Kristeller's article ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’ is a classic statement of the view, now widely adopted but rarely examined, that aesthetics became possible only in the eighteenth-century with the emergence of the fine arts. I wish to contest this view, for three reasons. Firstly, Kristeller's historical account can be questioned; alternative and equally plausible accounts are available. Secondly, ‘the modern system of the arts’ appears to have been neither a (...) system nor an agreed upon entity, but only a historical construct of Kristeller's own making that matches up with no known historical reality. Thirdly, while the concept of the fine arts existed in the eighteenth century, the assumption that it had an impact on the rise of aesthetic theory remains unproven and unnecessary. A more satisfactory account of aesthetic thought in antiquity can be given, once the ‘fine-arts’ objection has been cleared away. (shrink)

Kristeller's article ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’ is a classic statement of the view, now widely adopted but rarely examined, that aesthetics became possible only in the eighteenth-century with the emergence of the fine arts. I wish to contest this view, for three reasons. Firstly, Kristeller's historical account can be questioned; alternative and equally plausible accounts are available. Secondly, ‘the modern system of the arts’ appears to have been neither a (...) system nor an agreed upon entity, but only a historical construct of Kristeller's own making that matches up with no known historical reality. Thirdly, while the concept of the fine arts existed in the eighteenth century, the assumption that it had an impact on the rise of aesthetic theory remains unproven and unnecessary. A more satisfactory account of aesthetic thought in antiquity can be given, once the ‘fine-arts’ objection has been cleared away. (shrink)

Abstract…observations of skylfull pylotts is the onlye waye to bring it in rule; for it passeth the reach of naturall philosophy. – Michael Gabriel, 1576 (Collinson, 1867, p. 30)Abstract The tension between empirical data and formal theory pervades the entire history of geomagnetism, from the Middle Ages up to the present day. This paper explores its early-modern history (1500–1800), using a hybrid approach: it applies a methodological framework used in modern geophysics to interpret early-modern developments, exploring to (...) what extent formal conjectures shaped observation and vice versa. A range of pertinent case studies supports classification of this entire period as proto-scientific, characterised by the initial formation of theories being largely disconnected from observational constraints, and their subsequent evolution being advanced primarily by their empirical falsification, and not necessarily associated with the introduction of an alternative. The few exceptional instances of purely data-driven discovery were essentially due to an improved signal-to-noise ratio. (shrink)

L’histoire du Kronprinzenpalais, dans sa lente émergence vers la reconnaissance de son existence, ainsi que du rôle majeur qu’il joua sur la scène muséale allemande, en tant que premier musée d’art moderne, demeure étroitement lié au sort de son unique conservateur, Ludwig Justi. Cet article s’attache à restituer les innovations didactiques et muséographiques menées par Justi, les très nombreuses expositions temporaires aussi bien que l’enrichissement des collections, de même que la fondation de la revue Museum der Gegenwart, lesquels eurent un (...) rayonnement sur l’ensemble des musées d’art allemands. (shrink)

This work tells the story of the rise of the modern German environmental imagination, with particular emphasis on its narrative and visual components.

Transparence et opacité fut écrit à la fin des années 1960 et parut pour la première fois en 1975. Cet essai majeur sur les fondements théoriques de l'art moderne avait disparu des librairies depuis près de vingt ans. Partant d'une analyse de la théorie de l'art de Konrad Fiedler, qui écrivit entre 1876 et 1895, Philippe Junod se livre en fait à une archéologie de la modernité et envisage l'ensemble de la théorie de l'art et de l'esthétique depuis Platon et (...) Aristote. Il établit que l'idée d'art moderne naît quand sont abandonnées aussi bien la voie du réalisme que celle de la peinture d'idées, le naturalisme comme le symbolisme, pour en venir à une troisième voie, celle de l'opacité où l'œuvre opère dans son autonomie, sans transparence ni référence, en faisant prévaloir les droits de la vision et du visible sur ceux de la reconnaissance et du déchiffrement. À un moment où le moderne apparaît comme un moment de l'histoire de l'art, l'enquête riche et minutieuse de Philippe Junod permet de comprendre les questionnements et les enjeux de toute une époque dont nous sortons à peine. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper I explore a recently conceived notion of a modern liberal arts education which brings the ancient Aristotelian search for first principles into a modern metaphysics of Kant and Hegel. In the second part I examine two ways in which this modern conception of a liberal arts education intervenes in important social and political debates in Western culture. My concluding comments centre on the belief that twenty-first-century liberal arts education needs to (...) provide more resistance to a culture of capitalism by orienting itself to the tradition from a modern standpoint. (shrink)

Art In Its Time takes a close look at the way in which art has become integral to the everyday 'ordinary' life of modern society. It explores the prevalent notion of art as transcending its historical moment, and argues that art cannot be separated from the everyday as it often provides material to represent social struggles and class, to explore sexuality, and to think about modern industry and our economic relationships.

For Malraux, modernity in art is not only about modern art; it is also about the birth of what he aptly terms “the first universal world of art.” This event was a consequence of the process of metamorphosis which is central to Malraux’s account of the relationship between art and time. The article explains this event, noting also that modern aesthetics has not provided an explanation. (This is the English version of the final which will be in French.).

Sixteen of the 20th century's leading artistic innovators talk forcefully about their work — from Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger's 1912 presentation of cubist theory to Henry Moore's comments, three decades later, on sculpture and primitive art. Four newly added essays by Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, El Lissitzky, and Fernand Léger.

Passivité et création est un livre ancré dans une double pratique: la peinture et la philosophie. Sa composition s'inspire du trajet suivi par Maurice Merleau-Ponty dans l'élaboration de son cours au Collège de France de 1954-1955: "Le problème de la passivité: le sommeil, l'inconscient, la mémoire". A partir de l'étude de la pratique de certains artistes et de l'analyse de textes philosophiques, il s'agit de décrire une passivité de forme particulière, une passivité "opérante", corrélative d'une forme dynamique de la subjectivité. (...) Cette passivité, "dimension d'un mouvement dont je suis le médiateur, mais qui d'une certaine façon se fait en moi sans moi, à mon insu", de nombreux artistes du 20. siècle s'en sont faits les témoins (Arp, Bacon, Dubuffet, Klee, Michaux, Rauschenberg, Schwitters, Spoerri, Nicolas de Staël, Bram Van Velde...), appelant aussi cette expérience "inconscient", "hasard", "imprévu", "surprise". Dans la perspective esquissée ici, l'accès aux autres cesse alors d'être un "problème". L'autre a déjà sa part dans mon expérience la plus singulière. Mon expérience peut devenir expérience pour d'autres parce qu'elle s'inscrit au sein d'une dimension phénoménologique qui n'est ni de moi ni d'autrui, mais commune. Quel est le rôle de cette passivité structurelle dans la création comprise comme transformation de la vision et du monde lui-même? Et comment peut-on en retourner la fragilité en pouvoir? (shrink)

Annotation. In this volume, the third in his classic series of texts surveying the history of art theory, Moshe Barasch traces the hidden patterns and interlocking themes in the study of art, from Impressionism to Abstract Art. Barasch details the immense social changes in the creation, presentation, and reception of art which have set the history of art theory on a vertiginous new course: the decreased relevance of workshops and art schools; the replacement of the treatise by the critical review; (...) and the interrelation of new modes of scientific inquiry with artistic theory and praxis. The consequent changes in the ways in which critics as well as artists conceptualized paintings and sculptures were radical, marked by an obsession with intense, immediate sensory experiences, psychological reflection on the effects of art, and a magnetic pull to the exotic and alien, making for the most exciting and fertile period in the history of art criticism. (shrink)

The world is awash in bullshit, and we're drowning in it. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. These days, calling bullshit is a noble act. Based on Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West's popular course at the University of Washington, Calling Bullshit is a modern handbook to the art of skepticism. Bergstrom, a computational biologist, and West, an information scientist, catalogue bullshit in its many forms, explaining and offering (...) readers the tools to see through the obfuscations, deliberate and careless, that dominate every realm of our lives. They instruct readers to ask: Who is saying it? How do they know? What do they have to gain by persuading me? Are the numbers or results too good or too dramatic to be true? Is the claim comparing like with like or apples and oranges? Is it confirming your personal bias? In this lively guide to everything from misleading statistics to "fake news," Bergstrom and West help you recognize bullshit whenever and wherever you encounter it--in data, in conversation, even within yourself--and explain it to your crystal-loving aunt or casually racist uncle. Now more than ever, calling bullshit is crucial to a properly functioning community, whether it be a circle of friends, a network of academics, or the citizenry of a nation. (shrink)

The first sustained phenomenological approach to modern art, taking a new approach and drawing upon an unsual selection of thinkers.

Contents Acknowledgements vii Illustrations ix Preface xi Further Bibliography of A.C. Crombie xiii 1 Designed in the Mind: Western visions of Science, Nature and Humankind 1 2 The Western Experience of Scientific Objectivity 13 3 Historical Perceptions of Medieval Science 31 4 Robert Grosseteste 39 5 Roger Bacon [with J.D. North] 51 6 Infinite Power and the Laws of Nature: A Medieval Speculation 67 7 Experimental Science and the Rational Artist in Early Modern Europe 89 8 Mathematics and Platonism (...) in the Sixteenth-Century Italian Universities and in Jesuit Educational Policy 115 9 Sources of Galileo Galilei’s Early Natural Philosophy 149 10 The Jesuits and Galileo’s Ideas of Science and of Nature [with A. Carugo] 165 11 Galileo and the Art of Rhetoric [with A. Carugo] 231 12 Galileo Galilei: A Philosophical Symbol 257 13 Alexandre Koyré and Great Britain: Galileo and Mersenne 263 14 Marin Mersenne and the Origins of Language 275 15 Le Corps à la Renaissance: Theories of Perceiver and Perceived in Hearing 291 16 Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the History of Optics: i, Alhazen and the Medieval Tradition; ii, Kepler and Descartes 301 17 Contingent Expectation and Uncertain Choice: Historical Contexts of Arguments from Probabilities 357 18 P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis, F.R.S. : Précurseur du Transformisme 407 19 The Public and Private Faces of Charles Darwin 429 20 The Language of Science 439 21 Some Historical Questions about Disease 443 22 Historians and the Scientific Revolution 451 23 The Origins of Western Science 465 Appendix to Chapter 10: 479 Sources and Dates of Galileos Writings [with A. Carugo] Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico [with A. Carugo] Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier Corrections to Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought 495 Index 497. (shrink)

Hegel’s assertion that, for us moderns, art is a matter of the past has obscured his genuine interest in the art of his time and modern art in general. This article attempts to correct this situation. First, it contextualizes the claim in its historical and conceptual aspects; second, it returns to Hegel’s approaches to modern art, neglected hitherto by interpreters. This revision implies clarifying what for Hegel is the modern, whose concept comes from the freedom and autonomy (...) of thought, and does not conform to what, in developments of Aesthetics, after Hegel, represent tendencies and prescriptions such as the avant-garde or turns such as aesthetic modernity and postmodernity. Modern art is the product of an artist who freely disposes of the means and content of art since he places himself above them. (shrink)

Time is more than a line drawn from the past to the future. It is a form of life, marked by the ancient hierarchy between those who have time and those who do not. This hierarchy still governs a present which clings to the fable of historical necessity and its experts. In opposition to this, Jacques Rancière shows how the break with the hierarchical conception of time implies a completely different idea of the modern. He sees the fulfilment of (...) this in two arts of movement, cinema and dance, which at the beginning of the twentieth century abolished the opposition between free and mechanical people, and exposed the rift between the revolution of artists and that of strategists. (shrink)

When, in 1735, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten added a new discipline to the philosophical system, he not only founded modern aesthetics but also contributed to shaping the modern concept of art or 'fine art'. In The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment, Stefanie Buchenau offers a rich analysis and reconstruction of the origins of this new discipline in its wider context of German Enlightenment philosophy. Present-day scholars commonly regard Baumgarten's views as an imperfect prefiguration of Kantian and post-Kantian (...) aesthetics, but Buchenau argues that Baumgarten defended a consistent and original project which must be viewed in the context of the modern debate on the art of invention. Her book offers new perspectives on Kantian aesthetics and beauty in art and science. (shrink)

Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole were philosophers and theologians associated with Port-Royal Abbey, a centre of the Catholic Jansenist movement in seventeenth-century France. Their enormously influential Logic or the Art of Thinking, which went through five editions in their lifetimes, treats topics in logic, language, theory of knowledge and metaphysics, and also articulates the response of 'heretical' Jansenist Catholicism to orthodox Catholic and Protestant views on grace, free will and the sacraments. In attempting to combine the categorical theory of the (...) proposition with a Cartesian account of knowledge, their Logic represents the classical view of judgment which inspired the modern transformation in logic and semantic theory by Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and recent philosophers. This edition presents a new translation of the text, together with a historical introduction and suggestions for further reading. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relations between art and everyday life in the city from the vantage points of urban aesthetics and sociology, where the “city” refers as well to a normative world. The aim is to show how art/artistic life contributed to the normative change and new urban lifestyles. First, I focus on Baudelaire’s theory of beauty and life in modern metropolis or the city as “poetic object” and dandyism as an art of the self, seen as a crucial (...) normative change: the emergence of new norms of excellence and art of living, such as creativity and self-fashioning. Second, I discuss a recent yet related normative change, described by Boltanski and Chiapello as a passage to the “project-oriented city”, seen as a new way of working and living that fuses cultures of creativity and uncertainty. Third, I tackle the “creative city” hailed by Florida, where the creative lifestyle of “creative people” is the new mainstream setting the norms for society: individuality, diversity and openness, but also impermanent relationships and loose ties. I will argue that extending the hyper-mobile and flexible creative lifestyle from the extraordinary figure of the artist to ordinary people, as everyday urban life, triggers both benefits and risks. (shrink)

Griselda Pollock provides concrete historical analyses of key moments in the formation of modern culture to reveal the sexual politics at the heart of modernist art, exploring the writings of Elizabeth Siddall, Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot.

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

This view encouraged theorists to consider artistic geniuses the high-priests of humanity, creators of works that reveal the invisible essence of the world."--BOOK JACKET.

This paper addresses the relations between art and everyday life in the city from the vantage points of urban aesthetics and sociology, where the “city” refers as well to a normative world. The aim is to show how art/artistic life contributed to the normative change and new urban lifestyles. First, I focus on Baudelaire’s theory of beauty and life in modern metropolis or the city as “poetic object” and dandyism as an art of the self, seen as a crucial (...) normative change: the emergence of new norms of excellence and art of living, such as creativity and self-fashioning. Second, I discuss a recent yet related normative change, described by Boltanski and Chiapello as a passage to the “project-oriented city”, seen as a new way of working and living that fuses cultures of creativity and uncertainty. Third, I tackle the “creative city” hailed by Florida, where the creative lifestyle of “creative people” is the new mainstream setting the norms for society: individuality, diversity and openness, but also impermanent relationships and loose ties. I will argue that extending the hyper-mobile and flexible creative lifestyle from the extraordinary figure of the artist to ordinary people, as everyday urban life, triggers both benefits and risks. (shrink)

An engaging account of how Shaftesbury revolutionized Western philosophy At the turn of the eighteenth century, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, developed the first comprehensive philosophy of beauty to be written in English. It revolutionized Western philosophy. In A Philosophy of Beauty, Michael Gill presents an engaging account of how Shaftesbury’s thought profoundly shaped modern ideas of nature, religion, morality, and art—and why, despite its long neglect, it remains compelling today. Before Shaftesbury’s magnum opus, Charactersticks of (...) Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, it was common to see wilderness as ugly, to associate religion with fear and morality with unpleasant restriction, and to dismiss art as trivial or even corrupting. But Shaftesbury argued that nature, religion, virtue, and art can all be truly beautiful, and that cherishing and cultivating beauty is what makes life worth living. And, as Gill shows, this view had a huge impact on the development of natural religion, moral sense theory, aesthetics, and environmentalism. Combining captivating historical details and flashes of humor, A Philosophy of Beauty not only rediscovers and illuminates a fascinating philosopher but also offers an inspiring reflection about the role beauty can play in our lives. (shrink)

In this publication, the author attempts to develop an aesthetic theory from Heidegger's phenomenological concepts. She analyzes Heidegger`s concepts of truth, world, space, and related concepts and establishes a formal, contextual and material method of analysis for the purpose of examining works of art. This new method of analysis is applied to three pieces by the artist Joseph Beuys as a case study.

Art is not only autonomous, following its own law, different from nonaesthetic reason, but sovereign: it subverts the rule of reason.In this book Christoph Menke attempts to explain art's sovereign power to subvert reason without falling ...

This thesis is to make sure the art's political possibility especially in the age of the technological reproduction. Since Benjamin declared the death of the 'aura' in the modern art, the concept of the art has been criticized and changed, that of the simulacre which Plato had blamed in his 'republics' newly appeared passing through the post-modern application of Baudrillard. But the simulacre is not negative any more here, even though it was the side effect of the mimesis(the (...) poetic process, so long as it is not oblivious that simulacre is just the fake reality as Plato and Baudrillard said, it was different from the real. The artwork could not be free from the destiny of the dream, for it is available after awakening out of it. In the post-modernism the distinction between the dream and the real disappeared, which could be linked to understanding the fetishism of the technological reproduction widely spreading among the highly industrialized people. The semiology of Saussure could be borrowed to make people isolated of it awakened to the revolutionary subject. That is to say, if the simulacre is like the dreaming, to draw the social revolutionary possibility of it, they need to overcome these fetishism, that is, the learning that this dream is not the reality, and after that they can leap as another subject perceiving the power of that dream. According Freud, the dream is based on the unconscious process of the empty signs. And the teaching of 'the signs of the equivalent differences' in Saussure makes us free from the essentialism of the word(a sort of the fetishism), know that we are so much as the sign or the citizen empty in it, and so get to know that we need another signs, or neighbors even though, and for they are empty, too. The revolutionary subject is not based on the great individual subject but the empty(lost) 'us' that so need to associate each other. And the post-modern art, popular mass art can help us being social subjects. That is what Benjamin had dreamed in post-aura art through 'the artworks in the age of the technological reproduction'. (shrink)

All the manifestos for a ‘total work of art’ after Wagner were political programmes: political, however, in a sense directly antithetical to the modern idea of the political. The goal of the total work of art was the formation of the people as a homogeneous political body, as the other of the social and political division, conflict and uncertainty inherent in the whole movement of democratic revolution since the 18th century. In each case the union or synthesis of the (...) arts prefigures the reconciliation of the classes as the condition of the unity of the people. But who is this people that will realize itself in the total work? Is it the same people for the artists of the Bauhaus as it is for the leaders of the Third Reich? These are the questions I try to answer through an interrogation of the continuities and breaks in the re-workings of the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the programmes of the Bauhaus and the policies of National Socialism. (shrink)

Saturn and Melancholy remains an iconic text in art history, intellectual history, and the study of culture, despite being long out of print in English. Rooted in the tradition established by Aby Warburg and the Warburg Library, this book has deeply influenced understandings of the interrelations between the humanities disciplines since its first publication in English in 1964. This new edition makes the original English text available for the first time in decades. Saturn and Melancholy offers an unparalleled inquiry into (...) the origin and development of the philosophical and medical theories on which the ancient conception of the temperaments was based and discusses their connections to astrological and religious ideas. It also traces representations of melancholy in literature and the arts up to the sixteenth century, culminating in a landmark analysis of Dürer's most famous engraving, Melencolia I. This edition features Raymond Klibansky's additional introduction and bibliographical amendments for the German edition, as well as translations of source material and 155 original illustrations. An essay on the complex publication history of this pathbreaking project - which almost did not see the light of day - covers more than eighty years, including its more recent heritage. Making new a classic book that has been out of print for over four decades, this expanded edition presents fresh insights about Saturn and Melancholy and its legacy as a precursor to modern interdisciplinary studies. (shrink)

As Michel Foucault and others have shown, from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, Western political discourse has perpetuated an art of governing aimed at societies and populations. This article argues that this modern art of governing is now coming undone, in the name of governance. The discourse on governance is taking us from an art of governing premised on producing policy for a society or a population to an art of governing premised on solving problems with no necessary (...) reference to any kind of society or population. Tracing the evolution of that discourse, the article argues that existing social and political theory has failed to make sense of this shift. It concludes that in order to access and assess the new art of governing on its own terms we need a sociological imagination that stretches beyond societies and a political imaginary without the presupposition of collectivities. (shrink)