Shadows of Being
Four Philosophical Essays
This book is a study of the phenomena of shadows, meant in a broader sense as “symbolic forms”. The shadow is a less real, “surface” replica of some more real form. From the Platonic point of view, empirical objects are “shadows of ideas”, while from the modern “natural” point of view, shadows are seen and conceived primarily as “weaker” replicas of bodies, which give evidence of their material reality. In the first three essays here, several topics from the Ancient Egypt and Greece to modern arts and sciences are considered,…
This book studies shadows as symbolic forms, connecting their meaning in philosophy and art with their role in modern science. It considers topics from Ancient Greece to contemporary virtual reality and the internet as our parallel “shadow world.”
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Aesthetics of Presence
Philosophical and Practical Reconsiderations
In the field of aesthetic experiences, presence must be seen as mental activities such as attention, curiosity, and participation. The mere physical ‘being-there’ guarantees no aesthetic responses to artistic or natural appearances. When aesthetics became part of the discourse in eighteenth-century Enlightenments philosophy, the beholder was the centre of interest: how observations turned into aesthetic experiences. In this book, the spectator, reader, listener and viewer have again become the focus of scholarly attention, replacing the century-long dominance of the artwork as exclusive object of aesthetics. In the light of such…
This book re-centers aesthetics on the spectator, replacing the long-dominant artwork as the exclusive focus. It develops an ‘Aesthetics of Presence’ by exploring perceiving, playing, placing, and performing as its theoretical cornerstones.
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On the Ugly
Aesthetic Exchanges
This study offers an original and innovative collection of fresh approaches to the investigation of the concept of ugliness. It is divided into three parts: the idea of ugliness; Kantian conceptions of the ugly; and ugliness and art. The papers in all three sections deal with problems in the way that aesthetics has understood the concept of the ugly, in aesthetic experience, in fine art, and in contrast with the beautiful. These are new papers from a range of scholars from diverse philosophical backgrounds, and use the most recent literature…
This original collection offers fresh approaches to the concept of ugliness in aesthetics, art, and in contrast with the beautiful. Featuring new papers from diverse scholars, it collects the latest research, making it a key contribution to the growing interest in the field.
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This volume brings together scholars based predominantly in Asia to contribute provocative and experimental essays on the dynamic relationship between animation and philosophy. In an inventive and playful philosophical way, they address not only the mainstay of Japanese animation, but also Korean film, picture books and Mickey Mouse to understand what we might call film-philosophy in Asia. In thinking animation with concepts from the technicolour philosophies of Deleuze, Guattari, Stiegler, Benjamin, Kristeva and Heidegger, the book sees animation not as a representation of a philosophical idea per se, but conceptualizes…
In provocative essays, scholars from Asia explore the dynamic relationship between animation and philosophy. Using thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari, they see animation not as a representation of an idea, but as a philosophical thinking-device in itself.
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Art and the Technosphere
The Platforms of Strings
In the analysis of the relationship between aesthetics and contemporary art, this book investigates hermeneutics, phenomenology and semiotics when it comes to the notion of the image and its new status concerning avant-garde art, which went in the direction of the analysis of posthumanism/transhumanism. Showing that we must begin to think of the aesthetic construction of the worlds, rather than representing the idea in its eternity, it explains that contemporary art from avant-garde procedures of shock, provocation and experiment enters the area of the metatheory of visualization of the event.…
This book investigates contemporary art’s new status. From caves to digital simulations, art no longer just represents ideas—it constructs worlds. The question is no longer “what” art is, but how we determine the difference between the aesthetic object and artificial life.
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This edited collection, dedicated to the issue of Homo Kybernetes, sheds light on the genesis and development of opinions about the technosphere as an aesthetic problem par excellence from different points of view. In this sense, the contributions here reflect not only on the cybernetic way of thinking as a condition of the possibility of digital aesthetics, but also on the possibilities of the transition of human sensibility to a different way of bodily existence, starting from transhumanism and the posthuman condition.
This collection on Homo Kybernetes frames the technosphere as an aesthetic problem. It reflects on cybernetic thinking as a condition for digital aesthetics and explores the transition of human existence through transhumanism and the posthuman condition.
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Aesthetics of Everyday Life
East and West
As a new trend in aesthetics appearing concurrently in the West and the East in the last ten years, the aesthetics of everyday life points to a growing diversification among existing methodologies for pursuing aesthetics, alongside the shift from art-based aesthetics. The cultural diversity manifest in global aesthetics offers common ground for the collaborative efforts of aesthetics in both the West and the East. Given the rapidly growing interest and its potential for attracting new audiences extending beyond the more narrowly focused traditions of twentieth-century analytic and environmental aesthetics, it…
This book reconstructs the aesthetics of everyday life through cultural dialogue between the West and the East. It highlights the interaction between scholars to build a new form of aesthetics from a global perspective, bringing aesthetics to a wider sphere of human life.
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Arthur Danto
Philosopher of Pop
“Arthur Danto is a philosopher with a system, whose much discussed aesthetic theory cannot be understood adequately without grasping how it is embedded in his analysis of action, historiography and knowledge. Although some Americans have written about his system, we have as yet too little comprehension of how it appears from the vantage point of Europe. This monograph by a gifted young Italian scholar, which will change that situation. [It] presents a remarkably original, highly sympathetic perspective, one that will surely influence debate in her native country, in the United…
This original monograph presents Arthur Danto’s aesthetic theory as part of his larger philosophical system. For the first time, his themes are viewed as a whole, placed in the context of his broader commitments to action, knowledge, and metaphysics.
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£39.99
For two millennia philosophy has restlessly stalked a fundamental problem—the answer to the question “what is art, really?” Aesthetic discourse, focused on the Platonic Matrix of truth and beauty, arthood and object, imitation and representation, form and idea, has not delivered on its promise, leaving us in bewilderment over principles that are either ignored or contradicted by the arts themselves. In this searching critique, some astonishing faux pas are brought to light. Notably that aesthetics makes do without a knower, the heuristics of art, and the dynamics of self-exploration that…
For millennia, philosophy has failed to define art. This searching critique reveals why and proposes a new philosophy, demonstrating that art is quintessentially involved in the meaning of life, our impulse for self-knowledge, and understanding the human condition.
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Elemental Sensuous
Phenomenology and Aesthetics
Under the guidance of phenomenological insights, this book presents the sensuous in its elemental sense. The elemental is not to be confused here with the classical notion of the atom, which is viewed as a self-contained entity into which all reality is reducible. Rather, the elemental is a living creative force that resists categorization. This force embodies the principle of openness and opening, a principle celebrated and given expression by numerous artists and other friends of the sensuous. As elemental, the sensuous irreducibly expresses itself in multiple ways. The editors…
Under the guidance of phenomenological insights, this book presents the sensuous in its elemental sense. It explains how the sensuous, as elemental, irreducibly expresses itself in multiple ways, allowing the reader to become more aware of themselves and the world around them.
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From Plato’s Cave to the Multiplex
Contemporary Philosophy and Film
This is a rich and varied collection of articles that both offer philosophical analyses of film and reflect on philosophical questions through film. The pieces range widely, from discussions of specific films and the work of particular directors, to reflections on cinematic techniques and on the medium of cinema in general. Here, cinema enters into a genuinely productive interaction with philosophy. We see how philosophical perspectives and methods are able to inform the critical analysis of film, how films can concretely explore and make use of philosophical perspectives, and how…
This rich collection of articles explores the productive interaction between philosophy and film. The pieces offer philosophical analyses of specific films and the cinematic medium, revealing surprising connections and provoking philosophical reflection.
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£61.99
This is a book about mirrors, philosophy, art and organization. It arises from the recognition that we are caught in the mirror. We are under its spell and enchanted by its reflections. Mirrors direct us without our awareness, largely because we do not perceive them as mirrors. This is problematic because mirrors are everywhere. This book explores a philosophy of mirrors, one that investigates the art of painting, cartoons, architecture, music, photography and film, as well as belching and boozing robots, ‘geil’ photographers, monkish cells, cesspools, hairy auditions and clauding.…
We are caught in the mirror, under its spell. Mirrors direct us without our awareness because we do not perceive them as they are. This book explores a philosophy of mirrors through art and culture, opening up their hidden world and offering a challenge to organization theory.
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£44.99
In this book we attempted to gather together a set of chapters that describe new ways of approaching questions about aesthetics and innovation. Rather than going over old ground, the chapters describe attempts to break out in new directions. The book begins with a description of von Ehrenfel’s development of a Gestalt theory of aesthetics so evocative of the Vienna of 1900 that readers will wish that they had been there to experience the intellectual excitement and ends with a survey the very latest research on brain scan research on…
This book describes new ways of approaching aesthetics and innovation. Spanning Gestalt theory to the latest brain scan research, it unites chapters by Western aestheticians and Russian scholars, offering novel perspectives on art and science.
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£29.99
In recent years, philosophical debate of the concept of beauty has seen a remarkable renaissance. The twelve essays presented in this book provide a broad basis for a thorough reassessment of the European traditions of beauty in the arts (fine arts, performing arts, media arts) and in literature and film, not as a return to some distant, and allegedly ideal past, but as a constructive means of realising the potential of the arts for the 21st century.
These twelve essays provide a basis for reassessing European traditions of beauty in the arts, literature, and film, as a constructive means of realising the potential of the arts for the 21st century.
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The Crisis in the Humanities
Transdisciplinary Solutions
This volume will appeal to the reader interested in the so-called “long crisis in the humanities” and transdisciplinary approaches as a possible way out of this. It comprises a selection of 23 essays by both established and young scholars from the United States, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia, coming from a variety of disciplines, including aesthetics, anthropology, architecture, art, critical theory, ethnography, feminism, film studies, gender and queer theory, literary theory, Marxism, musicology, philosophy, and sociology, among others. What brings all these together here is the intention to advance transdisciplinarity, both…
This volume advances transdisciplinarity in order to study the place of the humanities in our society, and challenges the ways that issues which form the foci of various disciplines have been addressed in recent theoretical discourses.
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£58.99
This book represents a synthetic challenge to create a general aesthetics overcoming the problem of mimesis and any subordination of art, by using the ancient concept of continuity. Consequently, it traces an ontology of continuity considering nature as landscape, the persons who inhabit it as character, and the passage of the character in the landscape as journey. In addition, it also addresses the problem of continuity and globalization. As such, it is of special interest to readers of aesthetic and critical thinking, as well as literary and sociocultural scholars.
This title endeavours to create a general aesthetics to face the problem of mimesis and subordination of art, using the ancient concept of continuity. As such, it is of special interest to readers of aesthetic and critical thinking, and literary and sociocultural scholars.
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