This issue is dedicated to thinking about art and current aesthetic perspectives through Hegelianism.

In her book, Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett thinks through what ontological, political, and ecological questions would look like if humans could admit that matter and nonhuman things are living, creative agents; the contributors to this issue of Evental Aesthetics begin to think through what aesthetic questions would look like.

This paper investigates the reciprocal implications between aesthetics and technics, to show how technicity, as a cultural and symbolic attitude, is constitutively rooted in the aesthetic dimension of human experience. The analysis conducted aims to bring into focus the originarity of technicity in the development of the living body, understood in its inseparable connection with the mind, as junction between the sensible and the symbolic, the organic and the cultural, the perceptive and the expressive. I address this question through (...) a parallel analysis of Simondon’s groundbreaking reflection on technics and the less explored account of technics in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. If the latter inscribes our attitude towards technics in the motricity and symbolism inherent to the living body, the former ascribes to aesthetics a form of thinking, thus playing a fundamental role in our relationship to the technical dimension. Despite the differences in their approach to technics, I combine their theoretical perspectives to encompass their internal limits and to outline possible convergences. (shrink)

In the1960s, texts by the prominent German philosopher and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno were translated into the Czech and Slovak language. This was only possible due to the more relaxed social and political atmosphere of those years. The translated essays were published in professionally-oriented periodicals. This paper is aimed to map and evaluate the reception of Adorno’s translated works in Czechoslovakia. Although these texts embraced above all Adorno’s work in the sociology of philosophy, aesthetics of literature and musicology, this paper (...) is mainly focused on Adorno’s musicological texts. Albeit mostly regarded as an original and extremely versatile author in Czechoslovakia, Adorno was also criticised on the background of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. In order to evaluate the reception of Adorno’s ideas in the Czech and Slovak environment, it is methodologically necessary to adopt a broader aesthetic-philosophical perspective that enables us to account for Adorno’s endorsement of the Marxist philosophy pursued at Frankfurt School of Philosophy. (shrink)

M'illumino/d'immenso - I'm lit/with immensity is Geoffrey Brock's translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem Mattina. In the poem's minimalism, Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry's expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction, and literature's capacity, according to Kant, even to evoke, with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas, representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually graspable (...) - in case studies about myths of creativity, images of death and the beyond after the 'death of God', of the soul, of melancholy as the dark ground of genius, of metamorphoses of both evil and good, of ecstasy, of the economy of self-sacrifice, of the art of resistance, and, among others, about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity, what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality. (shrink)

Book review of KOPČÁKOVÁ, Slávka, (Ed.) – ORIŇÁKOVÁ, Slávka – ZUBAL, Pavol (2021) Tobias Gottfried Schröer (1791-1850). Estetika ako vízia lepšieho človeka. [Tobias Gottfried Schroer (1791-1850). Aesthetics as a vision of a better person.] Prešov: University of Prešov, Faculty of Arts. 321 p. ISBN 978-80-555-2767-3.

Thinking with images -- Aesthetics without theory -- The Baroque and Bacon's popes -- Chance meeting with Duane Michals -- Étant donnés, Marcel Duchamp -- Le Mépris or Contempt, a film by Jean-Luc Godard.

_Thinking about Science, Reflecting on Art: Bringing Aesthetics and Philosophy of Science togethe_r is the first book to systematically examine the relationship between the philosophy of science and aesthetics. With contributions from leading figures from both fields this edited collection engages with such questions as: Does representation function in the same way in science and in art? What important characteristic do scientific models share with literary fictions? What is the difference between interpretation in the sciences and in the arts? Can (...) there be a science of aesthetics? In what ways can aesthetics and philosophy of science be integrated? Aiming to develop the interconnections between the philosophy of science and the philosophy of art more broadly and more deeply than ever before this volume not only explores scientific representation by comparison with fiction but extends the scope of interaction to include metaphysical and other questions around methodology in mainstream philosophy of science, including the aims of science, the characterisation of scientific understanding, and the nature of observation, as well as drawing detailed comparisons between specific examples in both art and the sciences. (shrink)

The essays, collected by Berleant in this volume all express the impulse to reject the received wisdom of modern aesthetics: that art demands a mode of experience sharply different from others and unique to the aesthetic situation, and that the identity of the aesthetic lies in keeping it distinct from other kinds of human experience, such as the moral, the practical, and the social. Berleant shows, on the contrary, that the value, the insight, the force of art and (...) the aesthetic are all enhanced. (shrink)

모리스의 생태적 사유의 출발은 19세기 사회적 상황과 관련 있다. 그의 사유는 당시의 산업혁명의 결과로 나타난 사회적 부조리에 기초한다. 삶의 환경이 악화되고 공장에서 대량 생산되는 생산품은 규격화되고 형편없는 품질의 제품들이었다. 따라서 그는 기계로 생산되는 제품을 부정하고 인간의 솜씨를 통한 창의적인 제작과정으로 생산되는 제품이 아름답다고 주장한다. 이것은 그가 주목했던 도시의 미관과 도시 생활자들의 열악한 생활환경에 대한 우려와 관심에서 비롯되었다. 보건위생의 악화는 도시화의 결과였고 이것은 산업혁명에 의한 산업화의 부작용이기도 했다. 도시화에 따른 보건 위생, 생태적 위기, 근대 건축물의 등장은 모리스로 하여금 자본주의 체계가 야기한 (...) 생태 문제들을 정확하게 깨닫도록 하였다.BR 모리스의 생태적 사유는 사회의 미적 질을 개선하기 위해 사람들에게 사고의 전환을 요청한다. 그의 이러한 생각은 러스킨(John Ruskin)의 자본주의 문명에 대한 비판과 크로포트킨(Pyotr A. Kropotkin)의 공산주의 이념으로부터 영향을 받은 것이다. 그는 동시대의 사상가들로부터 자신의 이론을 구축하는 바탕을 마련하였고 예술로 사회의 변화가 가능하다는 자신의 신념과 생태적 사유를 결합한다. 이 신념은 미적 가치를 개선하고 미적인 삶의 회복을 지향한다. 모리스는 생태 위기 극복을 위한 인문학적 접근에서 생태와 환경 철학적, 미학적 가치를 규명하는데 노력했다. 나아가 자연과 공존하는 지속가능한 사회를 위한 실천 활동도 함께 했다. 그의 대표적인 활동은 런던의 에핑(Epping) 숲의 벌목을 막아내고 숲을 온전한 모습으로 보존하였던 일이다. 이처럼 모리스는 자연보호 정책에 있어서도 통찰력 있는 중요한 인물로 평가되고 있다. (shrink)

This paper proposes a radical re-examination of the foundations of modern aesthetics. It urges that we replace the tradition of eighteenth century aesthetics, with its insistence on disinterestedness and the separateness of the aesthetic, and its problematic oppositions, such as the separation of sense from cognition. In their place it appeals to a more process-oriented, pluralistic account, one that takes note of varying cultural traditions in aesthetics, that recognizes the aesthetic as a complex of many forces and factors, (...) and that considers the aesthetic as part of a complexity of values, including moral, practical, social, and political ones. It urges, further, an aesthetic-based criticism, not only of the arts, but of culture and knowledge. Central to this account is the idea of aesthetic engagement, which not only recognizes and extends the many connections of and in aesthetic experience, but invites our total involvement as active participants. (shrink)

The cultivation of the imagination -- Enlightening thought: Kant and the imagination -- C.S. Peirce and the growth of the imagination -- Abduction: inference and instinct -- Imagining nature -- Ontology and imagination: Peirce on necessity and agency -- The evolution of the imagination -- Emergence, complexity, and creativity -- Be imaginative! suggestion and imperative.

Philosophers investigating the experiences of the dancing subject (Sheets-Johnstone 1980, 2009, 2011, 2012; Parviainen 1998; Legrand 2007, 2013; Legrand & Ravn 2009; Montero 2013; Foultier & Roos 2013) unearth vast variations of embodied consciousness and cognition in performing body experts. The traditional phenomenological literature provides us with descriptions and definitions of reflective self-consciousness as well as of pre-reflective bodily absorption, but when it comes to the states of self-consciousness dance philosophers refer to as thinking in movement and a form (...) of reflective consciousness at a bodily level – as well as to dancers’ re- ported experiences of being in a trance and yet hyper-aware – we are challenged in terms of terminology and precise descriptions. After empirical research on dancers’ experiences and studies of the above-mentioned philosophies of dance, aligning this material with Husserl, Zahavi and other phenomenologists’ descriptions of reflection and embodied self-consciousness, I find it plausible to acknowledge the existence of a third form of self- consciousness: embodied reflection, a reflective process experienced through and with the embodied and/or emotional self. In this article I aspire to capture the characteristics of this transcendence of the bodily self. (shrink)

That which I always already am, without having to do it - the transcendental status of corporeality - is prefigured in Nietzsche’s theory, according to which every authentic philosophy is first of all to be thought “under the guidance of the body.” Nietzsche criticized philosophy’s forgetting of the living body long before a phenomenological difference was made between the living body and the dimensional body; he proposed that thinking be based on differences and not on oppositions. This turn toward (...) the living body in philosophy can be described as a turn of aesthetics. As a discipline, aesthetics had originated as a theory of sensual perception. Through Nietzsche, it discovered the space of the living and feeling body as the foundational basis for philosophical knowledge. (shrink)

An original study of late Enlightenment aesthetics, poetics, and environmental medicine as overlapping ways of comprehending the dislocations of historical existence lodged in the movements of bodies and minds This book studies later eighteenth-century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge increasingly concerned about the relationship between the geographical movements of persons displaced from home and the physiological or nervous "motions" within their bodies and minds. Looking beyond familiar narratives about medicine and art's shared therapeutic and harmonizing ideals, (...) this book explores Enlightenment and Romantic-era aesthetics and poetics in relation to a central but less well known area of eighteenth-century environmental medicine: pathology. No mere system of diagnosis or classification, philosophical pathology was an art of interpretation, offering sophisticated ways of reading the multiple conditions and causes of disease, however absent from perception, in their palpable, embodied effects. For medical, anthropological, environmental, and literary authors alike, it helped to locate the dislocations of modern mobility when a full view of their causes and conditions remained imperfectly understood or still unfolding. Goodman traces the surprising afterlife of the period's exemplary but unexplained pathology of motion, medical nostalgia, within aesthetic theory and poetics, arguing that nostalgia persisted there not as a named condition but as a set of formal principles and practices, perturbing claims about the harmony, freedom, and free play of the mind. (shrink)

In the eighteenth century the category of the aesthetic sought to bridge the gap between the prevalent dualities of Cartesian thought: art and science, history and science, prejudice and truth. This special issue of _boundary 2_ addresses current debates about the status of art in the context of global modernity. The range of arguments represented here cover a broad historical scope—from Cartesianism to present-day global modernity—of cultural discourse on the aesthetic to bring a focus to contemporary discussions of (...) the corollary concepts of beauty, virtue, taste, and truth. These essays present a rich and provocative account of the place of the aesthetic in late-twentieth-century culture. Included in this volume are considerations of the relation between theories of art and the avant-garde; art’s relation to cognition; the aesthetic as history; the aesthetic as a unique access to modernity; and its impact on problems of identity formation, ideology, and resistances to the institutional powers inherent in dominant social formations. _Contributors. _Charles Altieri, Peter Burger, David Carroll, Anthony J. Cascardi, Howard Caygill, Allen Dunn, Eric Gans, Agnes Heller, Ronald A. T. Judy, Marie-Rose Logan, Daniel T. O’Hara, Donald E. Pease, Alan Singer. (shrink)

This article explores the surprisingly decisive role that Kant’s “incongruity theory” of laughter plays in his aesthetic and broader critical philosophy. First, laughter constitutes a highly specific form of aesthetic judgment in Kant. Laughter involves a discordant relation between the cognitive faculties characteristic of the sublime, but this relation obtains between the understanding and the imagination, the two faculties at play in judgments of taste on the beautiful. Second, laughter is the transcendental condition of possibility for both the (...) beautiful and the sublime. While most commentators dismiss laughter as an afterthought of Kant’s aesthetics, laughter in fact constitutes the most basic aesthetic judgment in Kant. Third, an account of aesthetic judgment that begins with laughter transforms how we understand Kant’s argument that judgment unites nature and freedom. Namely, it reveals how an empirical world at odds with the subject’s purposes can nevertheless advance the subject’s rational vocation to think and act beyond the empirical. I conclude by arguing that Kantian critical philosophy is itself a philosophy of laughter. (shrink)

This paper debates the new theories of philosophical and aesthetical discourse by applying them to Nietzsche’s thinking on art. The article consists of four general subjects, each of them focusing on an essential part of Nietzsche’s special relationship to art: 1) Art generated by the philosophical text itself, through the form of the fragment; 2) The artistic relationship as an interdisciplinary ground for philosophical knowledge of the world (especially as applied in Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s work); 3) A critical debate (...) on Wolfgang Welsch’s theory about the interdisciplinary aspects of the philosophical and aesthetic discourse; 4) The backgrounds of Nietzsche’s aesthetics project explained in Claus Zittel’s theory on Nietzsche’s “aesthetic turn.” Thus, Nietzsche’s thinking is defined as a relationist project, emphasizing the “self-destruction dy- namic” of his aesthetical perspectivism. (shrink)

Thinking through the body: educating for the humanities -- The body as background -- Self-knowledge and its discontents: from Socrates to somaesthetics -- Muscle memory and the somaesthetic pathologies of everyday life -- Somaesthetics in the philosophy classroom: a practical approach -- Somaesthetics and the limits of aesthetics -- Somaesthetics and Burke's sublime -- Pragmatism and cultural politics: from textualism to somaesthetics -- Body consciousness and performance -- Somaesthetics and architecture: a critical option -- Photography as performative process -- (...) Asian ars erotica and the question of sexual aesthetics -- Philosophy as awakened life : everyday aesthetics of embodiment in American transcendentalism and Japanese Zen practice -- Somatic style. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:An Unconscious Dimension of Thinking, Situations, and La Vida:Reflections on Bethany Henning's Dewey and the Aesthetic UnconsciousGregory Pappasthis book is doing different related and valuable things. First, Bethany Henning explores a neglected dimension of Dewey's thought. In particular, the book inquires into the dimension of the unconscious and tries to develop what she considers an "implicit" "theory of the unconsciousness" or of the "aesthetic unconscious" in (...) Dewey's philosophy. Then, based on all of the above, it provides a diagnosis and possible solution to a problem with philosophers and with American culture.The neglected dimension of Dewey's thought that Henning explores highlights the ways in which Dewey foresaw what feminist thinkers have said, and recent scientific accounts of human life and thinking are confirming: What we "feel" (what is "qualitative," "ineffable," and "noncognitive") is key to how to think and how to live (guidance and meaning). It has therefore been puzzling to me (along with John McDermott, Tom Alexander, Mark Johnson, and a few others) why even Dewey scholarship has to a large extent neglected exploring this aspect of his thought. Frustrated with Bertrand Russell, Dewey says that "Mr. Russell has not been able to follow the distinction I make between the immediately had material of non-cognitively experienced situations and the material of cognition—a distinction without which my view cannot be understood" (LW 14:33; emphasis added).More importantly, by neglecting this insight and these aspects of his thought, we have failed to utilize one of the most important resources to diagnose sociopolitical-moral problems today! This is what I have been trying to do in recent years, and I see Dr. Henning as trying to do the same. She is not just providing a theory of the unconscious for the sake of speculation, but she does so with instrumental intent, in the hope that it will help us better approach a concrete social-cultural problem we suffer in our society, a topic to which I will return. [End Page 84]My reading of Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious has provoked a few questions:(a). Is there, in Dewey, a conception of aesthetic and religious experience that can be understood as an "implicit theory of the unconscious"?(b). Even if there is one, do we need one? For what purpose?(c). What would we miss if we were to say what needs to be said and explored by Henning by using different terms/concepts and avoiding the possible misunderstanding and dangers of making reference to "the unconscious"?(d). Would Henning agree that the problematic aversion or repression in American culture that concerns us is more than that of the unconscious, the qualitative, body, and nature that form the focus of her book?(e). Henning agrees that we need more than art and "deep" psychology to ameliorate the problems that concern us. What is this "more"? How?In regard to (b), I can think of one good purpose, which Henning develops in Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious: to engage in a dialogue with psychoanalysis and contemporary philosophies that draw from psychoanalysis and feminism (e.g., Kristeva) or, in general, other academics concerned with the same problems. I also wondered as I was reading the book why Henning does not put Carl Jung in dialogue with Dewey as well, just as a matter of curiosity. But I wonder, if we need to develop a "theory of the unconsciousness" or of the "aesthetic unconsciousness" to both make a contribution to the "depth" of lived experience (La Vida) and also deal with the social-cultural problems that concern us.There are dangers with talking about or making reference to "the" unconsciousness or "the" aesthetic unconsciousness and theorizing about them. The problem is that it comes across as a noun, and not as way of participating in La Vida or nature, that is continuous in a significant way with what is more conscious and more cognitive: we are at any time more or less conscious. But Henning seems aware of all of this. She is careful enough to make clear that she is acknowledging continuity, but I confess to "feeling" uncomfortable sometimes with her reference to that... (shrink)

How can we imagine a future not driven by capitalist assumptions about humans and the wider world? How are a range of contemporary artistic and popular cultural practices already providing pathways to post-capitalist futures? Authors from a variety of disciplines answer these questions through writings on blues and hip hop, virtual reality, post-colonial science fiction, virtual gaming, riot grrrls and punk, raku pottery, post-pornography fanzines, zombie films, and role playing. The essays in Art as Revolt are clustered around themes such (...) as technology and the future, aesthetics and resistance, and ethnographies of the self beyond traditional understandings of identity. Using philosophies of immanence – describing a system that gives rise to itself, independent of outside forces – drawn from a rich and evolving tradition that includes Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Braidotti, the authors and editors provide an engrossing range of analysis and speculation. Together the essays, written by experts in their fields, stage an important collective, transdisciplinary conversation about how best to talk about art and politics today. Sophisticated in its theoretical and philosophical premises, and engaging some of the most pressing questions in cultural studies and artistic practice today, Art as Revolt does not provide comfortable closure. Instead, it is understood by its authors to be a “Dionysian machine,” a generator of open-ended possibility and potential that challenges readers to affirm their own belief in the futures of this world. Contributors include Timothy J. Beck, Mark Bishop, Dave Collins, David Fancy, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Malisa Kurtz, Nicole Land, Eric Lochhead, Douglas Ord, Joanna Perkins, Peter Rehberg, Chris Richardson, Hans Skott-Myhre, and Kathleen Skott-Myhre. (shrink)

Environmental changes on a vast scale have motivated philosophers to consider problems related to intergenerational justice and future generations of people, nonhumans, and the earth they inhabit. How should the field of aesthetics respond? The aim of this special issue of “Studi di Estetica” is to create space for scholars to bring temporality and intergenerational aesthetics more deeply into the field. The articles here are focused on temporality in art, nature, modified environments and relationships between them. In this introductory essay, (...) I explore, first, how temporality features in the phenomena of aesthetic experience of environment, in living and nonliving things, creatures, situations, places, settings, and processes. Second, I address how the resources of the aesthetic subject (senses, imagination, emotions, and knowledge) grapple with environmental temporality and the future. To conclude the essay, I sketch out what it means to show “aesthetic concern” for future generations by drawing on ideas from environmental virtue aesthetics. (shrink)

Philosophy is the search for the large patterns of the world and of the large patterns of experience, perceptual, theoretical, . . . , aesthetic, and practical - the patterns that, regardless of specific contents, characterize the main types of experience. In this book I carry out my search for the large patterns of practical experience: the experience of deliberation, of recognition of duties and their conflicts, of attempts to guide other person's conduct, of deciding to act, of influencing (...) the physical world with one's doings, and the like. This is the experience that makes possible our social life, the formulation of plans for teamwork, the building of institutions, the development of nations, and the adoption of the ideal of morality. Here I develop a network of theories about the most fundamental aspects of practical thinking: what is thought in such thinking; what makes that thinking correct; what makes it practical; and the structure of the doings that accrue to the world when such thinking is effective. I have attempted to build each theory in sufficient detail, so that it il luminates its subject matter with a certain degree of fullness. But I have also aimed at producing an harmonious system of theories, so that the grand pattern of practical thinking can be admired, not only for the beauty of the separate structures of its parts, but also for its architectonic unity. Chapter 1 gives the details of the many facets of this project and discusses some methodological techniques. (shrink)

The complexity, subtlety, interlinking, and scale of many problems faced individually and collectively in today's rapidly changing world requires an epistemology--a way of thinking about our knowing--capable of facilitating new kinds of responses that avoid recapitulation of old ways of thinking and living. Epistemology, which implicitly provides the basis for engagement with the world via the fundamental act of distinction, must therefore be included as a central facet of any practical attempts at self/world transformation. We need to change (...) how we think, not just what we think. The new epistemology needs to be of a higher order than the source of the problems we face. -/- This theoretical, transdisciplinary dissertation argues that such a new epistemology needs to be recursive and process-oriented. This means that the thoughts about thinking that it produces must explicitly follow the patterns of thinking by which those thoughts are generated. The new epistemology is therefore also phenomenological, requiring the development of a reflexivity in thinking that recursively links across two levels of order--between content and process. The result is an epistemology that is of (and for) the whole human being. It is an enacted (will-imbued) and aesthetic (feeling-permeated) epistemology (thinking-penetrated) that is sensitive to and integrative of material, soul, and spiritual aspects of ourselves and our world. I call this kind of epistemology aesthetic, because its primary characteristic is found in the phenomenological, mutually fructifying and transformative marriage between the capacity for thinking and the capacity for feeling. -/- Its foundations are brought forward through the confluence of multiple domains: cybernetic epistemology, the esoteric epistemology of anthroposophy (the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner), and the philosophy of the implicit as developed by Eugene Gendlin. -/- The practice of aesthetic epistemology opens new phenomenal domains of experience, shedding light on relations between ontology and epistemology, mind and body, logic and thinking, as well as on the formation (and transformation) of identity, the immanence of thinking in world-processes, the existence of different types of logic, and the nature of beings, of objects, and most importantly of thinking itself and its relationship to spirit. (shrink)

How does Richard Shusterman’s Thinking Through the Body apply to the issues of everyday aesthetics? As it turns out, many chapters contribute significantly to everyday aesthetics, in particular the work on architecture, self-styling, the body as background, lovemaking, and the process of making a photographic portrait. Shusterman’s concentration on the art of living has special importance to everyday aesthetics. Current debates within the field of everyday aesthetics also raise problems for somaesthetics. I also question the limits of somaesthetics and (...) Shusterman’s rejection of defamiliarization in making the ordinary extraordinary. (shrink)

Abstract:This article enquires into a transcultural aesthetic: bi-xing (inspired metaphor) in China and symbolic representation in the West, which share the common logic of correlative thinking. By examining its earliest provenance in the Zhouyi (Book of Changes) and Shijing(Book of Songs) in China's high antiquity in relation to divination, symbolization, and poetic creation in the West, it argues that this aesthetic arose from omen readings in divination, went through symbolism in linguistic representation, and became a poetic principle (...) in aesthetic thought. It concludes that correlative thinking was an approach to knowledge production and conception in traditional thought across cultures. (shrink)

In German philosophy of the last 250 years, aesthetics has played a leading part. Any arbitrary list of great names contains mainly authors who either have written classical texts on aesthetics or are strongly influenced by aesthetic reflection, for instance, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and Adorno – the few exceptions being Husserl and Frege. It is not by chance that Frege is one of the founding fathers of modern Anglo-Saxon philosophy, where, generally speaking, (...) aesthetics has had only marginal influence. That is not an insignificant difference. The wildest dreams of one tradition were focused on logic, those of the other on aesthetics. (shrink)

Barbara M. Kennedy _Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation_ Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-7486-1134-7 224 pp.

In this elegant new study Galen Johnson retrieves the concept of the beautiful through the framework of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics. Although Merleau-Ponty seldom spoke directly of beauty, his philosophy is essentially about the beautiful. In Johnson’s formulation, the ontology of Flesh as element and the ontology of the Beautiful as elemental are folded together, for Desire, Love, and Beauty are part of the fabric of the world’s element, Flesh itself, the term at which Merleau-Ponty arrived to replace Substance, Matter, or Life (...) as the name of Being. Merleau-Ponty’s _Eye and Mind _is at the core of the book, so Johnson engages, as Merleau-Ponty did, the writings and visual work of Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, and Paul Klee, as well as Rilke’s commentary on Cézanne and Rodin. From these widely varying aesthetics emerge the fundamental themes of the retrieval of the beautiful: desire, repetition, difference, rhythm, and the sublime. The third part of Johnson’s book takes each of these up in turn, bringing Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic thinking into dialogue with classical philosophy as well as Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. Johnson concludes his final chapter with a direct dialogue with Kant and Merleau-Ponty, and also Lyotard, on the subject of the beautiful and the sublime. As we experience with Rodin’s _Balzac_, beauty and the sublime blend into one another when the beautiful grows powerful, majestic, mysterious, and transcendent. (shrink)

A comprehensive reassessment of the concept of mimesis in the history of ancient Greek aesthetics and philosophy of art, with particular attention to Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy, and neoplatonism. There is also a wide-ranging review of arguments pro and contra the idea of artistic mimesis from the Renaissance to modern literar theory. The book challenges standard accounts in numerous respects and builds a new dialectical model with which to make sense of the entire history of mimeticist thinking in aesthetics.

In this article we consider the growing interest in recent years in the use of documentary strategies in the wold of contemporary art, film and performing arts and explore some of the central epistemological assumptions underpinning the persistent idea that the documentary should be equated with ‘non-fiction’. Following Stella Bruzzi we argue that if documentary theory maintains objectivity as the primary measure of value, it will inevitably and continuously arrive at the conclusion that the documentary genre is fundamentally flawed. Instead, (...) we propose to move beyond the ‘realist epistemology’ of documentary theory and focus on the ‘documentary real’, i.e. the specific performativity of the reality constructed in and by the documentary genre. In the last paragraphs, we introduce the various articles that address the “documentary real” in this special issue. (shrink)

O mundo construído, o mundo da arquitetura, nas palavras de John Dewey, é “supremamente expressivo dos interesses e valores humanos”, influenciando o futuro, mas também recordando e transmitindo o passado. Ele “recorda e celebra mais que qualquer outra arte as características genéricas da nossa vida humana comum”. Prédios, ele escreve, entre todos os objetos de arte, são os que mais se aproximam ao “expressar a estabilidade e persistência da existência. Eles são para as montanhas o que a música é para (...) o mar”. Eu traço alguns novos vínculos entre uma estética pragmatista experiencial e o rico trabalho do arquiteto finlandês praticante e filosoficamente sofisticado, Juhani Pallasmaa. Em seu Os Olhos da Pele, Pallasmaa retoma o tema da “arquitetura e os sentidos” e desenvolve no caso da arquitetura uma afirmação deweyiana central: o mundo construído deve ser medido por quão bem fora construído de forma a nos ativar em todos estes níveis de nosso ser corpóreo. Pallasmaa proporciona um “ângulo” de arquiteto com a ajuda de diferentes, embora complementárias ferramentas filosóficas. Em A Mão Pensante, ele foca na fertilidade heurística e valor exemplificador do processo “manual” ou “guiado a mão” envolvidos no design do mundo construído em oposição ao uso privilegiado do computador. Pallasmaa vê a mão pensante como uma espécie de dispositivo mediador que supera o abismo, que também Dewey queria, entre as artes formativas e automáticas, permitindo um papel central para a imaginação baseado no corpo. O foco de Pallasmaa da dimensão háptica da percepção e a “mão pensante” é, como o foco de Dewey na “ressonância orgânica total”, não apenas descritivo, mas normativo. Suas análises e conceitos são de relevância universal para a compreensão não apenas da arquitetura mas da dimensão estética da vida de forma geral. (shrink)

Aesthetic internalism claims a link between judgement and motivation: aesthetic judgements bring with them motivations to act in characteristic ways. Critics object that there is a difference between merely liking something and judging it to be aesthetically good, and that it is our likings, not our aesthetic judgements, that motivate us. This paper develops a version of aesthetic internalism that can respond to this criticism. Wholehearted aesthetic judgements are characterized by stability, attention, and motivation. Making (...) such judgements is an important part of a good life, and so at least some aesthetic judgements are motivating. So we have reason to think that this version of aesthetic internalism is true. This paper defends wholehearted aesthetic internalism against objections, and assesses an argument from aesthetic internalism to aesthetic non-cognitivism. While wholehearted aesthetic internalism can only offer qualified support to non-cognitivism, it nonetheless offers a number of fruitful avenues for further work. (shrink)