Abstract:This article presents a new interpretation of Wang Guowei's concept of jingjie understood as his creative response to Kant and European aesthetics addressing concerns recently elaborated also in Gernot Böhme's new aesthetic theory, based on a non-standard interpretation of Kant's aesthetic theory through his concept of atmosphere. The convergence of both authors is explored in their efforts to overcome the dualism of subject and object in their explorations of the aesthetic experience and response, further exemplified by means of another current (...) term, Bence Nanay's distributed attention. (shrink)

A review of Allen Carlson‘s and Sheila Lintott‘s (eds) Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, 458 pp. ISBN 9780231138864).

This article presents a general conception of aesthetic experience built on an analysis of the relationship between the narrative and the ambient dimensions of the aesthetic value of a natural environment, the forest. First of all, the two dimensions are presented with respect to the possibilities and problems raised by distinguishing between them. Next, the possibilities of their relationship are analysed and it is argued that they are strongly complementary. This complementarity becomes the core of the proposed conception of aesthetic (...) experience, which can explain the difference between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, and can also provide an answer to the question of the non-reductive differentiation between the aesthetic experience of nature and the experience of a work of art. The conclusion of the article is mainly concerned to eliminate one of the problems localized in presenting the ambient dimension (the ambience paradox), by means of Ricoeur’s conception of the relationship between time and narrative. (shrink)