Yuriko Saito, the leading figure in the field, explores the nature and significance of the aesthetic dimensions of people's everyday lives. She argues that everyday aesthetics can be an effective instrument for directing humanity's collective and cumulative world-making project.

Yuriko Saito discusses aspects of our everyday experience that have been neglected by modern Western aesthetic theories.

Everyday aesthetic experiences and concerns occupy a large part of our aesthetic life. However, because of their prevalence and mundane nature, we tend not to pay much attention to them, let alone examine their significance. Western aesthetic theories of the past few centuries also neglect everyday aesthetics because of their almost exclusive emphasis on art. In a ground-breaking new study, Yuriko Saito provides a detailed investigation into our everyday aesthetic experiences, and reveals how our everyday aesthetic tastes and judgments can (...) exert a powerful influence on the state of the world and our quality of life. By analysing a wide range of examples from our aesthetic interactions with nature, the environment, everyday objects, and Japanese culture, Saito illustrates the complex nature of seemingly simple and innocuous aesthetic responses. She discusses the inadequacy of art-centered aesthetics, the aesthetic appreciation of the distinctive characters of objects or phenomena, responses to various manifestations of transience, and the aesthetic expression of moral values; and she examines the moral, political, existential, and environmental implications of these and other issues. (shrink)

This book takes Stanley Cavell's much-quoted, yet enigmatic phrase as the provocation for a series of explorations into themes of education that run throughout his work - through his response to Wittgenstein, Austin and ordinary language ...

日本初の“日英対訳版”登場!今こそ日本精神の源流を学ぶ時。「武士道」は、人類最高の指導理念です。本書は「武士道」の全てが分かる珠玉の一冊。ぜひ、世界の人々に「日本精神」を知って欲しい。.

The Correspondence of Tiglath-pileser III and Sargon II from Calah/Nimrud. By Mikko Luukko. State Archives of Assyria, vol. 19. Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2012. Pp. lxxiv + 287, 3 plts., illus. $89.50.

I propose that the appropriate appreciation of nature must include the moral capacity for acknowledging the reality of nature apart from humans and the sensitivity for listening to its own story. I argue that appreciating nature exclusively as design is inappropriate to the extent that we impose upon nature a preconceived artistic standard as well as appreciation based upon historical/cultural/literary associationsinsofar as we treat nature as a background of our own story. In contrast, aesthetic appreciation informed by our attempt to (...) make sense of nature, such as science, mythology, and folklore, is appropriate because it guides our experience toward understanding nature’s own story embodied in its sensuous surface. (shrink)

This book explores the idea of translation as a philosophical theme and as an important feature of philosophy and practical life, in the context of a searching examination of aspects of the work of Stanley Cavell. Furthermore it demonstrates the broader significance of these philosophical questions for education and life as a whole.

We critically examine pragmatism's approach to skepticism and try to elucidate its certain limits. The central questions to be addressed are: whether “skepticism” interpreted through the lens of problem-solving does justice to the human condition; and whether the problem-solving approach to skepticism can do justice to pragmatism's self-proclaimed anti-foundationalism. We then examine Stanley Cavell's criticism of Dewey's “problem-solving” approach. We propose a shift from the problem-solving approach's eagerness for solutions to a more Wittgensteinian and Emersonian project of dissolution.

This article examines the underexplored relationship between Amartya Sen's ‘capability approach’ to human well-being and education. Two roles which education might play in relation to the development of capacities are given particular attention: (i) the enhancement of capacities and opportunities and (ii) the development of judgement in relation to the appropriate exercise of capacities.

In the name of efficiency, the practice of education has come to be dominated by neoliberal ideology and procedures of standardization and quantification. Such attempts to make all aspects of practice transparent and subject to systematic accounting lack sensitivity to the invisible and the silent, to something in the human condition that cannot readily be expressed in an either-or form. Seeking alternatives to such trends, Saito reads Dewey’s idea of progressive education through the lens of Emersonian moral perfectionism (to borrow (...) a term coined by Stanley Cavell). She elucidates a spiritual and aesthetic dimension to Dewey’s notion of growth, one considerably richer than what Dewey alone presents in his typically scientific terminology. (shrink)

人間存在の総体性の回復、人称的対立における和解と統合の試み。日々の風景、断想、聖書研究等も収録。.