Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

David Roberts has always had a keen, sharp and even mischievous eye for paradox, for pointing to what used to be termed in Hegelianese, ‘contradictions’ or ‘dialectics’ of modern society and its forms. Roberts’ keen eye has focused on the paradoxes (rather than negative dialectics) of aesthetic modernity and the forms that these paradoxes have taken within the historical time consciousness and self-understanding of modernity. This paper will suggest – although only sketchily and in outline – that Roberts’ keen (...) eye notices and reconstructs three paradoxical models or forms of aesthetic modernity: 1. The total work of art of aesthetic modernism; 2. the contemporary postmodern plurality of the present which is captured as musealization; 3. interpretation, play and humour as the open acceptance of the contingency and paradoxes of the present. (shrink)

György Márkus, as a leading member of the Budapest School led by György Lukács in Hungary, is closely concerned with aesthetics. His final unfinished writings in political exile in Sydney were focused on the question of modern cultural autonomy. From the 1960s to the new century, from Budapest to Sydney in Australia, he established a new form of Neo-Marxist aesthetics on the basis of critical theory drawn from Lukács to the Frankfurt School. His aesthetics includes three dimensions: an aesthetics (...) of praxis, a reconstruction of Lukács’s aesthetics and a theory of aesthetic modernity. His aesthetics is characteristic of analytic philosophy, especially ‘categorical analysis’. It shifts from philosophical aesthetics in the Hungarian period, which is based on an ontological foundation, that is, materialist phenomenology, to social or sociological aesthetics in the Australian period concerning social modernity, institution, constitution, culture, and so on. This is a turn from a philosophical paradigm to a structural one as regards aesthetics, which indicates a break with Lukács’s late return in the early 1960s to Hegelian inspired Ontology of Social Being. Márkus is strictly and essentially an essayist in fragments, who distinguishes himself from the other members of the Budapest School in this way. Ironically, this genre is once again influenced by the young Lukács’s aesthetics. (shrink)

Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity analyzes Nietzsche's response to the aesthetic tradition, tracing in particular the complex relationship between the work and thought of Nietzsche, Kant, and Hegel. Focusing in particular on the critical role of negation and sublimity in Nietzsche's account of art, it explores his confrontation with modernity and his attempt to posit a revitalized artistic practice as the counter-movement to modern nihilism. Drawing on the full range of his published and unpublished writings, together with his comments on (...) figures as diverse as Wagner, Zola, Delacroix, and Laurence Sterne, it highlights the extent to which Nietzsche counters the culture of his own time with a dialectical notion of aesthetic interpretation and practice. As such, Nietzsche the dialectician articulates a position that proves to be intimately connected to the negative dialects of Theodor Adorno. (shrink)

Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity analyses Nietzsche's response to the aesthetic tradition, tracing in particular the complex relationship between the work and thought of Nietzsche, Kant and Hegel. Focusing in particular on the critical role of negation and sublimity in Nietzsche's account of art, it explores his confrontation with modernity and his attempt to posit a revitalized artistic practice as the counter-movement to modern nihilism. Drawing on the full range of his published and unpublished writings, together with his comments on (...) figures as diverse as Wagner, Zola, Delacroix and Laurence Sterne, it highlights the extent to which Nietzsche counters the culture of his own time with a dialectical notion of aesthetic interpretation and practice. As such, Nietzsche the dialectician articulates a position that proves to be intimately connected to the negative dialects of Theodor Adorno. (shrink)

Ambitious in scope and innovative in concept, this book offers an overview and critique of the conventions surrounding artistic creativity and intellectual endeavour since the outset of 'the broader modernity', which the author sees as beginning with the decline of feudalism and the Church. As a work of intellectual history, it suggests that art and the conventions associated with the artistic constitute a secular institution that has supplanted pre-Reformation theology. Beginning with Luther, Calvin, and Shakespeare and culminating with the Kantian (...) notion of the artist as an 'original genius,' the author reconstructs the steps by which art and creative activity were installed as the redemptive values of a modernity. In the process, the author reads passages from Plato, Proust, Donne, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kleist, Rousseau, Melville, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, as well as the graphic works of Holbein, Dürer, Mondrian, and Rothko. (shrink)

Johanna Charlotte Unzer (1725–1782), born Ziegler, is the author of the first metaphysical treatise intended specifically for women. In the preface of this treatise, published in 1751, she justifies her ‘unhabitual’ enterprise, emphasizing that her intention is not to instruct but only to please her female readership. A closer glance, however, reveals a genuine philosophical intention and an active participation in the debate on popular philosophy and aesthetics in Halle. Challenging an all-too narrow and all-too mathematical conception of practical philosophy, (...) Unzer advocates a dynamic model of philosophy as a love of wisdom, and a philosophy of beauty, poetry, and aesthetics. Fundamentally, these are ancient and mostly Platonic ideas, and among her intellectual circle Unzer stands out as a modern Diotima. But on account of their distinctively modern premises, these ideas likewise take a particularly modern shape, and they illustrate a certain Platonic reversal incipient in Wolffianism itself. (shrink)

Proceedings of a conference held in Sept. 2009 in London, England.

A comprehensive reassessment of the concept of mimesis in the history of ancient Greek aesthetics and philosophy of art, with particular attention to Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy, and neoplatonism. There is also a wide-ranging review of arguments pro and contra the idea of artistic mimesis from the Renaissance to modern literar theory. The book challenges standard accounts in numerous respects and builds a new dialectical model with which to make sense of the entire history of mimeticist thinking in aesthetics.

The book explores the forbidden feelings of beauty, admiration, or satisfaction before instances of terror and human pain from eighteenth-century natural disasters to twenty-first-century terrorist destruction. It explores the fascination felt by the subject witnessing major disasters directly or in a mediated fashion. Emmanouil Aretoulakis' makes the challenging proposition that there is, paradoxically, an ethics in the aesthetic appraisal of terror.

In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy, nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect (...) to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world. (shrink)

Mimesis is one of the oldest, most fundamental concepts in Western aesthetics. This book offers a new, searching treatment of its long history at the center of theories of representational art: above all, in the highly influential writings of Plato and Aristotle, but also in later Greco-Roman philosophy and criticism, and subsequently in many areas of aesthetic controversy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Combining classical scholarship, philosophical analysis, and the history of ideas--and ranging across discussion of poetry, painting, (...) and music--Stephen Halliwell shows with a wealth of detail how mimesis, at all stages of its evolution, has been a more complex, variable concept than its conventional translation of "imitation" can now convey. Far from providing a static model of artistic representation, mimesis has generated many different models of art, encompassing a spectrum of positions from realism to idealism. Under the influence of Platonist and Aristotelian paradigms, mimesis has been a crux of debate between proponents of what Halliwell calls "world-reflecting" and "world-simulating" theories of representation in both the visual and musico-poetic arts. This debate is about not only the fraught relationship between art and reality but also the psychology and ethics of how we experience and are affected by mimetic art. Moving expertly between ancient and modern traditions, Halliwell contends that the history of mimesis hinges on problems that continue to be of urgent concern for contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

Broad in its geographic scope and yet grounded in original archival research, this book situates the inception of modern aesthetic theory – the philosophical analysis of art and beauty - in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose. Simon Grote presents seminal aesthetic theories of the German and Scottish Enlightenments as outgrowths of a quintessentially Enlightenment project: the search for a natural 'foundation of morality' and a means of helping naturally self-interested human beings transcend their own (...) self-interest. This conclusion represents an important alternative to the standard history of aesthetics as a series of preludes to the achievements of Immanuel Kant, as well as a reinterpretation of several canonical figures in the German and Scottish Enlightenments. It also offers a foundation for a transnational history of the Enlightenment without the French philosophes at its centre, while solidly endorsing historians' growing reluctance to call the Enlightenment a secularising movement. (shrink)

A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle's defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato's famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact - precisely (...) what Plato criticized - and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. This three-volume set tells how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by both the best-known and lesser-known aestheticians of modern times, focusing on Britain, France and Germany in the eighteenth century; Germany and Britain in the nineteenth; and Germany, Britain and the United States in the twentieth. (shrink)

An analysis of the development and range of Adorno's aesthetics, incorporating the influence of other thinkers and musicians.

ABSTRACT George Berkeley is usually not discussed in the canonical histories of modern aesthetics. Similarly, Berkeley scholars do not seem to have paid attention to his possible contribution to modern aesthetics. Berkeley exploited certain theoretical potentials of the emerging aesthetic experience that was invented and formulated especially by his contemporaries like Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Lord Shaftesbury. He applied these elements in shaping a theologico-aesthetic language in the very same period when Francis Hutcheson and Alexander Baumgarten wrote (...) their widely acclaimed first aesthetic theories in Europe. At the same time, Berkeley advances the linguistic and religious aspects of the modern aesthetic experience not in his theoretical, but in his pragmatical and popularizing writings. Instead of relying on a purely rational theology or a negative theology, he offers an ‘aesthetic’ one based on the model of the beautiful and the sublime. Aesthetically, this meant a re-interpretation and re-configuration of the duality of the beautiful and the sublime – decades before Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry. (shrink)

Aesthetics and Modernity brings together Agnes Heller's most recent essays on aesthetic genres such as painting, music, literature and comedy, aesthetic reception and embodiment in the context of the continuing pitfalls of modernity. The essays also throw light on Heller's theories of values, emotions and feelings, embodiment, and modernity. Those with an interest in philosophy, critical theory, aesthetics, and social theory will find this collection illuminating, and an essential addition to any philosophy bookshelf.

A clear and concise account of the relationship between aesthetics and philosophy in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the development of aesthetics as a discipline in its own right.

Originally published in 1988, this book provides a comprehensive anthology in English of the major texts of German literary and aesthetic theory between Lessing ...

All Arts In India Owe Their Roots To The Theoretical Structure Developed By Bharatamuni In His Celebrated Work Natyasastra. His Theory Of Beauty Is Known As The Theory Of Rasa. The Present Volume Has Shown How The Insight Of Bharata Was Developed By The Classical Scholars From Abhinavagupta To Jagannatha Who Propounded The Theories With Names Like Rasa, Alamkara, Riti, Vakrokti, Dhvani Etc. To Employ The Theory Of Beauty From Natya (Drama) To Kavya (Poetry).

Using theories by Pierre Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School that causally link art to class interests, this article examines the differential development of modern architecture in the United States and central Europe during the early 20th century. Modern architecture was the aesthetic expression of technocracy, a movement of the new class of professionals, managers and engineers to place itself at the center of rationalized capitalism. The aesthetic of modernism, which glorified technology and instrumental reason, was weak and undeveloped (...) in the US, because this class defined by its cultural capital was quickly integrated into modernizing corporations, where it was compelled to cater to the emerging mass market and drop its distinctive aesthetic. Modern architecture emerged mainly in interwar central Europe, because here industrial modernization was blocked, forcing the new class to pursue an alliance with state managers pushing modernization. Thus unencumbered by the demands of the mass market, modern architects were free to express their machine aesthetic in state-financed housing projects. (shrink)

Herbert Marcuse is a thinker associated with one of the most radical and totalising critiques of modernity ever produced. Marcuse maintains that contemporary capitalist society is a one-dimensional prison that is capable of perpetuating itself by incorporating any criticism into its logic. Despite this totalisation, Marcuse insists that the realm of aesthetics is capable of escaping the logic of modern capitalism and establishing an alternative society that is grounded in an alternative non-repressive logic. However, it is argued that not (...) only does Marcuse ground this transformation in a specific economic formation thereby ensuring that it is economics not aestheticsthat grounds this social transformation, but his argument is based on a simplistic understanding of the relation between the aesthetic as a means of affecting individual transformation and the aesthetic affecting social transformation. (shrink)

A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle's defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato's famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact - precisely (...) what Plato criticized - and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. This three-volume set tells how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by both the best-known and lesser-known aestheticians of modern times, focusing on Britain, France and Germany in the eighteenth century; Germany and Britain in the nineteenth; and Germany, Britain and the United States in the twentieth. (shrink)

Truth, semblance, reconciliation -- The dialectic of modernism and postmodernism -- Art and industrial production -- Ethics and dialogue.

The book addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the nascent twentieth century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas---cultural, social, and personal---associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development (...) of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This essay argues that Antony and Cleopatra’s pitting of Egypt against Rome is a cipher of aesthetic resistance to modern rationality. The coordinates are Adornian. Antony’s and Cleopatra’s complex identities elude the disenchanting, nominalist machinery in which diffuse indeterminacy necessitates conceptual imposition. Here, the individuals are essentially dramatized: sensate, embodied selves composed and expressed in relations of passionate recognition. The lovers’ deaths, and especially Cleopatra’s self-conscious theatre, rewrite the ascetic, dominative, and pseudo-theatrical rationality of Octavian Rome. The protest, the (...) passion and singularity, lives mainly through its expressive emphases – such as hyperbole – and the re-functioning of the very dominative roles and norms being opposed. This reflects the restricted but critical – aesthetic – status of early modern drama, and specifies its opposition to the deepening attack on sensate knowing in its world. (shrink)

In Mao’s era, China’s policy makers and intellectuals viewed aesthetic experience and thought as handmaidens in the service of the political order. As China opened up and engaged more intensely with modern traditions of the West, aesthetic thinkers such as Li Zehou critiqued the subordinated role of aesthetics and reasserted notions of aesthetic autonomy and liberal humanism, calling for the separation of arts and literature from political, social, and moral concerns. This truncated aesthetic view stems from a modernist version (...) of Western aesthetics that favors sense and sensibility as the sole sources of aesthetic value—a view that considerably diminishes the horizon of concerns inherent in traditional and modern Chinese aesthetic thoughts. This article seeks to recapture a repoliticized aesthetics by considering the ways early twentieth-century Chinese thinkers linked aesthetic thoughts to moral and political considerations in the reconstruction of China as a modern nation-state. Instead of transcendent, pure aesthetics over and above political processes and social experience, prominent aesthetic thinkers like Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei, and Lu Xun invoked traditional Chinese aesthetic legacies and reconsidered intimate and necessary ties between aesthetic categories and broader concerns about cultural crises, moral reform, and nation building. (shrink)

The rapid acceleration of societal change has subjected contemporary individuals to prolonged periods of diverse pressures, leading to substantial psychological strain, resulting in anxiety, depression, and compromised mental well-being. Within this context, the home has evolved into a vital refuge for modern individuals, offering both physical and psychological respite. Through experimental intervention, this study examines two distinct residential groups: those adhering to traditional housing and those residing in characteristic folk houses, specifically Gannan Hakka architecture. Analysing the psychological state of (...) contemporary individuals and integrating Gannan Hakka architectural elements into folk house design through a psychologically informed approach, this research aims to enhance residents’ aesthetic experiences and alleviate psychological distress. The study involved 120 volunteers with varying psychological stress levels, categorised into characteristic and traditional folk house groups. Psychological assessments evaluated stress, self-efficacy, and quality of life. Findings reveal significantly improved psychological well-being, self-efficacy, and quality of life among the characteristic residential group, affirming the benefits of Gannan Hakka architecture integration. This research underscores the importance of addressing modern individuals’ environmental needs and proposes the integration of Gannan Hakka cultural elements into residential design to enhance well-being. Contribution: This study demonstrates the application of Hakka culture in contemporary housing profoundly influences residents’ lives, enabling both relaxation and a deeper cultural connection. This integration facilitates a comprehensive understanding of Hakka culture, promoting its preservation. Notably recognised for hospitality and diligence, Hakka culture enhances individuals’ appreciation of tradition, fostering physical and mental rejuvenation. These findings offer valuable insights for practical theology scholars and practitioners exploring the impact of religious aspects on modern residential design from a psychological perspective. (shrink)

The book is a reflection over how art functions in late modernity. It emphasizes processes of fictionalizing reality and exposes, how phenomenology can be used to extract this problem on a foundation of aesthetics. It is a panoramic outlook over existing views, but also a self-sufficient theoretical proposal.

Philosophers working on aesthetics have paid considerable attention to art and artists of the early modern period. Yet early modern artistic practices scarcely figure in recent work on the emergence of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy over the course the eighteenth century. This book addresses that gap, elaborating the extent to which artworks and practices of the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries were accompanied by an immense range of discussions about the arts and their relation to one (...) another. (shrink)