The authors in this book ask us to consider whether the perception of beauty has been defined by our genetics and culture over the years - has it grown and changed? Do certain neural connections define our emotional reactions to beauty? Does beauty follow any rules or laws? Can the aspiration toward beauty be detrimental? Can we divorce ourselves from dictates and sink into a mindful connection with our internal beauty? Can we move from the superficial where "beauty is only skin deep" to an intense appreciation of beauty in all of its variations. The Perception of Beauty will lead to a deeper understanding and contemplation of nature, art, and the world around us.

Aquinas on Beauty explores the nature and role of beauty in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with a standard definition of beauty provided by Aquinas, it explores each of the components of that definition. The result is a comprehensive account of Aquinas’s formal view on the subject, supplemented by an exploration into Aquinas’s commentary on Dionysius’s Divine Names, including a comparison of his views with those of both Dionysius and those of Aquinas’s mentor, Albert the Great. The book also highlights the tight connection in Aquinas’s thought between aesthetics and ethics, and illustrates how Aquinas preserves what is best about aesthetic traditions preceding him, and anticipates what is best about aesthetic traditions that would follow, marrying objective and subjective aesthetic intuitions and charting a kind of via media between the common extremes.

American Impersonal brings together some of the most influential scholars now working in American literature to explore the impact of one of America's leading literary critics: Sharon Cameron. It engages directly with certain arguments that Cameron has articulated throughout her career, most notably her late work on the question of impersonality. In doing so, it provides responses to questions fundamental to literary criticism, such as: the nature of personhood; the logic of subjectivity in depersonalized communities; the question of the human within the problematic of the impersonal; how impersonality relates to the “posthuman.” Additionally, some essays respond to the current “aesthetic turn” in literary scholarship and engage with the lyric, currently much debated, as well as the larger questions of poetics and the logic of genre. These crucial issues are addressed from the perspective of an American literary and philosophical tradition, and progress chronologically, starting from Melville and Emerson and moving via Dickinson, Thoreau and Hawthorne to Henry James and Wallace Stevens. This historical perspective adds the appeal of revisiting the American nineteenth-century literary and philosophical tradition, and even rewriting it.

Uncertainty is critical to economic theory, mainly because it either supports, or undermines, many significant debates within economic theory. Despite the significance of uncertainty, this book represents the first attempt to comprehensively trace the genealogy of uncertainty, which is a procedure that Nietzsche used in relation to morality; one of the subjects that become logically redundant in the absence of uncertainty. On the one hand, this logical redundancy is problematic when considered in isolation, given the practical importance of morality. On the other hand, this logical redundancy becomes even more problematic, given that, at one time, uncertainty was widely accepted as an important part of the philosophical system. Here uncertainty played a pivotal role, in terms of explaining practical decision-making. Such an appreciation of uncertainty has recently been set aside by modern philosophy, which argues quantities of human labour provide virtually all economic value. Such an explanation of economic value excludes uncertainty, the many qualitative contributions of nature, and morality, even when one acknowledged the contribution to the understanding of uncertainty, as proposed by Frank Knight, in 1921. However, in contrast to Knight, who looked toward recent philosophy so as to support the existence of uncertainty, this genealogy looks to support the significance of uncertainty by understanding the philosophy that supported the idea of uncertainty for thousands of years, before the philosophy of John Locke. Specifically, Locke excludes uncertainty from the analysis of practical decision-making in general, and from economic decision-making in particular. Accordingly, it can be anticipated that the enclosed genealogy will assist economists to more adequately develop the idea of uncertainty within economic theory.

The problem explored in The Soul of Beauty is the split in modern consciousness between the world of perception and appearance on the one hand, and the world of action and meaning on the other. We see in one way and find truth in another. The work presents this dualism as a problem in the modern sense of beauty. The intent of the book is the recovery of beauty as that which brings together such contemporary splits as perception and action, appearance and meaning, matter and spirit, subject and object. Beauty is imaged in two paradigms. The first presents beauty as a matter of appearance which holds meaning - beauty as truth. The second holds that beauty is subjective experience, which in its modern sense is divorced from knowledge and practical action - beauty as relative experience. The paradigms are formed through an imaginative and historical exploration of the tradition of beauty in Western consciousness. The prototype of the first paradigm - beauty as appearance - is seen in the goddess Aphrodite, who reflects the Greek sense of divinity in form itself. This paradigm is then founded upon the tradition of Plato in the Phaedrus and the Symposium, Plotinus, Dionysius, and Ficino. The major elements of this paradigm are depicted in beauty as: (1) source in a hierarchical universe, (2) universal mediator, (3) object of love, (4) human perception, (5) human knowledge, (6) light, and (7) unity, goodness, and being. The suggestion is made that the paradigm of beauty as appearance is relevant for psychology as a study of soul because it brings together perception and meaning. The paradigm of beauty as a subjective experience focuses historically upon beauty as a spiritual, conceptual (proportion), methodological (linear perspective), and subjective phenomenon. In the tradition of proportion and subjectivism, knowledge is gained through perception that occurs via an organizing system, such as mathematics, or a concept, such as proportion, rather than through the direct perception of appearance. Meaning is separated from perception, and the organizing system or concept, not appearance, becomes the ground of knowledge. It is suggested that this paradigm, reflected in scientific and conceptual psychology, is problematic for psychology as a study of soul. Instead, psychology conducts its endeavors in the service of identification with the divine, control over the physical world, and certainty of consciousness. The final portion of the work examines the recovery of beauty as appearance in contemporary psychology through the notion of "image" in Jung's later thought and the phenomenon of psychotherapy. The work concludes with a presentation of psychology as an aesthetic enterprise bringing together meaning and appearance, spirit and matter, art and science, subject and object.

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.