Philosophy: aesthetics Books

Book SynopsisHunting the Sun upends all previous Faulkner biography, scholarship, and criticism by tracing to Honoré de Balzac virtually everything in William Faulkner's œuvre. Faulkner's work departs, often confusingly, from the traditional Romantic focus of novels. The reason for the confusion is that Faulkner was rewriting Balzac's La Comedie humaine, itself a prose revision of Dante's Divine Comedy, in order to create his own comedy. More specifically, Faulkner abandons the metaphysical basis of the earlier works and replaces them with a psychosexual one; for example, Balzac's The Succubus becomes Faulkner's Carcassonne, which the American renders an erotic fantasy. Virtually all of Faulkner's major works, and many of the lesser ones, have direct sources in Balzac's work.Trade Review«It has long been known that Faulkner was a serious reader of Balzac as a young man. Once Faulkner became a famous writer in his own right, he would also refer to Balzac frequently in his public statements in response to the question of who were his most esteemed literary models and precursors. Fluent in the oeuvres of these two great novelists, Merrill Horton now gives us a sweeping and suggestive account of their myriad points of contact and interaction. Anyone who is interested in Faulkner’s conception of Yoknapatawpha County and in his creativity as a writer will learn much from this book.» ( Michael Zeitlin, English Department, University of British Columbia; Co-Editor, ‘The Faulkner Journal’ (2003-2008)

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Book SynopsisBody Language: Corporeality, Subjectivity, and Language in Johann Georg Hamann addresses the centrality of sensual perception to the constitution of subjectivity and the resulting relationship between subjectivity and language in the work of Johann Georg Hamann. In positing the body as the entity that conditions a subject's encounter with the world, Hamann, it is argued, prefigures a notion of finite subjectivity that not only runs counter to the Enlightenment tradition but also reemerges in nineteenth- (Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) and twentieth-century (Benjamin) discourses on the tension between subjectivity and the abstraction of language. The paradox at the heart of this investigation is Hamann's radical circumscription of reason as expressed through language, which nevertheless attempts to recuperate the concept of universal meaning through faith. Language is wrested away from abstraction and, therefore, any universality, and becomes the expression of the finite, corporeal s

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Book SynopsisWhy do readers report being powerfully affected by great poetry? What happens to us when we read a poem? Literary criticism has struggled to answer these questions because it treats poems as material artifacts of one kind or another. But readers do not experience literary texts as lifeless and silent material artifacts. They hear voices in them and feel moved and altered by them. Plerosis/Kenosis offers a new way of reading poems by treating poems as dynamic essentially as fields of energy and by focusing on how poetry pushes language towards two contradictory goals: the desire to say more, to convey universal truths, and overwhelm the reader with intensity; and the desire to speak with perfect clarity and precision, to achieve the purity of mathematics or logic. The pursuit of both goals inevitably ends in failure, but poetry is most powerful and most affecting as it approaches these two extremes. Plerosis/Kenosis lays out a theory of poetic language and applies that tTrade Review«Richard A. Nanian's study of poetic language and its energies is an original and bold attempt to conceptualize both the anatomy and history of modern poetry that has the philosophical sweep, critical sophistication, and elegant clarity of a Northrop Frye or a Kenneth Burke. Dr. Nanian's rejection of the ‘artifactual’ model of the poetic text for a dynamic one of its language acting upon the reader, coupled with his core premise of the two opposing directions of poetry culminating in the experience of the sublime at the limits of language, makes for a revisionary mapping of the landscape of Anglo-American poetry from the Romantics to the Modernists. The first and theoretical part, his innovative paradigm of poetic energies in terms of the plerosis/kenosis binary, is clearly and cogently articulated. The ensuing close readings of individual poems in support of his thesis of a shift from the plerotic Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, to the kenotic Dickinson, Eliot, and Stevens, are eye-opening in their striking combination of probing insight and artful appreciation. This thoughtful, ambitious, and lucidly written study of the nature and language of poetry deserves a wide audience.» (Eugene Stelzig, Distinguished Teaching Professor of English, SUNY Geneseo)

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Book SynopsisEl criminal imaginado: Estética, ética y política en la ficción latinoamericana (19902010) analiza películas y novelas donde los personajes principales son o se vuelven criminales. El protagonismo del delincuente en la cultura latinoamericana contemporánea desplaza al detective en su rol estelar del clásico policial inglés o estadounidense. Estas ficciones no buscan restablecer la ley y el orden, ya que el criminal imaginado indica el deseo de cambiar su entorno; por ello, transgrede las limitaciones de su género, raza o clase social. Ahora bien, la producción cultural reciente dista de ser uniforme. Por ello, este texto propone un espectro que comienza con objetos culturales sobre el narcotráfico, donde el criminal reúne características del criminal corporativo, el gánster y el noble bandido. En este retrato del narcotraficante, quien manda es el consumo y la circulación de mercancías y capital. La gama de criminales imaginados continúa con ficciones donde los delitos se deben Trade ReviewEl criminal imaginado nos invita a un recorrido critico y urgente por una parte indispensable de la cultura latinoamericana de los ultimos veinte anos. Con pasion y un estilo dialogico que atrapa al lector, con lecturas brillantes de novelas, peliculas y documentales - argentinos, uruguayos y venezolanos - este libro entrega una reflexion innovadora y refrescante sobre las relaciones entre etica, crimen, poder, politica y estetica. Cristina Miguez Cruz pone de cabeza los tiempos que corren, proponiendo una busqueda politica y estetica que rompe con el espectaculo neoliberal reinante. Una notable intervencion estetica y politica en el campo de la cultura latinoamericana, desde lo mejor de los criminales que imaginamos. (Daniel Noemi Voionmaa, Profesor asociado del departamento de lenguas, literaturas y culturas, Universidad Northeastern, Boston)

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Book SynopsisFrom Digital to Analog delves into the origins of digitization and its effects on contemporary culture. The book challenges the common sense assertion that digitization is just another step in the evolution of the culture of the editorial, film and recorded music industries and their enforcement of copyright laws. Digital technologies in contemporary culture have paradoxically undermined and, at the same time, strengthened such practices, provoking an unprecedented quarrel over the possession of, and access to, cultural products. Agustín Berti uses the release of Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) in 1992 to study this paradox. The importance of Agrippa for digital culture studies is proven through the discussion of the frequently understated importance of the materiality of digital culture. The book develops a critique of digital technology and its alleged neutrality and transparency. Ultimately, it illustrates how Agrippa anticipated a number of contemporary phenomena such asTrade Review«From Digital to Analog engagingly reveals the hidden significance of anomalous, unusual digital objects such as the early electronic literary project, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), and of diverse practices of piracy, hacking, bootlegging, remixing, e-poetry, digital memes, leaks, clones, and zombies to understanding the strange life of digital objects and the current cultural formations they unsettle, redouble, and preserve. Its roundabout, thick description of the backalleys of digital culture and critical pursuit of what may appear to be momentary aberrations to acceptable, standardized digital reproduction effectively mobilizes recent philosophy of technology to unpack a series of persistent, unavoidable questions digital objects pose today. The book sheds crucial light on seemingly contradictory traits, such as digital objects' notoriously immaterial materiality, and underscores the pressing at once technical, aesthetic, political, and economic – importance of confronting this unacknowledged, underexplored complexity. Recontextualizing and rejecting predominant ideologies of the digital as «pure content» by reading them through and against the oblique shadows, contours, and diffractions provided by stray digital literary experiments and other unexpected digital forays, From Digital to Analog reasserts and significantly expands the value of reading electronic literature, print and digital hybrids, and other variously experimental digital practices with full awareness of their critical contributions to digital cultures face to face with their technicity.» (Laura Shackelford, Associate Professor of English, Rochester Institute of Technology / Author of Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction) «From Digital to Analog surpasses expectations as a critical reading device. It comes with a spectrum of well-chosen case studies running from the pre-digital to the digital culture, and authoritative discussions on such topics as the materiality -and its degradation from the originals- of literary, artistic, game works, the analog/digital divide, hybrid (re)production and circulation, opacity and transparency of technology in a genealogical perspective, crafting and cracking codes (the "evasive ontology [and ethics] of copies"), copy rights and piracy, and the everchanging modalities of their conflicting preservation. It is a book that will become indispensable for the study of what the author states as the grounding of codes, and will certainly entice its readers to rethink their assumptions when exposed to our mutating activity of encoding/inscribing/recording and transmitting culture in all its institutionalized/professionalized areas, including the tech industry. Highly recommended for students, scholars, and anyone who wants to know more about certain compelling issues within our digital humanities multiverse.» (Luis Correa-Diaz, University of Georgia/Academia Chilena de la Lengua)«From Digital to Analog surpasses expectations as a critical reading device. Highly recommended for students, scholars, and anyone who wants to know more about certain compelling issues within our digital humanities multiverse.» Luis Correa-Diaz, University of Georgia, Academia Chilena de la Lengua «From Digital to Analog engagingly reveals the hidden significance of anomalous, unusual digital objects (...). The book sheds crucial light on seemingly contradictory traits (...) and underscores the pressing (...) importance of confronting this unacknowledged, underexplored complexity.» Laura Shackelford, Associate Professor of English, Rochester Institute of TechnologyTable of ContentsContents: Pirate Havens and Digital Coyotes – Milestones between matter and digits – Bit Rot – Crossing Borders. Pre-digital works in the Age of Digitization – Illegalized Aliens in the land of the copyrighted – The book of the dead and the death of the books – Epilogue: Hybrid genealogies in digital Genealogies in Digital Culture.

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Book SynopsisFrom Digital to Analog delves into the origins of digitization and its effects on contemporary culture. The book challenges the common sense assertion that digitization is just another step in the evolution of the culture of the editorial, film and recorded music industries and their enforcement of copyright laws. Digital technologies in contemporary culture have paradoxically undermined and, at the same time, strengthened such practices, provoking an unprecedented quarrel over the possession of, and access to, cultural products. Agustín Berti uses the release of Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) in 1992 to study this paradox. The importance of Agrippa for digital culture studies is proven through the discussion of the frequently understated importance of the materiality of digital culture. The book develops a critique of digital technology and its alleged neutrality and transparency. Ultimately, it illustrates how Agrippa anticipated a number of contemporary phenomena such asTrade Review«From Digital to Analog engagingly reveals the hidden significance of anomalous, unusual digital objects such as the early electronic literary project, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), and of diverse practices of piracy, hacking, bootlegging, remixing, e-poetry, digital memes, leaks, clones, and zombies to understanding the strange life of digital objects and the current cultural formations they unsettle, redouble, and preserve. Its roundabout, thick description of the backalleys of digital culture and critical pursuit of what may appear to be momentary aberrations to acceptable, standardized digital reproduction effectively mobilizes recent philosophy of technology to unpack a series of persistent, unavoidable questions digital objects pose today. The book sheds crucial light on seemingly contradictory traits, such as digital objects' notoriously immaterial materiality, and underscores the pressing at once technical, aesthetic, political, and economic – importance of confronting this unacknowledged, underexplored complexity. Recontextualizing and rejecting predominant ideologies of the digital as «pure content» by reading them through and against the oblique shadows, contours, and diffractions provided by stray digital literary experiments and other unexpected digital forays, From Digital to Analog reasserts and significantly expands the value of reading electronic literature, print and digital hybrids, and other variously experimental digital practices with full awareness of their critical contributions to digital cultures face to face with their technicity.» (Laura Shackelford, Associate Professor of English, Rochester Institute of Technology / Author of Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction) «From Digital to Analog surpasses expectations as a critical reading device. It comes with a spectrum of well-chosen case studies running from the pre-digital to the digital culture, and authoritative discussions on such topics as the materiality -and its degradation from the originals- of literary, artistic, game works, the analog/digital divide, hybrid (re)production and circulation, opacity and transparency of technology in a genealogical perspective, crafting and cracking codes (the "evasive ontology [and ethics] of copies"), copy rights and piracy, and the everchanging modalities of their conflicting preservation. It is a book that will become indispensable for the study of what the author states as the grounding of codes, and will certainly entice its readers to rethink their assumptions when exposed to our mutating activity of encoding/inscribing/recording and transmitting culture in all its institutionalized/professionalized areas, including the tech industry. Highly recommended for students, scholars, and anyone who wants to know more about certain compelling issues within our digital humanities multiverse.» (Luis Correa-Diaz, University of Georgia/Academia Chilena de la Lengua)«From Digital to Analog surpasses expectations as a critical reading device. Highly recommended for students, scholars, and anyone who wants to know more about certain compelling issues within our digital humanities multiverse.» Luis Correa-Diaz, University of Georgia, Academia Chilena de la Lengua «From Digital to Analog engagingly reveals the hidden significance of anomalous, unusual digital objects (...). The book sheds crucial light on seemingly contradictory traits (...) and underscores the pressing (...) importance of confronting this unacknowledged, underexplored complexity.» Laura Shackelford, Associate Professor of English, Rochester Institute of TechnologyTable of ContentsContents: Pirate Havens and Digital Coyotes – Milestones between matter and digits – Bit Rot – Crossing Borders. Pre-digital works in the Age of Digitization – Illegalized Aliens in the land of the copyrighted – The book of the dead and the death of the books – Epilogue: Hybrid genealogies in digital Genealogies in Digital Culture.

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Book SynopsisWhile Indian visual culture and Tantric images have drawn wide attention, the culture of images, particularly that of the divine images, is broadly misunderstood. This book is the first to systematically address the hermeneutic and philosophical aspects of visualizing images in Tantric practices. While examining the issues of embodiment and emotion, this volume initiates a discourse on image-consciousness, imagination, memory, and recall. The main objective of this book is to explore the meaning of the opaque Tantric forms, and with this, the text aims to introduce visual language to discourse. Language of Images is the result of a long and sustained engagement with Tantric practitioners and philosophical and exegetical texts. Due to its synthetic approach of utilizing multiple ways to read cultural artifacts, this work stands alone in its attempt to unravel the esoteric domains of Tantric practice by means of addressing the culture of visualization.Trade Review«It is refreshing to see a study that takes seriously visual images and visualization as primary pieces of evidence in seeking to understand the meaning and purpose of Tantra and South Asian religious traditions generally.… The overwhelming majority of people experience the meaning of their religious traditions through seeing images and hearing recitations. Sthaneshwar Timalsina’s work on the visual image as itself a kind of ‘language’ is a welcome addition to research on Tantra.» (Gerald James Larson, Research Professor, University of California, Irvine; Tagore Professor Emeritus, Indiana University, Bloomington; and Professor Emeritus, Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) «… Hindu and Buddhist Tantras have attracted the attention not only of Sanskritists but of scholars of cultural anthropology, religious studies, and, of late even of some Jungian psychologists. But rigorous Western philosophers have kept a safe and often suspicious distance from such ‘oriental mysticisms.’ …In this book, for the first time, Sthaneshwar Timalsina builds bridges between twenty-first-century psychology, phenomenology, semiotics, and philosophy of mind on the one hand and the wide and complex use of visual and proprioceptive images in altering bodily and mental states through contemplative practice. Written with uncompromising clarity and robust common sense, this ‘prasanna-padā’(gracefully phrased) exposition of the meaning and use of images in Tantric transformative spiritual practices is sure to transform the field of comparative philosophy of mind and of phenomenology of imagination. We have been waiting for an accessible yet textually meticulous introduction to the – ancient but alive – theory and practice of re-imagining the felt body that would attract a broadly philosophical readership the world over. With Timalsina’s book, the wait has ended…» (Arindam Chakrabarti, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the EPOCH Eastern Philosophy of Consciousness)Table of ContentsContent: Image, Imagination, and Meaning – Image and Visualization in Classical Hinduism – Better than Real: Imagining the Body in Tantric Rituals – Materializing Space and Time in Tantric Images – Transformative Role of Imagination in Visualizing the Image of Bhairava – Surplus of Imagination: Images with Multiple Arms.

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Book SynopsisIn What Is Film?, Julie N. Books critically evaluates three philosophical doctrines of film realism (transparency, illusionism, and perceptual realism) and defends her view that films are creative works of art. By examining contemporary films, such as computer-animated films and films with computer-generated images, Dr. Books shows how films are creative works of art, thereby undermining the long-held view that films are slavish recordings of reality. This book is ideal for academics and courses on the philosophy of film, film theory, film history, filmmaking, metaphysics, and the philosophy of art.Table of ContentsContents: Transparency – Photographs and Transparency – Films and Transparency – Criticisms of Transparency – Illusionism – Introduction – Currie’s Arguments Against Cognitive Illusionism – Arguments Against Cognitive Illusionism – Currie’s Arguments Against Perceptual Illusionism – Evaluating Perceptual Illusionism – Perceptual Realism – Currie’s Account of Perceptual Realism – Problems with Resemblance Theories – Summarizing the Doctrines of Film Realism – A New Theory of the Ontology of Film – Introduction – Films as Creative Works of Art.

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Book SynopsisThe purpose of Chinese Philosophy and Contemporary Aesthetics is simple and straightforward: to discuss empty, nothing, opening, white, nature color, blankness, and different delicate senses, in ink-water painting and calligraphy, around discourses of poetics, philosophy ideas, and art critics. Because xu has inner plasticity and re-generation, which are crucial for its aesthetic discourse, the relation between nature or naturalness and emptiness approaches a fundamental question of modernitythe relation between event revolution and silent transformation.Table of ContentsList of Figures – Acknowledgments – Introduction: Infra-White—An Impossible Beginning – Color and White, the Blank Canvas: The Reverse Reconstruction of Non-Dimension – Remnant and White, Color and Blankness, Qi and White – Empty and White, Empty—Empty—Substance—Substance, the Empty Room Filled with Light – The White Layout of the "Woodcutters Fighting for the Path": The Ethics of Remnant Yielding – Jade and White, Snow and White, Light and White – "Black-and-Blankism" and the Silent Transformation of Invisibility – Appendix: The Ink Art of Chen Guangwu: Fasting of the Mind and Interval-Blankness of Chora – Index.

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Book SynopsisCognition and Temporality: The Genesis of Historical Thought in Perception and Reasoning argues that both verbal grammar and figural grammar have their cognitive basis in twelve characteristic forms of judgment, distributed among individuals in human populations throughout history. These twelve logical forms are context-free and language-free foundations in our attentional awareness and shape all verbal and figural statements. Moreover, these types of historical judgment are psychogenetic inheritances in a population, and each serves a distinct problem-solving function in the human species. Through analysis of verbal and figural statements, Mark E. Blum contends, the researcher can find evidence of these forms of judgment and in turn analyze how the event to which those statements attend is formally constructed by that judgment. This construction guides how the event is assessed, approached, and engaged in the process of problem-solving. Artists and aestheticians in Trade Review“Mark E. Blum addresses a rarely asked yet central question underpinning modern thought: what are the preconditions for our predominant paradigm for subjectivity, a paradigm that is determinative in both the natural sciences and the human sciences? Blum addresses the issue of how creatures who are genetically almost identical can have individual experiences, from which they then can distill a common and binding discourse. Instead of a psychological approach to subjectivity, Blum analyzes grammar and style to show how the objective emerges from the unstated but ever-present subjective. His treatment of art is exceptionally illuminating, making concrete the Kantian idea of a pre-objective universal subjectivity. Cognition and Temporality: The Genesis of Historical Thought in Perception and Reasoning will become necessary reading for anyone thinking about the places of the subject and the self in modernity, showing how modernity is rooted in universal context-free assumptions about the world that go back to our origin as a species.” —Gabriel Motzkin, Professor of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, The Hebrew University of JerusalemTable of ContentsList of Illustrations – Acknowledgements – Introduction – Discerning the Attentional Episteme in Its Verbal and Figural Grammar – The Problematic Modality of Continuity, Quantum, Continuum, and Dialectic – The Assertoric Modality of Continuity, Quantum, Continuum, and Dialectic – The Apodeictic Modality of Continuity, Quantum, Continuum, and Dialectic – An Evolutionary Myth of the Development of Differing Forms of Historical Judgment – The Argument for the Psycho-genetic Cause of Historical Logics – Ergon and Energeia in Verbal and Figurative Judgment: The Ushenko and the Pepper Family.

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Book SynopsisContemporary critical thinking was founded by Karl Marx approximately a century and a half ago. Later, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, various critical thinkers (some Marxist, others not) further developed this perspective in studying the most important issues of their day: for instance, the future death of art, the conditions and limitations of how we understand and perceive time, the essential questions of how popular culture functions and expresses itself, the role of popular protest and the moral economy of the crowd, the limits and crises facing modern bourgeois reason and how to characterize today's capitalist world. This book is a careful, rigorous review of these fundamental lessons in critical theory and critical thought as developed by some of the most important social thinkers of our age: Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Fernand Braudel, Mikhail Bakhtin, E. P. Thompson, Carlo Ginzburg and Immanuel Wallerstein.Table of ContentsIntroduction ─ Karl Marx’s Lessons on the Universe of Contemporary Politics ─ Walter Benjamin’s Lessons on the Present and Future of Art ─ Fernand Braudel’s Lessons on Historical Time ─ Mikhail Bakhtin’s Lessons on the Codes of Popular Culture ─ E. P. Thompson’s Lessons on Rebellion and the Moral Economy of the Crowd ─ Carlo Ginzburg’s Lessons on the Limitations of Modern Bourgeois Rationality ─ Immanuel Wallerstein’s Lessons on Explaining the Contemporary World

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Book SynopsisThis posthumously published work by Lawrence Krader surveys the study of myths from ancient times (in classical Greece and Rome, Egypt, Babylon, Akkad, Sumer, China), in the Biblical traditions, of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, and from Northeastern and Central Asia. It also covers the various approaches to the study of myth in Europe in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and the Romantic movement in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth century; it discusses evolutionist, structuralist, hermeneutic, and linguistic approaches. The book covers on the one hand the treatment of myth from the inside, that is from the experience of those committed to the myth, and on the other the perspective of those ethnologists, philosophers and other students of myth who are outsiders. Krader takes up the theme of esoteric and exoteric myths as he rejects some of the assumptions and approaches to the study of myth from the past while singling out othTable of ContentsForeword by Mayán Cervantes – Editors’ Preface by Cyril Levitt and Sabine Sander – Editors’ Introduction by Cyril Levitt and Sabine Sander – Preface – Introduction: Rebels as Demons in Ancient Chinese Myths – Myth in Classical Antiquity – Myth in the Renaissance and Enlightenment – Myth in the Nineteenth Century – Bachofen, Tylor, Müller, Frazer: Introduction to Part II. Modern Studies of Myth – Durkheim and His School. Alcheringa, or Dreamtime – Myth as the Myth of Others – The Force of Myth in Our Own Time – Myth of Another Time and Space – Myths of the North Pacific Peoples – Winnebago Trickster Myths. Radin, Malinowski, Kluckhohn – What Is True Myth? Pawnee Creation and Coyote Myths. Dorsey and Grinnell – Structuralists, Lévi- Strauss, Leach – Myths and Universals – The Treatment of Myth as a Code – Myth of the Law in the Book of Daniel – Esoteric and Exoteric Myth – The State as Myth and Myths of the State – Sacred and Secular Myth – Myth in the Making – Myth, the Known and the Unknown – Myth and Ideology – References – Index.

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Book SynopsisThis carefully researched book offers a dynamic and expansive Deweyan vision for the arts and education. This (re)vision acknowledges the influence on Dewey's aesthetics of art collector and educator Albert Barnes, while also exploring the various ways Dewey's writings on the arts, in moving beyond Barnes' "scientific aesthetic method," were an important resource for many innovative twentieth-century American artists, art movements, and arts-related educational institutions. Neither Barnes' influence on Dewey nor the features of Dewey's naturalistic aesthetics that made his Art as Experience a favorite text of many artists and arts practitioners have been fully and adequately acknowledged in existing literature on Dewey's thinking about the arts and education. This book effectively remedies that situation. "Granger clarifies, advances, and augments a broad and open-ended Deweyan vision of the arts and education.' Enlivened on almost every page by concrete histoTrade Review“Granger clarifies, advances, and augments a broad and open-ended ‘Deweyan vision of the arts and education.’ Enlivened on almost every page by concrete historical and contemporary examples drawn from the arts, Granger’s highly readable book is essential for democratic educators, administrators, and policymakers who reject the zombie idea that ‘real’ academic work is inherently separate from aesthetic consummations.” —Steven Fesmire, Professor of Philosophy, Radford University; President of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy; Author of John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics“One of the most vexing characters on the American art scene was Albert Barnes: the self-styled, passionate collector whose good intentions to educate the masses ran amuck with a museum that, like his art theories, proved too rigid to be realistic. Thus, his friendship with John Dewey whose wide application of art to life has been puzzling—until now. With Granger, we see that Barnes’ lessons in how to look, while frozen in a formal analysis of modern French art, nonetheless unleashed in the philosopher an expansive way to think about the aesthetic. As demonstrated here, Dewey’s dynamic, embodied understanding inspired the evolution of radical art throughout the 20th century, providing insight into making and being in the world still.” —Mary Jane Jacob, Professor and Director of the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Author of Dewey for Artists“David Granger’s valuable book begins by examining the mutually-influential friendship of John Dewey and Albert Barnes, along with significant differences between the two men. In contrast with Barnes’ comparatively ridged formalism, Granger demonstrates compatibilities and/or relationships between Dewey’s aesthetics and painters Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, as well as Black Mountain College artists and educators including John Andrew Rice, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham among others. Well researched, the book establishes many surprising relations among people, art, and ideas. Granger concludes with a refreshingly original vision of the arts and education.” —Jim Garrison, Professor Emeritus, School of Education, Virginia Tech; Past-President of the John Dewey Society; Author of Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of TeachingTable of ContentsCredit Lines – Acknowledgments – Prologue – Introduction: John Dewey and Albert Barnes: The Fruits of an Unlikely Friendship – Dewey, Barnes, and Aesthetic Formalism – Dewey, Barnes, and the Sociocultural Dimension of the Arts – The Continuity of Art and Life: Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock – The Continuity of Art and Life: From Black Mountain College to "Happenings" and Beyond – Conclusion: Revisioning the Arts and Education – Index.

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Book SynopsisTakes Heideggers' later thought as a point of departure for exploring the boundaries of post-conceptual thinking.

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Book SynopsisProvocative reading of the role masochism plays in structuring the aesthetics and political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Theorization of sensual desire was not uncommon in the eighteenth century; like many materialists of the French Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected imperatives founded on metaphysical suppositions and viewed the senses as the only valid source of philosophical knowledge. In Social Contract, Masochist Contract, Fayçal Falaky demonstrates that what distinguishes Rousseau is that the foundational measure on which he bases his materialist philosophy is a sexual instinct endowed, paradoxically, with the same sublime, self-abnegating attributes historically associated with Christian, metaphysical desire. To understand the aesthetics of Rousseau's masochism is, Falaky argues, to understand how ideals of Christian morality and spiritual ennoblement survived the Enlightenment, and how God died, only to be repackaged in new fetishes. Whether it is the imperious mistress of his erotic fantasies, the Arcadian nature of his philosophical reveries, or the sublime Law designed to elevate the citizen from enslaving appetite, Rousseau's fetishes herald the new regulative Ideals of the modern secular state.

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Book SynopsisAn original philosophical account of relational ontology drawing on the work of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Heidegger.In this original work of philosophy, Andrew Benjamin calls for a new understanding of relationality, one inaugurating a philosophical mode of thought that takes relations among people and events as primary, over and above conceptions of simple particularity or abstraction. Drawing on the work of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Heidegger, Benjamin shows that a relational ontology has always been at work within the history of philosophy even though philosophy has been reluctant to affirm its presence. Arguing for what he calls anoriginal relationality, he demonstrates that the already present status of a relational ontology is philosophy''s other possibility. Touching on a range of topics including community, human-animal relations, and intimacy, Benjamin''s thoughtful and penetrating distillation of ancient, modern, and twentieth-century philosophical ideas, and his judicious attention to art and literature make this book a model for original philosophical thinking and writing.

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Book SynopsisPhilosophers and artists consider the relevance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty''s philosophy for understanding art and aesthetic experience.This collection of essays brings together diverse but interrelated perspectives on art and perception based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty focused almost exclusively on painting in his writings on aesthetics, this collection also considers poetry, literary works, theater, and relationships between art and science. In addition to philosophers, the contributors include a painter, a photographer, a musicologist, and an architect. This widened scope offers important philosophical benefits, testing and providing evidence for the empirical applicability of Merleau-Ponty''s aesthetic writings. The central argument is that for Merleau-Ponty the account of perception is also an account of art and vice versa. In the philosopher''s writings, art and perception thus intertwine necessarily rather than contingently such that they can only be distinguished by abstraction. As a result, his account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. The contributors examine various aspects of this intertwining across different artistic media, each ingeniously revealing an original perspective on this intertwining.

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Book SynopsisUsing Li Zehou''s theories of aesthetics, argues for the importance of the arts to philosophy.In this wide-ranging examination of the concept of zhi ("the heart''s intent") as the foundation of Chinese aesthetics, Marthe Atwater Chandler places traditional Chinese aesthetics in conversation with contemporary Chinese theory and traditional western philosophy. Poetry, music, painting, and calligraphy played much the same role in the development of thought in China as science did for philosophy in the west, with important implications for the relationship between art, religion, politics, and morality. Inspired by the work of Li Zehou, a leading contemporary Chinese philosopher and scholar of Kant who traced the relationship between philosophy and art throughout Chinese history, Chandler applies Li''s theoretical structure to specific traditions in Chinese art. Throughout the book she considers the relationship of aesthetics and religion in the Chinese adoption of Buddhism, the aesthetics of horse painting, and the personal and political in philosophy in the work of Su Dongpo. By examining particular works of art, Expressing the Heart''s Intent argues that if philosophy ignores the arts, it is immeasurably impoverished.

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Book SynopsisDevelops the sustained, relational, dynamic, and reflective attention demanded by Gertrude Stein''s novel into a theory of reading and critical analysis.Arguing that Gertrude Stein''s monumental novel The Making of Americans models a radically aesthetic relation to the world, E. L. McCallum demonstrates how the novel teaches us to read differently, unmaking our habits of reading. Each of the chapters works through close readings of Stein''s text and a philosophical interlocutor to track a series of theoretical questions: what forms queer time, what are the limits of story, how do we feel emotion, how can we agree on a shared reality if interpretation and imagination intervene, and how do particular media shape how we convey this rich experience? The formally innovative agenda and epistemological drive of Stein''s novel stages rich thought experiments that bear on questions that are central to some of the most vibrant conversations in literary studies today. In the midst of ongoing debates about the practices of reading, the difficulty of reading, and even the impossibility of reading, the moment has come to have a fuller critical engagement with this landmark novel. This book shows how.

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Book SynopsisExamines the relationship of Derrida''s writings on architecture to his methodology of deconstruction and to deconstrutivism in architecture.Between 1984 and 1994 Jacques Derrida wrote and spoke a great deal about architecture both in his academic work and in connection with a number of particular building projects around the world. He engaged significantly with the work of architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, and Daniel Libeskind. Derrida conceived of architecture as an example of the kind of multidimensional writing that he had theorized in Of Grammatology, identifying a rich common ground between architecture and philosophy in relation to ideas about political community and the concept of dwelling. In this book, Francesco Vitale analyzes Derrida''s writings and demonstrates how Derrida''s work on this topic provides a richer understanding of his approach to deconstruction, highlighting the connections and differences between philosophical deconstruction and architectural deconstructivism.

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Book SynopsisEssays address the major themes of Pareyson''s hermeneutic philosophy in the context of his existentialist approach to personhood.What if the inexhaustible were the only mode of self-revelation of truth? The question of the inexhaustibility of truth, and its relation to being and interpretation, is the challenge posed by the philosophy of the prominent Italian thinker Luigi Pareyson (1918?1991). Art, the interpretation of truth, and the theory of being as the ontology of both inexhaustibility and freedom constitute the main themes of Pareyson''s distinctive form of philosophical hermeneutics, which develops also on the basis of another fundamental concept, that of personhood understood in the radically existentialist sense of the human being. In Thinking the Inexhaustible, Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder bring together essays devoted to Pareyson''s hermeneutic philosophy by important international scholars, including well-known Italian thinkers Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo, who were both students of Pareyson. Pareyson''s philosophy of inexhaustibility unfolds in conversation with major figures in Western intellectual history-from Croce to Valéry, Dostoevsky, and Berdyaev; from Kant to Fichte, Hegel, and German romanticism; and from Pascal to Schelling, Kierkegaard, Marcel, Jaspers, and Heidegger.

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Book SynopsisEssays address the major themes of Pareyson''s hermeneutic philosophy in the context of his existentialist approach to personhood.What if the inexhaustible were the only mode of self-revelation of truth? The question of the inexhaustibility of truth, and its relation to being and interpretation, is the challenge posed by the philosophy of the prominent Italian thinker Luigi Pareyson (1918?1991). Art, the interpretation of truth, and the theory of being as the ontology of both inexhaustibility and freedom constitute the main themes of Pareyson''s distinctive form of philosophical hermeneutics, which develops also on the basis of another fundamental concept, that of personhood understood in the radically existentialist sense of the human being. In Thinking the Inexhaustible, Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder bring together essays devoted to Pareyson''s hermeneutic philosophy by important international scholars, including well-known Italian thinkers Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo, who were both students of Pareyson. Pareyson''s philosophy of inexhaustibility unfolds in conversation with major figures in Western intellectual history-from Croce to Valéry, Dostoevsky, and Berdyaev; from Kant to Fichte, Hegel, and German romanticism; and from Pascal to Schelling, Kierkegaard, Marcel, Jaspers, and Heidegger.

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Book SynopsisArgues that symbolism is an important and unique element of Merleau-Ponty''s phenomenology.Merleau-Ponty says in his Institution and Passivity lectures that he wants to "consider criticism itself as a symbolic form" instead of doing "a philosophy of symbolic form." This invites the possibility of an unconventional thought: If critical philosophy is a symbolic form, it cannot disclose its own limits and is, in fact, uncritical. Furthermore, the symbolic form can never itself be thought according to the terms of the criticism it produces but is always only constellated and matrixed within them-a symbolic form within both reflection and what it reflects on, within consciousness and the world. Thus, as Rajiv Kaushik argues, the symbolic form is another name for what Merleau-Ponty calls ontological divergence. Only now divergence introduces the question of a limit to both the subject and philosophy itself. This is nothing less than a psychoanalysis of philosophy.Kaushik''s analyses of the matrices between space-imagination, light-dark, awake-asleep, and repression-expression reveal this symbolism in its form of divergence, its lack of origin and destination. Kaushik also argues that the phenomenology of symbolism must detour from the purely descriptive method. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty''s recently published course materials, and attentive to his reliance on literature and literary language, Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism continues the living force of Merleau-Ponty''s thought and develops his radical insight of the primacy of the symbolic form, even in an ontology that claims to be about the sensible and its elements.

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

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Book SynopsisPresents 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.From The World Viewed to Cities of Words, writing about movies was strand over strand with Stanley Cavell''s philosophical work. Cavell was one of the first philosophers in the United States to make film a significant focus of his thought, and William Rothman has long been one of his most astute readers. The Holiday in His Eye collects Rothman''s writings about Cavell-many of them previously unpublished-to offer a lucid, serious introduction to and overview of Cavell''s work, the influence of which has been somewhat limited by both the intrinsic difficulty of his ideas and his challenging prose style. In these engaging and accessible yet philosophically serious and rigorously argued essays, Rothman presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell''s oeuvre, one that takes Cavell''s kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies.

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Book SynopsisHistorical and theoretical discussions that describe and reflect on personal objects from a variety of perspectives.The Cultural Power of Personal Objects seeks to understand the value and efficacy of objects, places, and times that take on cultural power and reverence to such a degree that they are treated (whether metaphorically or actually) as "persons," or as objects with "personality"-they are living objects. Featuring both historical and theoretical sections, the volume details examples of this practice, including the wampum of certain Native American tribes, the tsukumogami of Japan, the sacred keris knives of Java, the personality of seagoing ships, the ritual objects of Hinduism and Ancient Egypt, and more. The theoretical contributions aim to provide context for the existence and experience of personal objects, drawing from a variety of disciplines. Offering a variety of new philosophical perspectives on the theme, while grounding the discussion in a historical context, The Cultural Power of Personal Objects broadens and reinvigorates our understanding of cultural meaning and experience.

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Book SynopsisHistorical and theoretical discussions that describe and reflect on personal objects from a variety of perspectives.The Cultural Power of Personal Objects seeks to understand the value and efficacy of objects, places, and times that take on cultural power and reverence to such a degree that they are treated (whether metaphorically or actually) as "persons," or as objects with "personality"-they are living objects. Featuring both historical and theoretical sections, the volume details examples of this practice, including the wampum of certain Native American tribes, the tsukumogami of Japan, the sacred keris knives of Java, the personality of seagoing ships, the ritual objects of Hinduism and Ancient Egypt, and more. The theoretical contributions aim to provide context for the existence and experience of personal objects, drawing from a variety of disciplines. Offering a variety of new philosophical perspectives on the theme, while grounding the discussion in a historical context, The Cultural Power of Personal Objects broadens and reinvigorates our understanding of cultural meaning and experience.

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Book SynopsisA powerful and original statement on the nature of film and the intimate relation of "film imagination" to our lives as human beings in the world.This eloquent book draws on the author''s responses to a wide range of extraordinary films-"long takes" on Altman''s Nashville, Godard''s Hail Mary, Makavejev''s WR: Mysteries of the Organism, and von Sternberg''s Blonde Venus, as well as "short takes" on films by Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Ross McElwee, Michelangelo Antonioni, Michael Haneke, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Charles Warren''s masterful close readings blend profound philosophical reflections with a treasure trove of literary and artistic references to place film, in its relations to other arts, as one of the greatest aesthetic forms. Collectively, these essays offer an original and powerful statement on the nature of film and the intimate relation of what the author calls "film imagination" to our lives as human beings in the world. This important and much-needed book is no less than a celebration and affirmation of the very discipline of film criticism. One is left with one''s appetite for film refreshed.

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Book SynopsisA powerful and original statement on the nature of film and the intimate relation of "film imagination" to our lives as human beings in the world.This eloquent book draws on the author''s responses to a wide range of extraordinary films-"long takes" on Altman''s Nashville, Godard''s Hail Mary, Makavejev''s WR: Mysteries of the Organism, and von Sternberg''s Blonde Venus, as well as "short takes" on films by Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Ross McElwee, Michelangelo Antonioni, Michael Haneke, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Charles Warren''s masterful close readings blend profound philosophical reflections with a treasure trove of literary and artistic references to place film, in its relations to other arts, as one of the greatest aesthetic forms. Collectively, these essays offer an original and powerful statement on the nature of film and the intimate relation of what the author calls "film imagination" to our lives as human beings in the world. This important and much-needed book is no less than a celebration and affirmation of the very discipline of film criticism. One is left with one''s appetite for film refreshed.

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Book SynopsisThe definitive philosophical exploration of the work of pioneering filmmaker Terrence Malick.Leaving a promising career in academic philosophy to embark on a career in film, American director Terrence Malick has created cinematic works of art that are also deeply philosophical. His contribution to philosophy through a half century of filmmaking has become the focus of increasing scholarly attention. Inviting the reader along a journey of reflections at the intersection of film, art, and philosophy, Life Above the Clouds brings together an international team of contributors to present the most current and definitive statement of the filmmaker''s work. Accessibly written and exploring films such as Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World, The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song, and A Hidden Life, the nineteen essays herein will be of interest not only to scholars and students of philosophy, theology, film studies, and aesthetics, but also to anyone with a true love of film.

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Book SynopsisExplores the importance of the body and the senses in educational encounters, drawing out the aesthetic and political dimensions of educational practices.How are educational encounters understood, experienced, and lived? How are they conceptualized? How do they shape our being in and of the world? In this time of apparent distance and disconnect, this volume emphasizes the role of contact and connectedness in education, above all by understanding education as encounters, as embodied, sensory experiences. Drawing on a range of theoretical positions that highlight our profound interconnection with things and other bodies-from feminism to Buddhism to new materialism and beyond-Sharon Todd argues that educational encounters are formations of "touching" and "being touched by." They are singular in their eventfulness and yet bring us into relation with our environment. Focusing particular attention on two key issues for teachers and students today-the climate emergency and online education-The Touch of the Present offers unique insights into the aesthetics and politics of educational practices, seeing them as embodied processes that not only contribute to how one is socialized into a given order but also carry the transformative potential for "becoming" beyond the cultural scripts we are given.

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Book SynopsisBrings the figure of the voice and the problem of mimesis in Heidegger and post-Heideggerian continental thought to bear on the dismissal of language by the affective and aesthetic turns of contemporary critical theory.The recent turns to affect and aesthetics in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences have been productive for reflecting on the crucial role sensibility plays in the constitution of the social. However, these scholarly developments construct their interventions by dismissing the attention to language that was central to the linguistic and cultural turns of previous eras and by claiming that language is an obstacle to experiencing the reality of difference to which they maintain only sensibility can grant access. By analyzing the figure of the voice in the work of Martin Heidegger and the continental thinkers who follow him, The Scene of the Voice shows that the dismissal of language in favor of sensibility requires overlooking their common connection in the problem of mimesis. As this book ultimately argues, artificially separating language and sensibility results in a failure to encounter affect, the relation to difference affect is said to name, and the experience of thinking affect is taken to provoke.

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Book SynopsisReconsiders the figure of synaesthesia, understood as the combination of the senses and of the arts, in philosophy and literature.This book investigates synaesthesia in philosophy and literature, from Aristotle to Charles Baudelaire to Jean-Luc Nancy and beyond. Its central claim is that while synaesthesia is generally read as a figure of transcendence and unity, there is another effect of synaesthesia, one that articulates differences and displaces essence. This other synaesthesia opens up within or alongside the more familiar sense of synaesthesia as synthesis, pointing to an alternative understanding of the senses and of the arts as "interbelonging" in a kind of rhythmic relation rather than parts of a totalizing aesthetic whole. In so doing, The Other Synaesthesia contests the suggestion that neurological synaesthesia is the foundation for the aesthetics of synaesthesia. Topics include Nancy''s conception of community; the correspondence between Franz Liszt and George Sand; Baudelaire''s poetics; Richard Wagner''s theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art; decadence and symbolism; and Heidegger''s critique of the correspondence theory of truth.

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Book SynopsisArgues that Daoism and dandyism, linked by likeminded philosophies of "carefree wandering," deconstruct the puritanism and political correctness sought by Confucianism, Victorianism, and contemporary neoliberal culture.How would Zhuangzi, a Chinese philosopher who lived in the fourth century BCE, have reacted to the recent linguistic reforms commonly referred to as "political correctness"? Zhuangzi was a language skeptic, which means that he did not believe that language could convey the true meanings of the world. Might Zhuangzi have argued that political correctness creates but a dream world made of rules, policies, and words-no more real than when he "dreamt he was a butterfly"? Written in a provocative tone, this book looks at political correctness through the lens of ancient Chinese philosophy, as well as through Brummell''s and Wilde''s aesthetic philosophy of dandyism. Several scholars have established links between Zhuangzi and dandyism, and Wilde wrote one of the first reviews of Herbert Giles''s English translation of the Zhuangzi. Like Daoism, dandyism does not engage in a Confucian "correction" of language, instead preferring aimless roaming and rambling. The Daoist "carefree wanderer" is a flâneur, and both Daoist and dandy deconstruct the puritanism and correctness sought by Confucianism, Victorianism, and our contemporary neoliberal culture. Instead of seeking to induce correct opinions, they seek to liberate the mind.

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Book SynopsisAn examination of Deleuze's notion of the diagram from philosophical and aesthetic perspectives that develops the concept into a critical touchstone for contemporary multidisciplinary art. It charts Deleuze's corpus according to aesthetic concepts such as the map, the sketch and the drawing to bring out a comprehensive concept of the diagram.Trade Review‘A magnificent treatment of the relation of the diagram to what Deleuze calls le devenir: For Zdebik the diagram, like the fold, is a creative function that shapes the entirety of the philosopher's writing.It is a hybrid machine, an amphibious device, an elastic mechanism in which geography and anatomy, like art and science or form and force, are of the same order.Zdebik offers a clear, compelling, indeed dazzling reading of a body of work integral to what John Bender and Michael Marrinan have astutely called the culture of diagram.Thanks to this book we can now see how and why Deleuze excels in areas that extend from philosophy to cinema, from geology to biology, from literature to topology, and from painting to poetry. The author brings us a rich, sensuous, and decisive contribution that stands high and strong in the industry of Deleuze studies.' -- Tom Conley, Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, USA.‘Finally, a book has arrived that brilliantly delineates how the diagram indirectly reveals the untraceable, yet mappable, philosophical system of Deleuze and Guattari. Zdebik delicately explains the diagram's dynamism, productive constraints, and its abstract and material dimensions.Drawing on a philosophical lineage stretching from Kant to Heidegger, Foucault and Simondon, as well as examples from natural history, architecture, and contemporary art, the diagram's hybridity and, ultimately, its carnality for Deleuze in his study of Francis Bacon, is masterfully displayed. This is a bold work of transdisciplinary scope that rightfully places the diagrammatic at the core of Deleuzean philosophy.' -- Gary Genosko, Professor and Canada Research Chair, Lakehead University, Canada‘Zdebik's book fills handsomely a glaring gap in the literature on diagrammatic thinking in general and the role the diagram plays in Gilles Deleuze's ontology and aesthetics. It is thoughtful, well written, informative and will be of immense interest to those who want to understand the recent prominence of diagrammatic thinking and the way in which it rivals semiotic thinking. It will also show Deleuze scholars how exactly the diagram—a concept at the center of Deleuze's work—was meant to work.' -- Constantin V. Boundas, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Trent University, Ontario, CanadaTable of ContentsIntroduction: Brief Notes on a Diagram; 1. A Joyful Monotony; 2. The Distorted Chiaroscuro; 3. A Complicated Difficulty: Kant's Schema; 4. The Indiscernible Style; 5. A Portrait of the Diagram Made Flesh: The Aesthetics as Incarnation; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

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