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No values figure as pervasively and intimately in our lives as beauty and other aesthetic values. They animate the arts, as well as design, fashion, food, and entertainment. They orient us upon the natural world. And we even find them in the deepest insights of science and mathematics. For centuries, however, philosophers and other thinkers have identified beauty with what brings pleasure. Concerned that aesthetic hedonism has led us to question beauty's significance, Dominic McIver Lopes offers an entirely new theory of beauty in this volume. Beauty engages us in action, in concert with others, in the context of social networks. Lopes's 'network theory' explains the social dimension of aesthetic agency, the tie between beauty and pleasure, the importance of disagreement in matters of taste, and the reality of aesthetic values as denizens of the natural world. The two closing chapters shed light on why aesthetic engagement is so important to quality of life, and why it deserves (and gets) lavish public support. Being for Beauty offers a fresh contribution to aesthetics but also to thinking about metanormativity, the metaphysics of value, and virtue theory.
Seerveld is convinced that philosophical aesthetics-systematic reflection on the nature and task of human imaginative life-will be normative when the thought is wholesome, edible, worth chewing, and builds the body of a community with joyful shalom. Normative Aesthetics, introduced by Lambert Zuidervaart, aims to spell out some of what this aesthetic imperative means for human imaginative acts, for the arts, and for other acts and institutions where aesthetic functions play a role.
The Aesthetics of Desire and Surprise: Phenomenology and Speculation covers issues central to contemporary continental philosophy (desire, expectations, excess, rupture, transcendence, immanence, surprise). The proposed term desire||surprise captures the phenomenological-speculative character of the pair not yet and no longer. Non-obvious parallels between different thinkers are drawn, and the argumentation is organized around philosophical figures relevant in the sequence desire – excess –pause (rupture, break) – recuperation (surprise). The works of Levinas, Žižek, Bataille, Blanchot, Foucault, and Ricoeur are interpreted and positioned according to the proposed template of desire - excess - pause. The consideration of limit experiences involves authors fascinated by transgression, and the question of whether excess is immanent or transcendent. This discussion considers works by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Žižek, and Foucault. The analysis of surprise and the beginning of recovery after the pause considers works by Fink, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Lyotard, Dufrenne, Bachelard, and Seel. The provocative argument elaborated in this work is that surprise starts with indifference. Furthermore, the argument is that surprise begins where the concept reaches its ending, hence that the limit of speculative thinking at its ending is the limit of aesthetics at its beginning. The work of Hegel, Schelling and Jaspers are discussed in order to argue for the beginning of aesthetics there where knowledge ends. Philosophical thematic is contextualized via sections on artists such as Duchamp and Mondrian, and on some films, provoking interest of aestheticians working in art history and cultural studies departments.
This book bridges the gap between the many insights into art provided by research in evolutionary theory, psychology and neuroscience and those enduring normative issues best addressed by philosophy. The sciences have helped us understand how art functions, our art preferences, and the neurological systems underlying our engagement with art. But we continue to rely on philosophy to tell us what is truly good in art, how we should engage with art, and the conceptual basis for this engagement. Naturalized Aesthetics: A Scientific Framework for the Philosophy of Art integrates a systematic and comprehensive naturalism, grounded in the sciences, with an "ecology" of art. It shows how the environments in which we make and experience art – our "engineered art niches" – affect the practice and experience of art and generate normativity – the goods and the shoulds – in our engagement with art. There are, in effect, two "streams" of normativity, according to this book: a niche-dependent, social, impersonal and objective stream and a niche-independent, individual, personal and subjective stream. Recognition of these two streams allows us to make progress in long-standing and unresolved philosophical disputes about how to interpret, evaluate and conceive art. Key Features: Provides a structured and critical introduction to the scientific accounts of art based on evolutionary thinking, psychology and neuroscience. Develops an "ecology" of art based on the insight that we engage with art in engineered niches. Presents a naturalistic account of normativity based on the recognition of two streams: a niche-dependent, social, impersonal and objective stream; and a niche-independent, individual, personal and subjective stream. Serves as an introduction and critical analysis of the debates about the interpretation, evaluation and definitions of art.
This book presents a comprehensive and systematic picture of Charles Peirce’s ethics and aesthetics, arguing that Peirce established a normative framework for the study of right conduct and good ends. It also connects Peirce’s normative thought to contemporary debates in ethical theory. Peirce sought to articulate the relation among logic as right thinking, ethics as good conduct and, in an unorthodox sense of aesthetics, the pursuit of ends that are fine and worthy. Each plays an important role in ethical life. Once aesthetics has determined what makes an end worthy and admirable, and ethics determines which are good and right to pursue, logical and scientific reasoning is employed to figure the most likely means to attain those ends. Ethics does the additional duty of ensuring that the means conform to ideals of conduct. In the process, Peirce develops an interesting theory of moral motivation, an account of moral reasoning, moral truth, and a picture of what constitutes a moral community. Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences will be of interest to scholars and students working on Peirce, American philosophy, and metaethics.
The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics is the most authoritativesurvey of the central issues in contemporary aesthetics available.The volume features eighteen newly commissioned papers on theevaluation of art, the interpretation of art, and many other formsof art such as literature, movies, and music. Provides a guide to the central traditional and cutting edgeissues in aesthetics today. Written by a distinguished cast of contributors, includingPeter Kivy, George Dickie, Noël Carroll, Paul Guyer, TedCohen, Marcia Eaton, Joseph Margolis, Berys Gaut, NicholasWolterstrorff, Susan Feagin, Peter Lamarque, Stein Olsen, FrancisSparshott, Alan Goldman, Jenefer Robinson, Mary Mothersill, DonaldCrawford, Philip Alperson, Laurent Stern and Amie Thomasson. Functions as the ideal text for undergraduate and graduatecourses in aesthetics, art theory, and philosophy of art.
A collection of eleven essays on the moral philosophy of the American Polymath Charles S. Peirce (18391914). The essays cover the three normative sciences that Peirce distinguishes (esthetics, ethics, and logic), and their relation to metaphysics.
'The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics' has assembled 48 brand-new essays, making this a comprehensive guide available to the theory, application, history, and future of the field.