Picture 000 @toc3a:Pictures Are Presentations Pictorial Signs Are Not (Just) Symptoms Pictures Are Compact Signs Subsidiary Forms of the Picture The Self-Referentiality of Art Pictures All Pictures Present; Most Pictures Represent Representation and Similarity Pictures Are Sign Events The Phenomenological and the Semiotic Theory of the Picture Three Basic Instances of Seeing Cyberspace Is Not Pictorial Space Film, a Virtual Movement Space Picture and Reality @toc2:V.Variations on Art and Violence 000 @toc4:Notes 000 Bibliography 000

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Book SynopsisReadings of Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger trace the role that the discourse on the end of art has played in post-Hegelian philosophical aesthetics.Trade Review"Geulen's book succeeds in bringing new significance, renewed continuity, and robust meaning to a large portion of this endlessly productive tradition."—xNotre Dame Philosophical ReviewsTable of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc2:1 Introduction: The End in the Meantime 000 2 Hegel without End 000 3 Nietzsche's Backward Motion 000 4 Counter Play: Benjamin 000 5 Endgame: Adorno 000 6 The Same End and the Other Beginning: Heidegger 000 7 That Mysterious Yearning toward the Chasm 000

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Book SynopsisThe Shape of Revelation explores the overlap between revelation and aesthetic form from the perspective of Judaism. It does so by setting the Jewish philosophy of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig alongside its immediate visual environment in the aesthetics of early German modernism, most notably alongside the spiritual in art as it appears in the art and art theories of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Franz Marc. The modern shape of revelationand the spiritual in art that emerges from this conversationbuilds upon a vocabulary of form-creation, sheer presence, lyric pathos, rhythmic repetition, open spatial dynamism, and erotic pulse that was unique to Germany in the first quarter of the twentieth century. This study works to identify and critically assess the sensual root that is brought to bear upon the modern image of revelation and the spiritual in art.Trade Review"This material is fascinating and largely unnoticed by recent interpreters of modern Jewish thought... The book is about beauty and itself is beautiful." -- Newsletter of the Central Conference of American Rabbis"In his new book, [Braiterman] brilliantly traces the parallels between modern Jewish religious thought as epitomized by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, and contemporaneous trends in visual art as exemplified by Kandinsky, Klee, and Franz Marc... In short, an impressive achievement." -- Jewish Book World"This learned and challenging academic study offers a poetic, timely call for shifting the Jewish communal focus from policies based on corporate strategy toward a debate on Jewish mission and meaning, in which text, tradition, and modernity combine." -- Ha'aretz"Braiterman has created a fascinating, brilliant, and valuable new reading of Buber and Rosenzweig by reinserting the two Jewish thinkers into their context in German culture. He shows their work has profound confluences and parallels with that culture, especially with modernist painters such as Klee and Kandinksy. With The Shape of Revelation, Jewish thought regains the specific aesthetics of German modernism, and modernist aesthetics regains its theological/spiritual dimension." -- Robert Gibbs * University of Toronto *Table of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments iii Abbreviations iii Preface: Revelation and the Spiritual in Art iii @toc2:Introduction 1 1 Form 000 2 Abstraction 000 3 Pathos 000 4 Time 000 5 Space 000 6 Eros 000 Epilogue: Mutations 000 @toc4:Notes 000 Index 000

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Book SynopsisIn this book, Gerhard Richter explores the aesthetic and political ramifications of the literary genre of the Denkbild, or thought-image, as it was employed by four major German-Jewish writers and philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer. The Denkbild is a poetic mode of writing, a brief snapshot-in-prose that stages the interrelation of literary, philosophical, political, and cultural insights. Richter''s careful analysis of the linguistic characteristics of this mode of writing sheds new light on pivotal concerns of modernity, including the fractured cityscape, philosophical problems of modern music, the experience of exiled homelessness, and the disaster of Auschwitz. Thought-Images not only reorients our understanding of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in important ways but also establishes significant links between these writers and contemporary French thinkers sTrade Review"Richter's truly fresh look at the Frankfurt School writers through the genre of the philosophical miniature of the Denkbild is a stroke of genius. Richter demonstrates how the Denkbild was both a manifestation of a particular shared conception of aesthetics and a genre with which to expand this conception. The book's major accomplishment is to establish a significant connection between the work of the Frankfurt School and contemporary French thinkers, in particular, Deleuze and Derrida." -- Rodolphe Gasché * SUNY Buffalo, author of The Honor of Thinking(Stanford, 2007) *"Masters of the philosophical miniature, Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, and Kracauer were able to shine light through the smallest cracks in the facade of an increasingly opaque world. Building on their legacy, Gerhard Richter reveals himself to be no less adept at fashioning illuminating thought-images of his own. This collection of scintillating essays is a welcome addition to the ongoing and still lively reception of Frankfurt School ideas." -- Martin Jay * University of California at Berkeley *

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Book SynopsisIn this book, Gerhard Richter explores the aesthetic and political ramifications of the literary genre of the Denkbild, or thought-image, as it was employed by four major German-Jewish writers and philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer. The Denkbild is a poetic mode of writing, a brief snapshot-in-prose that stages the interrelation of literary, philosophical, political, and cultural insights. Richter''s careful analysis of the linguistic characteristics of this mode of writing sheds new light on pivotal concerns of modernity, including the fractured cityscape, philosophical problems of modern music, the experience of exiled homelessness, and the disaster of Auschwitz. Thought-Images not only reorients our understanding of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in important ways but also establishes significant links between these writers and contemporary French thinkers sTrade Review"Richter's truly fresh look at the Frankfurt School writers through the genre of the philosophical miniature of the Denkbild is a stroke of genius. Richter demonstrates how the Denkbild was both a manifestation of a particular shared conception of aesthetics and a genre with which to expand this conception. The book's major accomplishment is to establish a significant connection between the work of the Frankfurt School and contemporary French thinkers, in particular, Deleuze and Derrida."—Rodolphe Gasché, SUNY Buffalo, author of The Honor of Thinking(Stanford, 2007)"Masters of the philosophical miniature, Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, and Kracauer were able to shine light through the smallest cracks in the facade of an increasingly opaque world. Building on their legacy, Gerhard Richter reveals himself to be no less adept at fashioning illuminating thought-images of his own. This collection of scintillating essays is a welcome addition to the ongoing and still lively reception of Frankfurt School ideas." —Martin Jay, University of California at Berkeley

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Book SynopsisIn The Arts and the Definition of the Human, Margolis introduces a novel theory of the human person or self as a historical artifact and argues that important topics in the philosophy of art, pictorial representation, and the nature of interpretation make no sense when separated from a "philosophical anthropology" along the lines he suggests.Trade Review"Margolis is in the unique position of knowing both contemporary continental and analytical philosophy, and one of the great merits of this book is its creative bridging of the two. The Arts and the Definition of the Human is a signal work of very high accomplishment that crowns the career of a distinguished philosopher justly celebrated for his many substantial contributions to the philosophy of art and to many other philosophical domains." -- Edward S. Casey"In search of the distinctively human as a key to understanding language, culture, history, agency, creativity and responsibility, Margolis rejects the oppositions that have shaped discourse about these central philosophical topics since the time of the pre-Socratics. Breathtaking in its panoramic sweep of the Western tradition, admirably informed about the ideological dimensions of classical and contemporary aesthetics, Margolis's rethinking of basic issues in the intersection between knowledge, imagination, and art in all its expressive manifestations is certain to spark vitally innovative discussions as it carries forward ongoing disputes in important new directions." -- Dale Jacquette, University of Bern * Switzerland *Table of ContentsContents Preface xxx Prologue The Definition of the Human 000 1 Perceiving Paintings as Paintings I 000 2 Perceiving Paintings as Paintings II 000 3 "One and Only One Correct Interpretation" 000 4 Toward a Phenomenology of Painting and Literature 000 5 "Seeing-in," "Make-believe," Transfiguration": The Perception of Pictorial Representation 000 Epilogue Beauty and Truth and the Passing of Transcendental Philosophy 000 Notes 000 Index 000

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Book SynopsisRediscovering Aesthetics brings together prominent international voices from art history, philosophy and artistic practice who reflect on current notions, functions, and applications of aesthetics in their distinctive fields.Trade Review"Rediscovering Aesthetics is an impressive collection that lives up to the mission outlined in its subtitle...this book is to be highly recommended to both experts and merely curious readers."—Vladimir D. Thomas, Philosophy in Review"Rediscovering Aesthetics collects the essays of a number of the most distinguished and articulate intellectuals and artists of our day, all of whom have original and challenging things to say about important issues. This powerful book, which focuses mostly on the visual arts, has ramifications for the reconsideration of the aesthetic in many different areas of artistic practice."—Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley"Rediscovering Aesthetics is a valuable contribution that begins with the premise that recent developments in art history and practice have engendered a recovery of the place and role of aesthetics. It refreshingly dispenses with questions of aesthetics' origins and instead inserts itself in the midst of modern histories of art."—Tom Huhn, School of Visual ArtsTable of Contents@fmh1: Contents @toc4: List of Contributors @toc4: (Re)Discovering Aesthetics: An Introduction @toc1: I. Aesthetics in Art History and Art Theory @toc2: 1. Kunstwissenschaft versus Asthetik: The Historians' Revolt Against Aesthetics @tocca: Richard Woodfield @toc2: 2. Aesthetics and the Two Cultures: Why Art and Science Should Be Allowed to Go Their Separate Ways @tocca: James Elkins @toc2: 3. Stones of Solace @tocca: Michael Ann Holly @toc2: 4. The Dogma of Conviction @tocca: David Raskin @toc2: 5. Sensation in the Wild: On Not Naming Newman, Judd, Riley, and Serra @tocca: Richard Shiff @toc2: 6. Kant's "Free-Play" in the Light of Minimal Art @tocca: Thierry de Duve @toc1: II. Aesthetics in Philosophy @toc2: 7. The Future of Aesthetics @tocca: Arthur C. Danto @toc2: 8. Retrieving Kant's Aesthetics for Art Theory After Greenberg @tocca: Diarmuid Costello @toc2: 9. Artistic Creativity: Illusions, Realities, Futures @tocca: Paul Crowther @toc2: 10. Gadamer and the Ambiguity of Appearance @tocca: Nicholas Davey @toc2: 11. Modernisms and Mediations @tocca: Peter Osborne @toc2: 12. Aesthetics Beyond Aesthetics @tocca: Wolfgang Welsch @toc2: 13. Intuition and Concrete Particularity in Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic @tocca: Adrian Piper @toc1: III. Aesthetics in Artistic and Curatorial Practice @toc2: 14. Seasonal Fractional Political Idiosyncratic Aesthetics @tocca: Carolee Schneemann @toc2: 15. Toward an Ophthalmology of the Aesthetic and an Orthopedics of Seeing @tocca: Robert Morris @toc2: 16. The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents @tocca: Claire Bishop @toc2: 17. The Richter Effect on the Regeneration of Aesthetics @tocca: Michael Kelly @toc4: Notes @toc4: Index

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Book SynopsisWatson investigates the responses of of key twentieth-century philosophers to the work of artist Paul Klee and reveals how the art and philosophy mutually illuminate each other through these encounters.Trade Review"This is a great book. It provides a new understanding of familiar, but not really well known, material by showing not only how Klee's influence on many figures is 'philosophically significant,' but also how the philosophical interpretations of Klee have laid out an intertwined history or tradition. Each page of this book demonstrates Watson's long engagement with phenomenology, the Frankfurt School, and art theory. He is trying to transform the very concept of phenomenology, and he does this quite successfully." -- Leonard Lawlor * Penn State University *"Watson's "Crescent Moon Over the Rational" is an impressive book, contributing a great deal to the discussion of art and aesthetics in the 20th century. It presents the work of Paul Klee in an innovative and persuasive configuration: each chapter develops a tapestry of quotations and situates Klee and his interlocutors in the context of a broader philosophical and aesthetic reflection on art, rationality, and the sensuous in modernity." -- Krzysztof Ziarek * SUNY Buffalo *

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Book SynopsisThe book is a comprehensive phenomenological study of meanings that are unique to the major visual art forms.Trade Review"This is perhaps the most systematic phenomenological theory of the visual arts ever written. A book of philosophic meditation that makes direct contact with art history and art criticism, it will be the center of discussion and controversy by a very wide range of contemporary art historians, critics, artists, and theorists." -- James Elkins"Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) speaks to the present moment of speculation about visual art, both by the critique of currently prominent art theories and by giving a convincing new theory that is at once more generous and more nuanced than previous efforts. Highly original and yet confirmatory of virtually every experience of art, this book is a singular contribution to contemporary theory of the visual arts." —Edward S. Casey, SUNY at Stony Brook"This book should interest a variety of scholars with a theoretical interest in the visual arts. The book addresses pictures, sculpture, abstract art conceptual art, photography, digital art, and architecture... Recommended" * J. O. Young Choice. *

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Book SynopsisThe book is a comprehensive phenomenological study of meanings that are unique to the major visual art forms.Trade Review"This is perhaps the most systematic phenomenological theory of the visual arts ever written. A book of philosophic meditation that makes direct contact with art history and art criticism, it will be the center of discussion and controversy by a very wide range of contemporary art historians, critics, artists, and theorists." -- James Elkins"Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) speaks to the present moment of speculation about visual art, both by the critique of currently prominent art theories and by giving a convincing new theory that is at once more generous and more nuanced than previous efforts. Highly original and yet confirmatory of virtually every experience of art, this book is a singular contribution to contemporary theory of the visual arts." —Edward S. Casey, SUNY at Stony Brook"This book should interest a variety of scholars with a theoretical interest in the visual arts. The book addresses pictures, sculpture, abstract art conceptual art, photography, digital art, and architecture... Recommended" * J. O. Young Choice. *

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Weigel (director, Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin) offers a meticulous exploration of the German writer Walter Benjamin's take on creaturely existence, law, sovereignty, secularization and holiness, language, and art."—M. V. Marder, CHOICE"Weigel's readings, which are steeped in philological detail and hermeneutic insight, brilliantly exhibit the stakes involved in approaching Benjamin's work anew. Her impeccable sense for intertextual trajectories coupled with broad erudition not only results in sophisticated exegeses, but also amply demonstrate the continued if not urgent relevance of Benjamin's interventions for our current intellectual and cultural concerns."—John T. Hamilton, Harvard University

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Weigel (director, Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin) offers a meticulous exploration of the German writer Walter Benjamin's take on creaturely existence, law, sovereignty, secularization and holiness, language, and art."—M. V. Marder, CHOICE"Weigel's readings, which are steeped in philological detail and hermeneutic insight, brilliantly exhibit the stakes involved in approaching Benjamin's work anew. Her impeccable sense for intertextual trajectories coupled with broad erudition not only results in sophisticated exegeses, but also amply demonstrate the continued if not urgent relevance of Benjamin's interventions for our current intellectual and cultural concerns."—John T. Hamilton, Harvard University

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Book SynopsisA radical reassessment of the art and writings of Wassily Kandinsky, this book contests the traditional understanding that he was motivated by mystical concerns and sees his work instead as an extended philosophical "conversation" on the nature of art with German philosopher Hegel, and the Kandinsky's own nephew, philosopher and Hegel scholar, Alexandre Kojève.Trade Review"Like most readers, I have always understood Kandinsky's position as an expressionist-romantic one (that conceives of the picture as a portrait of the artist's inner self). Florman cogently demonstrates that we have had it all wrong and that Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art is directly and profoundly indebted to the philosophy of Hegel. To my knowledge, this is the first book entirely dedicated to one of the most important art treatises of the 20th century, and it patiently upturns almost everything we thought we knew about it." -- Yve-Alain Bois * Institute for Advance Study *"Lisa Florman's deeply considered and beautifully written book stands to change a good many minds. Concerning the Spiritual—and the Concrete—in Kandinsky's Art does not directly contest the painter's connections with Madame Blavatsky et al., but it does not dwell on them either . . . If Hegel can help us to see Kandinsky anew, Florman's study suggests the inverse is also true." -- Molly Warnock * CAA Reviews *"Lisa Florman's Concerning the Spiritual—and the Concrete—in Kandinsky's Art is a welcome addition to the literature on modernist painting. Setting out to do nothing less than reframe central issues in our understanding of one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, Florman insists that we take seriously Kandinsky's ambitions not only as a pioneering abstract painter but also as a writer engaged with philosophical aesthetics. Vigorously argued, this is a book intended to spark debate. It deserves a wide readership in art history and beyond." -- Brigid Doherty, Associate Professor of Art & Archaeology and German and Director of the Program in European Cultural Studies * Princeton University *"In a deeply researched and closely argued text, rich in perceptive insights and information, Florman clarifies Kandinsky's concept of spirit and recovers the significance of his overlooked later art production . . . [Florman] adds much to readers' understanding of the artist's intellectual heritage and aesthetic objectives. She also enlarges the broad literature on the history of color theory, the significance of abstraction for the diverse modern movements, and the meaning of such terms as materiality and subjectivity in current critical discourse . . . The book is further enhanced by a sequence of 24 superb color plates and 49 monochrome illustrations of other pictorial work by Kandinsky and contemporaries, together with interesting diagrams. This well-produced volume includes a concise index and efficacious endnotes that also serve as the bibliography . . . Recommended." -- R. W. Liscombe * CHOICE *

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Beautifully written and compelling, this book digs deep into military doctrine to understand the place of aesthetic cultures within it. Fascinating and disturbing."—Lucy Suchman, author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions"A bold, ambitious, and expansive book."—Thomas Stubblefield, author of Drone Art: The Everywhere War as Medium"Erudite yet wonderfully readable, Martial Aesthetics traces the tangled histories of war and art to offer new insights into the artful design and operation of violence in the modern age. "—Caren Kaplan, author of Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above

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Book SynopsisDeveloping a concept briefly introduced in Counterrevolution and Revolt, Marcuse here addresses the shortcomings of Marxist aesthetic theory and explores a dialectical aesthetic in which art functions as the conscience of society. Marcuse argues that art is the only form or expression that can take up where religion and philosophy fail and contends that aesthetics offers the last refuge for two-dimensional criticism in a one-dimensional society.

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Book SynopsisSpecial 2018 Edition with a new introduction by Michelle Fine. Greene argues that freedom must be achieved through continuing resistance to the forces that limit, condition, determine, and—too frequently—oppress.

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Book SynopsisIn this highly original interdisciplinary study incorporating close readings of literary texts and philosophical argumentation, Henry W. Pickford develops a theory of meaning and expression in art intended to counter the meaning skepticism most commonly associated with the theories of Jacques Derrida. Pickford arrives at his theory by drawing on the writings of Wittgenstein to develop and modify the insights of Tolstoy's philosophy of art. Pickford shows how Tolstoy's encounter with Schopenhauer's thought on the one hand provided support for his ethical views but on the other hand presented a problem, exemplified in the case of music, for his aesthetic theory, a problem that Tolstoy could not successfully resolve. Wittgenstein's critical appreciation of Tolstoy's thinking, however, not only recovers its viability but also constructs a formidable position within contemporary debates concerning theories of emotion, ethics, and aesthetic expression.

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