Preliminary Material -- Aesthetics: Definition and Object -- Difficuties for Aesthetics -- Immediate Aesthetics Perception--the Material Basis of Aesthetics -- The Optimal Starting Point: Nature or Art? -- Three Starting Points for Aesthetics Analysis -- The Essential Properties of Aesthetics Perception -- The Internal Structure of an Aesthetic Object -- The Expressiveness of an Aesthetic Object and its Objective Sense -- Aesthetic Form and Aesthetic Structure -- The Relations of Natural and Artistic Beauty with Respect to Origin -- The Aesthetic Critertion of Natural and Artistic Beauty is the Same -- The Conception of Nature's Beauty in the History of European Culture. The Beauty of Wild Nature -- The Beauty of Organic Forms -- Human Beauty. Its Ideal -- Organic Beauty and the Sexual Instinct -- Beauty and Ugliness. Their Relation in Art -- The Peculiarity of Natural Beauty -- The Relation of Primitive Art to Others Areas of Culture -- Attempts to Derive the Origin of Art form General Psychological Principles. Criticism -- Stimuli for the Emergence of Representational Art -- The Origin of Music -- General Conclusions -- The Artist and the Child (Primitive Man) -- A General Characterization of the Creative Process -- The Creative Process: Three Basic Moments -- Creative Imagination -- The Problem: Formulation and Explication -- Taine's "Milieu Theory" and its Critical Appraisal -- The Psychological Theory of "Numbing" and its Critique -- The Relation of the Artist's Individual and Creativity to the Cultural Environment -- The Relation of the Development of Art to General Cultural Development -- The Historical Changing of Styles and the Theories Explaining it -- Introduction -- Beauty and Morality -- Art (Beauty) and Truth -- The Aesthetic of the Ancient Greeks -- Rationalist Aesthetics in France and Germany -- The Empiricist Aesthetics of the English -- The Aesthetics of Kant -- Vico -- German Idealist Aesthetics: Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer -- The Formalists. Fechner -- Contemporary Aesthetic Theories -- The Problem -- The Relation of the Art Work to the Subject. Optical and Acoustic Impression: Their Difference -- Spatial and Nonspatial Forms of Art -- Objective and Nonobjective Forms of Art -- Representational and Nonrepresentational Art -- Notes -- Index.

Aesthetics and the philosophy of art are about things in the world – things like the Mona Lisa, but also things like horror movies, things like the ugliest dog in the world, and things like wallpaper. There's a surprising amount of philosophical content to be found in wallpaper. Using a case-driven approach, Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art is grounded in real-world examples that propel thought, debate, and discussion about the nature of art and beauty. Now in its third edition, this tried-and-tested text features fresh cases and new activities. Hands-on Do Aesthetics! activities pepper the text, and Challenge Cases appear at the end of each chapter to test intuitions, to complicate the field of discussion, and to set a path forward. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-Paper” serves as a recurring case throughout, and this edition includes the full text of this classic short story. From classical debates that continue to bother philosophers today, to emerging problems of identity, appropriation, and morality, this introduction is designed to engage you in a field that itself engages with so much of the world around you. Here is everything you need to know about the history, themes, thinkers and theories to get you started on aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

An ideal guide to aesthetics

The Reformation was one of the defining cultural turning points in Western history, even if there is a longstanding stereotype that Protestants did away with art and material culture. Rather than reject art and aestheticism, Protestants developed their own aesthetic values, which Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts addresses as it identifies and explains the link between theological aesthetics and the arts within a Protestant framework across five-hundred years of history. Featuring essays from an international gathering of leading experts working across a diverse set of disciplines, Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts is the first study of its kind, containing essays that address Protestantism and the fine arts (visual art, music, literature, and architecture), and historical and contemporary Protestant theological perspectives on the subject of beauty and imagination. Contributors challenge accepted preconceptions relating to the boundaries of theological aesthetics and religiously determined art; disrupt traditional understandings of periodization and disciplinarity; and seek to open rich avenues for new fields of research. Building on renewed interest in Protestantism in the study of religion and modernity and the return to aesthetics in Christian theological inquiry, this volume will be of significant interest to scholars of Theology, Aesthetics, Art and Architectural History, Literary Criticism, and Religious History.

This book shows how aesthetic understanding of organizations can extend our knowledge and sharpen our insights into many processes that shape organizational action. Organizational life is pervaded by aesthetics, yet conventional organizational analysis has been dominated by a `scientific′, logico-rational tradition that ignores the aesthetic dimension. The book highlights the role of emotion in organizations, the importance of symbol, the subjective influence of culture and the processes of learning and cognition. These phenomena are related to the aesthetic rather than to purify rational, demanding new modes of inquiry that allow us richer insight into the dynamics of organizational life. Organization and Aesthetics provides a powerful new lens through which the daily, ever-chaning complexity of organizations can be better understood by students, researchers and mangers.

This book considers the presence of media illiteracy in a world in which we are supposedly consumed by media, live a media life, in a media ecosystem, surrounded by mediated communication. Unpacking this paradoxical situation, the author proposes that before venturing into media literacy, we must first understand the workings of how mystification occurs. Departing from the idea that aesthetics work on an agreed set of principles between art and society, the author applies this ideology of aesthetics to news-based narration. Using empirical cases from India, the author proposes demystification as a possible methodology to approach media illiteracy and recommends completely transformed media literacy programs that deliver to communities, drawing from the construct of critical pedagogy. The book offers the possibilities for a collectivistic, non-Western, postcolonialist model of learning by using the very collective and hierarchical identities of societies that must be critiqued. This vital and innovative book will be an important resource for scholars and students in the areas of media literacy and critical media literacy, media education, journalism, mass communication, aesthetics and media technology.

This study recognizes the broad impact of opera in early-modern French culture.

Emotion in Aesthetics is the first book on aesthetics to provide an extensive theory of emotion; application of the cognitive-emotive theory to aesthetics; analysis of the relationship between aesthetics, metaphor and emotion; a full theory of meaning and its application to aesthetics; discussion of the relationship between aesthetics, music and language in terms of phonetics, phonology and intonation; an analysis of humanistic aesthetics; a well-developed naturalistic theory of ethics as applied to aesthetics and emotion. Stress is placed on the views of contemporary philosophers as well as some of the main historical accounts of emotion in aesthetics. The important recent work on emotion has not hitherto been applied to aesthetics. As a result there is still much confusion in aesthetics about aesthetic emotion and related concepts, such as the expression theory of emotion. The present book has been written to show how the theory can be used to clarify the issue, resulting in a major breakthrough in aesthetics. In addition, the theory presented is valuable in relating aesthetics to ethics and humanism.

Blindness has always fascinated those who can see. Although modern imaginative portrayals of the sightless experience are increasingly positive, the affirmative elements of these renderings are inevitably tempered and problematized by the visual predilections of the artists undertaking them. This book explores a variety of the (dis)continuities between depictions of the sightless experience of beauty by sighted artists and the lived aesthetic experiences of blind people. It does so by pressing a radical interdisciplinary reinterpretation of celebrated dramatic portrayals of blindness into service as a tool with which to probe the boundaries of the capacities of the sighted imagination while exploring the sensory detriment of our visually fixated notions of beauty. Works by J. M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, and Brian Friel are explored as a means of crafting a workable and innovative medium of theoretical and experiential exchange between the disciplines of literature, aesthetics, and disability studies. In addition to appraising previously unexamined aspects of the work of three of Ireland's most celebrated modern dramatists, this book considers the consequences for blind people of the exclusionary and prohibitive elements of traditional aesthetic theory and art education. The insights yielded will be of value to those with an interest in modern literature, differential aesthetics, visual culture, perception, and the experience of blindness.