This chapter contains sections titled: On Definition Theories of Gaming A Definition of Videogames.

This second edition features a new 48-page Afterword--1980 updating Professor Beardsley's classic work.

IN THE winter and spring of 1031,1 was invited to give a series of ten lectures at Harvard University. The subject chosen was the Philosophy of Art; the lectures are the origin of the present volume. The Lectureship was founded in memory of William James and I esteem it a great honor to have this book associated even indirectly with his distinguished name. It is a pleasure, also, te recall, in connection with the lectures, the unvarying kindness and hospitality of (...) my colleagues in the department of philosophy at Harvard. I am somewhat embarrassed in an effort to acknowledge indebtedness to other writers on the subject. Some aspects of it may be inferred from authors mentioned or quoted in the text. I have read on the subject for many years, however, more or less widely in English literature, somewhat less in French and still less in German, and I have absorbed much from sources which I cannot now directly recall. Moreover, my obligations to a number of writers are much greater than might be gathered from allusions to them in the volume itself. My indebtedness to those who have helped me directly can be more easily stated. Dr. Joseph Ratner gave me a number of valuable references. Dr. Meyer Schapiro was good enough to read the twelfth and thirteenth chapters and to make suggestions which I have freely adopted. Irwin Edman read a large part of the book in manuscript and I owe much to his suggestions and criticism. Sidney Hook read many of the chapters, and their present form is largely the result of discussions with him; this statement is especially true of the chapters on criticism and the last chapter. My greatest indebtedness is to Dr. A. C. Barnes. The chaptershave been gone over one by one with him, and yet what I owe to his comments and suggestions on this account is but a small measure of my debt. I have had the benefit of con versations with him through a period of years, many of which occurred in the presence of the unrivaled collection of pictures he has assembled. The influence of these conversations, together with that of his books, has been a chief factor in shapingmy own thinking about the philosophy of esthetics. Whatever is sound in this volume is due more than I can say to the great educational work carried on in the Barnes Foundation. That work is of a pioneer quality comparable to the best that has been done in any field during the present generation, that of science not ex cepted. I should be glad to think of this volume as one phase of the widespread influence the Foundation is exercising. I am indebted to the Barnes Foundation for permission to reproduce a number of illustrations and to Barbara and Willard Morgan for the photographs from which the reproductions were made. J. D. (shrink)

This book offers an introduction to the way art is perceived, interpreted, and felt and approaches these mindful events from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.

What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthes's answers to these questions constitute "perhaps for the first time in the history of criticism... not only a poetics of reading... but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading.... Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we (...) must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge." --Richard Howard. (shrink)

The work of the artist and the science of vision may seem distantly related as subjects.