This book offers a compelling account of the evolution of sensibility, weaving together Darwinian and biosemiotic theory. It works along non-anthropomorphic aesthetics of the appreciation and creation of beauty in nature as an end in itself which has practical benefit.

A growing literature testifies to the persistence of place as an incorrigible aspect of human experience, identity, and morality. Place is a common ground for thought and action, a community of experienced particulars that avoids solipsism and universalism. It draws us into the philosophy of the ordinary, into familiarity as a form of knowledge, into the wisdom of proximity. Each of these essays offers a philosophy of place, and reminds us that such philosophies ultimately decide how we make, use, and (...) understand places, whether as accidents, instruments, or fields of care. (shrink)

As a category, poiesis can be extended beyond the standard anthropocentric use and applied across three radically different scales: auto-poiesis in everyday self-organization of every living creature, phylo-poiesis in the shaping of a species by sexual selection across various generations and onto-poiesis as an individual's development of formal skills and creative modification of its environment. In this paper, I apply these distinctions and argue, following Darwin and Sebeok, for the possibility of considering poietic and aesthetic manifestations among various animal species (...) in their ability of both appreciating and expressing rhythm, visual decorative patterns, and chromatic qualities. In music we can find song and equivalents to instrumental playing (cicadas and crickets), theater in representing fictitious situations (killdeer's broken wing act and playing), acrobatic skills (various types of woodcocks and paradise birds) and dancing (cranes and eleonora cockatoo). I do not claim there is animal art, since the very concept of the “artistic” is a result of convention. What I do assert, however, is that human aesthetic appreciation did not emerge ex nihilo nor was granted by God to humans only (as Wallace believed) but has evolutionary relevance and is preceded by the zoo-aesthetics in many other species. (shrink)

Based on the understanding of aesthetics as the study of all processes and activities related to aesthesis in his original etymological sense as «sensibility», this paper argues that an evolutionary approach must follow the evolution of aesthesis from its inception. A degree of sensibility may perhaps be traced already at molecules sensing borders in DNA replication. The next stage, which may be defined as “cyto-aesthesis”, refers to evidence of cells’ actions to antigens, virus, enzymes or bacteria and other significant elements (...) in the intercellular fluid by their receptors’ sensibility to ligands. Darwin explored plants’ irritability specifically at their tendrils and petioles and there are studies on their sensibility to surface, nutrients, touch, water, temperature, seasonal cycles, color, gravity, and light. All animal species, including human beings, have evolved a keen sensitivity to predators and mates upon which their survival depends following evolutionary priorities and conditions. There is consequently no particular experience that we may call «aesthetic experience», a redundant term, since the whole spectrum of activities and effects of various species’ sensibility involves experiencing the world, namely, aesthesis. (shrink)

Illocutionary force may be qualified according to Aristotle's classical triadic distinction of logos as a degree of verity, ethos as a degree of credibility or authority and pathos as eloquence or passional intensity. Jakobson 's model of linguistic functions can be understood as operating performatively with greater advantages to pragmatic theory than Searle and Vanderveken's taxonomy of illocutionary acts. Consequently, these three dimensions can also be found in the aesthetic as in other linguistic functions proposed by Jakobson when examined from (...) a pragmatic viewpoint. By detecting the direction of fit and establishing a distinction between conversion and constitution, we may better understand not only the difference between the aesthetic and other functions but a variety of instances besides the artistic in which the aesthetic is displayed. Therefore, pathos can be clearly differentiated from the aesthetic as a dimension that may weigh, together with logos and ethos, upon the aesthetic function of an illocutionary act. (shrink)

La tesis central de este libro es que no sólo es posible sino indispensable abrir los estudios estéticos –tradicionalmente restringidos al arte y lo bello– hacia la riqueza y complejidad de la vida social contemporánea. Eso es precisamente la Prosaica: la estética en la vida cotidiana. La autora actualiza las discusiones en torno a la estética, rescatando particularmente la filosofía de Dewey y Bajtín para proyectarlas hacia un enfoque interdisciplinario. A partir de Huizinga y la taxonomía de los juegos de (...) Caillois (vértigo, competencia, azar y simulacro) la autora plantea a la lúdica como la gemela siamesa de la estética para recorrer el tejido social siguiendo estas dos hebras primordiales.135. (shrink)

Desde una perspectiva matricial de la cultura, la autora aborda el estudio de las identidades sociales en su dimensión estética. La presentación dramatúrgica de la persona propuesta por Goffman adquiere un perfil más concreto al enfocar a las identidades a partir de sus procesos de gestación y proyección, pues nunca brotan en el vacío sino a través de matrices que ineludiblemente las conforman. Mandoki explora identidades colectivas religiosas como la cristiana, la musulmana y la judía, así como prácticas familiares, escolares, (...) artísticas y médicas donde la estética opera con todo su poder de seducción, repulsión, cohesión o distinción. Ello implica no sólo que cada sujeto despliega identidades diferentes según las matrices en que se ubique y con cuyos símbolos se identifica, sino que lo realiza por medio de estrategias estéticas que suministran la adherencia efectiva. (shrink)

Peirce proposed the concept of abductive inference to inquire into the generation of new hypotheses and defined it as another term for pragmatism, no less (Admitting, then, that the question of Pragmatism is the question of Abduction, let us consider it under that form. What is good abduction? What should an explanatory hypothesis be to be worthy to rank as a hypothesis? Of course, it must explain the facts. But what other conditions ought it to fulfill to be good? The (...) question of the goodness of anything is whether that thing fulfills its end. What, then, is the end of an explanatory hypothesis? Its end is, through subjection to the test of experiment, to lead to the avoidance of all surprise and to the establishment of a habit of positive expectation that shall not be disappointed (Peirce. 1931–1966. The collected papers of Charles S. Peirce, 8 vols., C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss & A. W. Burks (eds.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 5.197)). Apart from being linked to the vague idea of the play of musement as an almost dreamlike process of epiphany or inspiration or as an inverted minor premise from a syllogism, we are far from understanding the dynamics and specificity of this kind of inference. Among authors dealing with this problem I could trace three factors at work in processes of abduction, i.e. combination, resemblance, and dialetics or questioning. In this paper I attempt to look a bit further into this enigma by a category of play I defined as “peripatos” or games of invention, riddles, and puzzles, hoping it could shed some light on the process of creativity in several social activities such as science, art, war, and religion. The approach will take on Huizinga’s idea of the play of culture, Lakoff and Johnson’s conception of cross-domain correlations, Kant’s view of “aesthetic ideas,” and my proposal of the play of peripatos through a “what if-as if” coupling into this very common yet little understood, and thus mystified, process of the generation of innovative ideas. (shrink)