The volume represents a selection of the articles which were presented at a colloquium on new research topics in aesthetics at the Austrian Library in Pilsen in September 2010. Their authors, Czech and Austrian scholars, address various topics, ranging from the institutional history of aesthetics to the relationship between philosophical aesthetics and psychology, and from the philosophy of literature to the aesthetics of fine arts, dramatic arts, and architecture.

During the Third Reich, state‐sponsored violence was linked to scientific research on many levels. Prisoners were used as involuntary subjects for medical experiments, and body parts from victims were used in anatomy and neuropathology on a massive scale. In many cases, such specimens remained in scientific collections and were used until long after the war. International bioethics, for a long time, had little to say on the issue. Since the late 1980s, with a renewed interest in the Holocaust and other (...) Nazi crimes, a consensus has increasingly taken hold that research on human tissues and body parts from the Nazi era is inadmissible, and that such specimens should be removed from scientific collections and buried. The question of what to do with scientific data obtained from these sources has not received adequate attention, however, and remains unsolved. This paper traces the history of debates about the ethical implications of using human tissue or body parts from the Nazi period for scientific purposes, primarily in the fields of anatomy and neuropathology. It also examines how this issue, from after the war until today, influenced the establishment of legal and bioethical norms on the use of human remains from morally tainted sources, with a particular emphasis on Germany and Austria. It is argued that the use of such specimens and of data derived from them is unethical not only because of potential harms to posthumous rights of the victims, but also because such use constitutes a moral harm to society at large. (shrink)

In "Aesthetic Histories" our contributors’ shared concern is the inspiring and confounding, healthy and uncomfortable and above all inevitable relationship between history and aesthetic praxis.

Aesthetics, experiments and values -- Between cybernetics, aesthetics, and semiotics -- 'I/other' oppositions in music, aesthetics, and semiotics -- Interpersonal analysis in film music -- Janácek from an interpersonal viewpoint -- Postscript.

Against arbitrariness -- The plastic word -- The simultaneous vision -- Each of us tracks his own toad -- The bed in the background : the erotics of chance in the discourses of Czech surrealism -- The poet and the hangman.

If artworks and their aesthetic properties stand in constitutive relationships to historical context and circumstances, so that some understanding of relevant facts is involved in responding to a work, what becomes of the intuitive view that we see artworks and at least some of their aesthetic properties? This question is raised by arguments in both aesthetics and art history for the historical nature of works of art. The paper argues that the answer needs to take philosophy of perception into (...) account. The principal development that has shaped philosophy of perception in the last thirty years—explaining perceptual experience in terms of contents that represent that such-and-such is the case—is directly relevant to key arguments for the historical nature of art because contents can represent complex kinds and properties. Conceptual realism is especially well-suited for explaining perception of artworks and aesthetic properties because it emphasizes that forms of understanding—in the sense of capacities, abilities and techniques—are involved in perceptual engagement with individual objects and instances of properties. To make this case, the paper examines influential arguments for the historical nature of art and aesthetic properties by Arthur C. Danto and Kendall L. Walton; and examines art-historical discussions by Michael Baxandall, Linda Nochlin and T. J. Clark. The paper argues that the aesthetic properties of an artwork depend on human intentional uses of properties, colours and contours among them, and such uses may themselves be aesthetic. The Wittgensteinian notion of use is contextual and historical, and uses are perceptible. (shrink)

The article highlights the problem of studying historical time in terms of aesthetics and social ethics. The essence of history, according to the author, is not so much in retrospection or reflection, but in the gap between feeling and awareness. Guided by the apophatic method, the author analyzes the historiosophical views of domestic and foreign scholars and comes to the conclusion that the Soviet paradigm is true, where the only vector of human development is the liberation of labor in (...) the name of creating a bright future for the sake of all people and for everyone -/- . (shrink)

This dissertation treats two themes crucial for the emergence of modern aesthetics. First, it considers the "aesthetic consciousness," which results from a rejection of the Aristotelian mimesis doctrine, and which seeks to establish art as independent from either morality or nature. Second, it treats the "historical consciousness," required to bring about the aesthetic consciousness, and eventually to raise it to the level of a moral ideal. Thus, the dissertation begins by considering that version of the mimetic argument rejected by the (...) moderns: it treats Lessing's moral interpretation of dramatic catharsis. Lessing's moral interpretation of catharsis, it is argued, jeopardizes the harmony between nature, morality and art on which the mimetic argument rests. Thus, the second chapter treats the first decisive challenge to the mimetic tradition: Rousseau's attack on the moral interpretation of catharsis. This attack follows two steps. First, Rousseau argues that the arts efface man's natural moral character. Second, Rousseau's developmental/historical account of man supports this opposition between art, on the one hand, and nature and morality, on the other. Rousseau, thus, is seen to be the first to introduce a historical consciousness of development into discussions of art, which revises the traditional links between art, nature and morality, and established a direction for Kant and Schiller. ;In light of Lessing and Rousseau, Kant's foundation of an aesthetic consciousness can be more clearly understood. Thus, the third chapter considers Kant's argument for aesthetic by considering three themes: first, Kant's notion of autonomy; second, Kant's analysis of the disinterestedness of the aesthetic judgement; third, his account of genius as the cause of fine art. ;Kant's argument, however, suggests that the aesthetic consciousness supercedes morality. Although Kant himself never pursues this suggestion, Schiller does. Thus, the final chapter treats Schiller's attempt to retrieve the moral and the natural without sacrificing the autonomy of the fine arts. Schiller does this by bringing Rousseau's historical consciousness of the human as a development beyond nature with Kant's aesthetic consciousness. This chapter, therefore, treats three themes. First, it considers how Schiller's distinction between naive and sentimental poetry translates into historical categories: ancient and modern. Second, it shows how the goal of the sentimental poet is a "moral unity" between art and nature, the necessity of which is unknown to the naive poet. Third, it considers how, through the search for a moral unity achieved only through a historical consciousness of progress from naive to sentimental, the nature of art becomes, for the first time, a function of human history. The dissertation concludes with a summary of these themes in terms of the distinction between the good and the beautiful. (shrink)

Czech history defies dominant Western progressive historical narratives and moral evolutionism. Czech free-market democracy was defeated and betrayed three times in 1938, 1948, and 1968. The Czech Protestants were defeated in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Consequently, Czechs have a different perspective on the traditional questions of speculative philosophy of history: Where are we coming from? Where are we going? What does it mean? They ask further: where and why did history go wrong?Jan Patocka (...) , the leading Czech philosopher and the author of Charter 77 of human rights, traced the repeated historical tragedies of the Czechs to the origins of their national movement in the imperial liberation of the serfs in the eighteenth century, debating the dominant nationalistic belief in national historical continuity, leading to linguistic nationalism. Patocka accused his nation of being "petty," of low social origins and interests, unlike their elitist neighbors. Despite his obsession with aristocracies bent on any transcendence, Patocka thought that the Czechs should have fought the Nazis in 1938 for the transcendental ideal of democracy. Linguistic nationalism led the Czechs and their leaders to choose life in slavery in their Hegelian conflict with the German masters.The Czech reception of Patocka's philosophy of Czech history has been mixed. I criticize the philosophical, political, and historical shortcomings of Patocka's discussion. Contemporary Czech attitudes to their history are forgetfulness; new Czech historicism tracing a continuity from Jan Hus to Václav Havel; and a search for historical truth and philosphical understanding of history that has political implications. (shrink)

Benedetto Croce was a historian, humanist, political figure, and the foremost Italian philosopher of the early twentieth-century. A Croce Reader brings together the author's most important works across the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, history, literary criticism, and the Baroque and presents the "other" Croce that has been erased by scholarly tradition, including by Croce himself. Massimo Verdicchio traces the progress of Croce as a thinker, focusing on his philosophy of absolute historicism and its aesthetic implications. Unlike other anthologies, A (...) Croce Reader includes essays from the Aesthetics of 1902 and key studies on Vico, Hegel, and Pirandello. Verdicchio's masterful translation of the source material welcomes specialists and non-specialists alike to discover the "other" Croce for themselves. (shrink)

Ranke's work marks a turning point in the development of historiography: it changed from literature to science. Ranke's introduction of reason into historiography gave it a certain aesthetic quality, which modern historical studies have forgotten. Traditional rhetoric, or the use of language for strategic purposes, was discarded for its fictitious nature. In its place, Ranke advocated a synthesis of the scientific principles of research and the more artistic principles of writing history. This synthesis initiated the aesthetics of historiography, and (...) yielded a hidden rhetoric in the form of linguistic patterns of significance, or topoi, which give the facts of the past their sense and meaning for present-day life. Historiography, by its aesthetics, addresses its audience in a way that makes visible the mental forces which constitute the identity of the addressed people in the temporal course of their life. The postmodern recognition of rhetoric in historiography should not lead us back to premodern rhetoric but forward to a rhetoric of historiography which preserves the necessity of liberating reason in historiography and which reflects this reason not simply as a technique of research, but 'With a much wider and deeper approach to historical studies as a question of the aesthetics of historiography. (shrink)

Focusing on the work of such artists as Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Rosemary Laing, Dierk Schmidt, Hito Steyerl, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, Veronica Tello argues that their practices represent an emergent paradigm of contemporary...

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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:110 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY History of Aesthetics, Vol. I. Ancient Aesthetics. By Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz. Ed. J. Harrell. Trans. Adam and Ann Czerniawski. (The Hague-Paris: Mouton and Warszawa: PWN-Polish Scientific Publishers, 1970. Pp. vii-352.) History of Aesthetics, Vol. II. Medieval Aesthetics. By WladySlaw Tatarkiewicz. Ed. C. Barrett. Trans. R. M. Montgomery. (The Hague-Paris: Mouton and Warszawa: PWN-Polish Scientific Publishers, 1970. Pp. vii-315.) These two volumes of Tatarkiewicz' (...) monumental history of aesthetics, the third volume (to 1700) of which is now being prepared for press, have been reviewed already in the major aesthetic journals in Europe and America following their publication in Polish. Since Polish is not one of my languages, I can say nothing about the adequacy of the (rather obscured) translators and their work. The editors of both volumes have done their difficult work thoroughly, though the usual inconsistencies of spelling and such creep in. British spellings of judgement, centre, and colour, for example, appear in one part of a volume, while center, color, and judgment appear in another part. These are rare and not at all irksome details. On p. 220 of volume I, Aristotle has become a Stagiryte (sic). If the editors and translators actually re-checked all of those Greek, Polish and English texts--to say nothing of the Latin--they have earned a very large debt indeed. Again, my selective ignorance eliminates me from assessment. Tatarkiewicz' historical writing is surgical and Lacon-like. His major achievement lies in refraining from philosophical animadversions and for sticking strictly to his topic, no matter how tempting the theoretic distractions. Actually one expects a history of aesthetics to find the locus of aesthetic theory in the usual systematic frameworks of outstanding philosophers, but again Tatarkiewicz knows better than to try to provide these settings. His device is to stay exactly with the texts of authors, and to provide as much evidence for his statements as a printed work will allow. His scholarship is truly prodigious, and the work will live as reference for a long time to come. But it is more than a reference. There are some remarkable novelties included that bear mention. First of all, Tatarkiewicz' opening analysis of what must be included in a history of aesthetics is penetrating and convincing. In addition to the major "dualities" of aesthetics (beauty-art, subjective-objective aesthetics, psychological-sociological aesthetics, descriptive-prescriptive aesthetics, etc.) he simply accepts the necessity to find evidence of aesthetic history among statements by artists, among the inexplicit and inarticulate art works, in the vox populi and cultural actions of people. Thus the "evidence" he adduces will often displease the theoretical purist. Next, one is impressed by the great antiquity of some key issues that are being avidly pursued today. What is impressive is not that they are being repeated now, but that modern writers so rarely recognize (or acknowledge) their historical sources---or seem to care to. A careful study of this history might do much to reduce the growing volume in aesthetics----or at least to change the direction of emphasis significantly. One is surprised to note which figures emerge as of first rate importance in the history of aesthetics, important for different reasons. These figures stand out: Democritus, Plotinus, Aristotle, Vitruvius, the Pseudo-Dionysius, Johannes Scotus Erigena, to select only a few. The first Polish philosopher, Vitelo, anticipates much modern psychologizing in advancing the work of Alhazen. Ockham, not so surprising, contributes major advances, as do Augustine and Aquinas. BOOK REVIEWS 111 One fascinating item is the author's extensive account of the most violent and extended controversy in the history of aesthetics---the veneration of images and the disputes between the Iconoclasts and the Iconophiles. This sometimes physical battle raged for over 100 years! The Byzantine society, obviously, took art seriously. Tatarkiewicz' great labor is an object lesson in historiography and bibliographic technique. At one and the same time it demonstrates how much of value remains to be discovered by careful adherence to the detail of scholarship, while it also displays how much fruitful scholarship depends upon a brilliant and profoundly informed mind. Such a work, in short, could only have descended from a fully mature... (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a growing anti-feminist, conservative movement across many parts of the world known as the anti-gender movement. This movement has been especially strong in Central Eastern Europe, where anti-gender actors have framed ‘gender’ as a static, foreign concept imported from ‘the West’ and destructive to ‘traditional’ societies. Utilising a postcolonial feminist approach, I examine the concept of ‘gender’ in Czechia, drawing attention to the role played by Czech academics, activists and policymakers in negotiating the (...) use of the term ‘gender’. This article traces the history of the term from the 1990s when ‘gender’ was first introduced to a Czech academic audience, through public seminars and lectures hosted by the Prague Gender Studies Centre, to the present-day inclusion of gender mainstreaming discourse in Czech policy documents. I reveal that ‘gender’ is not a timeless, clearly defined, fixed term wholly imported from ‘the West’ but rather a concept with a variable and complicated history. Thus, this crucial term, first developed in Anglo-academia, is not uncontested or uncritically accepted, contrary to the claims made by anti-gender actors. The findings presented in this article hold implications critical to transnational feminist dialogue and activism during the current period of growing global anti-feminist sentiment. (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)

The paper describes the Czech project in the history of mathematics which was initiated at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University in Prague at the end of the eighties of the 20th century. Its main aim is to map the development of mathematical research in the Czech lands in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The main result of this project is the production of monographs. These (...) chart out the life and work of some prominent Czech personalities-mathematicians who have had substantial influence on the development of Czech mathematics. The aim of the project, the structure of the monographs and the general method are discussed in the paper. (shrink)

New books by Caroline Arscott and Mike Sanders return to the vexed problem of Marxism and aesthetics. For some time, there has been an intense suspicion of aesthetic thought in Marxist circles, where it is perceived as an ideology perpetrating a false resolution of contradictions. Arscott and Sanders understand aesthetics to be at the heart of the communist imagination: Arscott offers a detailed investigation of how the body is inhabited in the art of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones; Sanders considers (...) the figure of the poet in Chartism as a spur to radicalism. Engaging with these books, this review calls for a Marxist reconsideration of aesthetic thought and artistic practice. (shrink)

The history of aesthetics, like the histories of other sciences, may be treated in a two-fold manner: as the history of the men who created the field of study, or as the history of the questions that have been raised and resolved in the course of its pursuit. The earlier History of Aesthetics (3 volumes, 1960-68, English-language edition 1970-74) by the author of the present book was a history of men, of writers and artists who (...) in centuries past have spoken up concerning beauty and art, form and crea tivity. The present book returns to the same subject, but treats it in a different way: as the history of aesthetic questions, concepts, theories. The matter of the two books, the previous and the present, is in part the same; but only in part: for the earlier book ended with the 17th century, while the present one brings the subject up to our own times. And from the 18th century to the 20th much happened in aesthetics; it was only in that period that aesthetics achieved recognition as a separate science, received a name of its own, and produced theories that early scholars and artists had never dreamed of. (shrink)

Este artículo ofrece una aproximación al papel de la historia en los proyectos narrativos de Juan José Saer y Germán Espinosa. Para el caso del primer autor, se plantea un análisis crítico de la novela El entenado, debido a su particular naturaleza metaficcional, así como de algunos de los textos recogidos en su libro de ensayos El concepto de ficción (1997). En lo que respecta a Germán Espinosa, el paralelo será establecido primordialmente a partir de su ensayística, sin olvidar, desde (...) luego, las oportunas reflexiones que sobre la historia y la literatura aparecen contenidas en un notable acervo de entrevistas y en su extenso libro de memorias. This article offers an approach to the role of history in the narrative projects of Juan José Saer and Germán Espinosa. In the case of the first author, this article poses a critical analysis of the novel The Step Brother, given its particular metafictional nature, as well as some of the texts compiled in his book of essays The Concept of Fiction (1997). With regard to Germán Espinosa, a parallel will be drawn primarily with his essays, without forgetting, of course, the proper reflections upon history and literature that appear in his remarkable body of extensive interviews and memoirs. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Now available in English for the first time, The Visibility of the Image explores the development of an influential aesthetic tradition through the work of six figures. Analysing their contribution to the progress of formal aesthetics, from its origins in Germany in the 1880s to semiotic interpretations in America a century later, the six chapters cover: Robert Zimmermann (1824-1898), the first to separate aesthetics and metaphysics and approach aesthetics along the lines of formal logic, providing a purely syntactic way of (...) using signs, regardless of objective content; Alois Riegl (1858-1905), who went on to further develop aesthetics on the model of formal logic, creating a theory of style in response to Zimmermann's call for an aesthetics oriented toward formal logic; Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), who represents a step toward an understanding of consciousness by using pictures as cognitive tools; Konrad Fiedler (1841-1895), the Saxon philosopher who considered the possibility that some kinds of images are made and viewed not for what they show, but for their visibility's sake alone; Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), responsible for taking up the connections between the problems of reducing the range of potential meanings and contexts of a given image down to just the picture surface; Charles William Morris (1901-1979), who set out to establish whether a picture with no objective reference, such as an abstract painting, still counts as a sign, and if so, in what sense. Bringing these thinkers together and interlinking their ideas, Lambert Wiesing presents an engaging history of formal aesthetics, while reconstructing the philosophical foundations for the appearance of new image forms in the 20th century, including the video-clip, abstract collage, digital simulation and virtual reality. Using this original approach, The Visibility of the Image introduces the rise of modern image theory and provides a valuable account of our engagement with pictures in the 21st century. (shrink)

A history of music aesthetics from Antiquity to the present day. Fubini considers musical thought in terms of its relationship to philosophy, medicine, astronomy, mathematics and teaching in the period up to the Enlightenment. The second half of the book concentrates on key issues in contemporary music aesthetics, placing them in the perspective of the Enlightenment and of 19th-century philosophers.".

Applying Aesthetics to Everyday Life surveys current debates in the field of everyday aesthetics, examining its history, methodology and intersections with cognate research areas. Lisa Giombini and Adrián Kvokacka bring together an international team of renowned scholars who are shaping the present and future of the discipline. They demonstrate how the historical origins of everyday aesthetics emerges across the history of Western aesthetic thought, from Renaissance thinkers to the modern German philosophers Baumgarten, Kant and Heidegger. Chapters shed light (...) on the field's methodological underpinnings, tracing its theoretical foundations back to epistemology and ethics and assess the potential of everyday aesthetics as a theoretical tool. They reveal its interdisciplinary nature and how it assists various fields of inquiry, including environmental and urban aesthetics, conservation ethics and the philosophy of art. Through fresh explorations of its origins, background and contemporary developments, this collection advances a new definition of everyday aesthetics and provides a cutting edge reflection on the world we inhabit today. (shrink)

_Rediscovering Aesthetics_ brings together prominent international voices from art history, philosophy, and artistic practice to discuss the current role of aesthetics within and across their disciplines. Following a period in which theories and histories of art, art criticism, and artistic practice seemed to focus exclusively on political, social, or empirical interpretations of art, aesthetics is being rediscovered both as a vital arena for discussion and a valid interpretive approach outside its traditional philosophical domain. This volume is distinctive, because it (...) provides a selection of significant but divergent positions. The diversity of the views presented here demonstrates that a critical rethinking of aesthetics can be undertaken in a variety of ways. The contributions open a transdisciplinary debate from which a new field of aesthetics may begin to emerge. Contributors include: Claire Bishop, Diarmuid Costello, Paul Crowther, Arthur Danto, Nicholas Davey, Thierry de Duve, James Elkins, Francis Halsall, Michael Ann Holly, Julia Jansen, Michael Kelly, Robert Morris, Tony O'Connor, Peter Osborne, Adrian Piper, David Raskin, Carolee Schneemann, Richard Shiff, Wolfgang Welsch, and Richard Woodfield. (shrink)