In a companion volume to his "History of Beauty," the renowned philosopher and cultural critic analyzes our attraction to the gruesome, horrific, and repellant in visual culture and the arts, drawing on abundant examples of painting and sculpture, ranging from antiquity to the works of Bosch, Goya, and others.

Essays discuss poetry, communication, television, form, aesthetics, bad taste, and art.

As the only book-length treatment of Aquinas's aesthetics available in English, this volume should interest philosophers, medievalists, historians, critics, and ...

In this book, the Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco presents a learned summary of medieval aesthetic ideas.

In this short discussion of the Irish modernist writer, the author establishes a link between the mind of James Joyce and medieval theology. He shows how Joyce's fiction was suffused by his reading of St. Thomas Aquinas, Giordano Bruno and Nicola da Cusa and the book creates a dialogue between the saint, the novelist and the critic.

What is beauty? What is art? What is taste and fashion? Is beauty something to be observed coolly and rationally or is it something dangerously involving? So begins Umberto Eco's intriguing journey into the aesthetics of beauty, in which he explores the ever-changing concept of the beautiful from the ancient Greeks to today. While closely examining the development of the visual arts and drawing on works of literature from each era, Eco broadens his enquiries to consider a range of (...) concepts, including the idea of love, the unattainable woman, natural inspiration versus numeric formulas, and the continuing importance of ugliness, cruelty, and even the demonic. Professor Eco takes us from classical antiquity to the present day, dispelling many preconceptions along the way and concluding that the relevance of his research is urgent because we live in an age of great reverence for beauty, "an orgy of tolerance, the total syncretism and the absolute and unstoppable polytheism of Beauty." In this, his first illustrated book, Professor Eco offers a layered approach that includes a running narrative, abundant examples of painting and sculpture, and excerpts from writers and philosophers of each age, plus comparative tables. A true road map to the idea of beauty for any reader who wishes to journey into this wonderful realm with Eco's nimble mind as guide. (shrink)

Beauty is both a history of art, and a history of aesthetics. Eco draws on the histories of both art and aesthetics to define the ideas of beauty that have informed sensibilities from the classical world to modern times. Taking in painting, sculpture, architecture, film, photography, the decorative arts, novels and poems, it offers a rich panorama of this huge subject. It traces the philosophy of aesthetics through history and examines some of the many treatises that have (...) sought to define it. Eco writes about Botticelli and Michelangelo, but also about the way fashion of the 1960s owes much to ancient Egyptian dress, or the fact that ancient Roman and eighteenth-century hairstyles have much in common. Bespreking van de Nederlandse vertaling in: Boekman. 17(2005)65(winter. 106-107). (shrink)

On the Shoulders of Giants collects previously unpublished essays from the last fifteen years of Umberto Eco's life. With humor and erudition, one of the great contemporary thinkers takes on the roots of Western culture, the origin of language, the nature of beauty and ugliness, the imperfections of art, and the lure of mysteries.

숲에 관한 관심이 뜨겁게 달아오르고 있다. 이는 ‘생태적 삶의 추구’가 일종의 시대정신이 된 상황과 밀접하게 연관되어 있다. 그런데 이러한 현상이 명실상부한 생태적 삶으로 이어지고 있다고 보기 어렵다. 본고는 이를 비판적으로 고찰하고, 더 나아가 숲에 관한 생태학적 인식과 실제 삶이 괴리되지 않도록 하는 데 일조하려는 시도의 일환이다.BR 이를 위해서 논자는 ‘뵈메(G. Böhme)가 말하는 생태적 자연미학’의 관점에서 숲을 조망하고자 한다. 뵈메가 강조하는 영국식 정원과 조경술은 숲에 관한 생태학적 연구와 보통 사람들이 일상에서 접하는 숲 체험이 괴리되지 않고 조화를 이루는 데로 나아가는 실마리를 제공한다. (...) 특히 조경술의 실천과 지침이 그렇다.BR 본고는 그러한 실마리를 바탕으로 특정한 숲(화담숲)에 대한 생태미학적 조망을 시도한다. 이를 통해서 조경술이 시사하는 ‘가로지름의 실천’에 기초한 숲의 생태미학적 조망은 보통 사람들이 일상에서 자연/인공의 이분법의 덫을 넘어 ‘자연과, 숲과 억지스럽게 않게 어우러지는 삶’의 가능성을 열어준다는 사실이 드러난다. 요컨대 숲은 평범한 사람이 자신의 일상과 괴리되지 않는 방식으로, 즉 몸으로 느끼고 감지하는 감성적 방식으로, 자연적인 것/인공적인 것의 이분법에서 벗어나서, 자연의 소리에 귀를 기울이게 해주고, 자연의 사고에 다가가게끔 해주는 특별한 체험의 개방된 공간이라는 사실이 숲의 생태미학적 조망을 통해서 개시된다는 점이 논구된다. (shrink)

«What does art mean in a world where urgency predominates, a world that now exhausts its annual quota of renewable resources in July?» (Bourriaud [2021]: 7; my translation). The climate crisis (which began in the last century, but whose consequences have become increasingly worrying in recent years), the Covid 19 pandemic that struck the planet in 2020 and the recent conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the heart of Europe are epoch-making phenomena that are inevitably reshaping the present and future (...) of human societies. With respect to this situation, is art being called into question or, on the contrary, is it an essential tool for rethinking the world of tomorrow? More specifically, is public art today a lost cause or an opportunity? In this article, I will try to place these questions within the framework of what we might call eco-aesthetics, which has an essential connection to the category of “relations”. (shrink)

By moving beyond traditional aesthetic categories (beauty, the sublime, the religious), Eco-Aesthetics takes an inter-disciplinary approach bridging the arts, humanities and social sciences and explores what aesthetics might mean in the 21st century. It is one in a series of new, radical aesthetics promoting debate, confronting convention and formulating alternative ways of thinking about art practice. There is no doubt that the social and environmental spheres are interconnected but can art and artists really make a difference to (...) the global environmental crisis? Can art practice meaningfully contribute to the development of sustainable lifestyles? Malcolm Miles explores the strands of eco-art, eco-aesthetics and contemporary aesthetic theories, offering timely critiques of consumerism and globalisation and, ultimately, offers a possible formulation of an engaged eco-aesthetic for the early 21st century. (shrink)

This paper shows that there is one and the same break in the artistic creative process of Robert Smithson and in the philosophical creative process of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. For Smithson it takes place between Site-Nonsite works and Earthworks . For Deleuze and Guattari it happens in the transition from Difference and Repetition to Anti- Oedipus . Smithson's break marks his abandoning of the institution in favour of an art of direct intervention, the Earthworks confronting one of the (...) most pressing political concerns of his time, the destruction of the earth. Deleuze and Guattari's break happens as they take us from a conceptual mapping of structures to a material machinery of production that allows thought to engage with real political processes. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary in approach, this book combines philosophy, hybrid theory, and architectural theory with case studies, explicitly linking the traditions together to investigate the eco-aesthetics of the urban environment.

As a contemporary form of aesthetics of nature, Eco-aesthetics is dedicated to an aesthetic revision of the split between humans and nature in the process of modernization. Starting from the criticism that the current eco-aesthetic research is usually limited to a taste evaluation of natural beauty and that many studies pay little attention to practically reconstructing a new harmony between humans and nature under contemporary conditions, the article focuses on the following issue: a) To what extent can the (...) approach of Eco-aesthetics be theoretically re-formulated so that the perspective of traditional aesthetics of judgment, predominantly fixed on the experience and reflection of natural beauty, can be avoided? b) How can this reformulation contribute to recultivating and renaturing an environment in a widely urbanized world? Here the concept of ‘atmosphere’ which has been primarily developed by contemporary German philosophers emphasizes the interaction between bodily perception and the qualities of the surrounding environment is of particular significance for solving these issues. It is demonstrated that in atmospheric experiences the body embeds man, together with his multifarious ways of perception and sense experiences, into nature so that man and nature are interrelated with each other and merged into a unified whole. The eco-aesthetic meaning here transcends the framework of the beauty of nature and is characterized by an infinite range of perceptual possibilities towards the integration of the human situation and the environmental conditions. At the same time, the investigation of the conditions and forms of atmospheric creation will contribute to further extending the eco-aesthetic vision to the practical area. And it is not least this practical dimension that distinguishes the Eco-aesthetics from traditional aesthetic approaches to nature. (shrink)

In order to develop environmental aesthetics, Berleant takes environment as an aesthetic paradigm. His understanding of the nature of environment decides the nature of his aesthetics of engagement, which emphasizes experiential continuity and rejects the separation between subject and object. Based on these ideas, he criticizes Kant’s core idea of disinterestedness in his series of books. Berleant’s environmental aesthetics has a significant impact on ecoaesthetics in China. However, Berleant’s criticism of Kant’s core idea of disinterestedness is a (...) misunderstanding and his conception of environment is not fundamentally sound. The future of ecoaesthetics is taking ecosystem not environment as a new aesthetic paradigm. (shrink)

Environmentalists can make individuals more eco-friendly by dispelling many of the myths and misconceptions about the natural world. By learning what in nature is and is not dangerous, and in what contexts the danger is real, individuals can come to aesthetically appreciate seemingly unappreciable nature. Since aesthetic attraction can be an extremely valuable tool for environmentalists, with potentialbeyond that of scientific education, the quest for an eco-friendly is neither unnecessary nor redundant. Rather, an eco-friendly aesthetic ought to be pursued in (...) conjunction with other efforts to protect nature. (shrink)

" Our various cultures are symbolic environments or "spiritual ecologies" within which the Human Eros can thrive. This is how we inhabit the earth. Encircling and sustaining our cultural existence is nature.

In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco essentially presents an educative vision of some basic semiotic principles that infuse the textual form of a popular fictional genre—the detective story. In effect, it characterizes the postmodernization of the traditional “whodunnit” moving the genre from the realm of “the real” or the plausible into the realm of “the metaphysical” or the unthinkable. The Name of the Rose is a practical application in semiotics. Or, how the aesthetics of textual production as (...) generated through the lexical signs and codes manifest the discursive text of a novel work. The semiotic twists and turns of the detective story facilitate this educational function and the purposeful transformation of the reader into an individual capable of appreciating and grasping the conflicting ideological viewpoints expressed through its dialogical structure. The detective genre enables the Umberto Eco to produce an educational narrative via the intricacies of plot in the detective story while teaching main aspects of semiotic theory. (shrink)

In this essay I will discuss the issue of vagueness when defining the concept of open work within the philosophy of Umberto Eco (1932-2016), particularly considering its relevance for the development of his original semiotic view. The analysis of vagueness allows us to stress the importance of Eco’s concept of open work not only in Opera Aperta (1962) but in different phases of his thought. This paper is divided into five sections. Section 1 briefly outlines the Peircean notion of vagueness, (...) trying to understand it as a pivotal concept to define the structure and dynamical form of the open work. Section 2 dwells on the concept of quality in both John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce: here the possibility of articulating an interpretation is considered embodied in the vague immediacy of the qualitative experience. Section 3 analyses to what extent an artwork can be considered open and in motion, according to the Pareysonian concepts of form and interpretation. Section 4 stresses the hypothesis that vagueness produces not only the condition of possibility of an open work and of its multiple interpretations, but also an increase of information due to its aesthetic quality. Section 5 calls into question the distinction between use and interpretation and specifies that interpreting an open work does not mean using it for your own purposes but interpreting a developmental movement towards its own fulfilment; a text is nothing other than the rule that constitutes the universe of its interpretations. (shrink)

The Human Eros is an outstanding accomplishment, a work of genuine wisdom. It combines meticulous scholarship with an enviable mastery of cultural and philosophical history to address pressing concerns of human beings, nature, and philosophy itself. While comprised of essays spanning over two decades, the book presents a powerfully coherent philosophical vision which Alexander names, alternately, “eco-ontology,” “humanistic naturalism,” and “ecological humanism.” Whatever the name, the approach is humane and intellectually compelling, offering insight and direction to pragmatism, aesthetics, existentialism, (...) environmental philosophy, and anyone in search of wisdom. It is an immensely readable book, too. (shrink)

Although Eco was deeply interested in music, his bibliography does not include a work entirely and exclusively dedicated to this theme. However, references to the problems of musical production, listening, interpretation and transmission are scattered in numerous essays, and are often implicitly or explicitly linked to the theoretical and compositional work of his friend and composer Luciano Berio, who in turn dialogued with the developments of Eco’s thought. This article reconstructs the intellectual relationship and friendship between Eco and Berio, originated (...) in the fifties at the Rai studios in Milan; then it examines the passages in Eco’s work dedicated to music, from The Open Work (1962) to Kant and the Platypus (1997). Finally, the article focuses on the controversies raised by the concept of open work, conceived by Eco starting from some musical works including Berio’s Sequenza I for solo flute (1958). With respect to the freedom left to the performer in the 1958 score, Berio’s rewriting in traditional notation in the Nineties seems to undermine at its roots the idea of openness which, according to Eco, distinguishes contemporary poetics. This circumstance provoked some musicological, philological and philosophical controversies, which allowed Eco (2012) to return to reflect on the concept of open work, specifying and clarifying the aesthetic conception underlying it. (shrink)

The subject matter of the text is an examination of the role the problem of repetition plays in cognitive, social and anthropological aspects of the artistic avant-garde as those are viewed from the standpoint of Umberto Eco's semiology. In Eco's "The Open Work" and "The Absent Structure" the above-mentioned problem takes the form of the concept of redundancy. The latter must be analysed in its relation with the concept of information, as they constitute each other; additionally, they shape Eco's approach (...) to the world of signs, being therefore a kind of conceptual infrastructure of his discourse. The author demonstrates that there are in Eco two interpretations of the relation between information and redundancy. According to the one that Eco himself calls "dialectical", the two concepts, although purported to be inextricably linked, remain opposed to each other: information is held to be a function of challenging established communicational codes, thus opening up a possibility of multiple interpretations of signifying structures, whereas redundancy does not question those codes and guarantees communication of single univocal meaning. As for the other, more complex interpretation, the author maintains that a sketch of it can be found on the margins of Eco's discourse. It is largely implicit there and the author makes an attempt to throw it into relief under the name of ostentatious redundancy. The latter oscillates, in a highly ambiguous manner, between confirming and challenging communicational codes. By the same token it can be regarded not as opposing information but as creating it, or even as being, paradoxically, informative in itself. The tension between the two interpretations shapes Eco's internally divided approach to the question of the avant-garde and its cognitive, social and anthropological aspects. Discussing these aspects, the author indicates that Eco has recourse, obliquely, to ostentatious redundancy every time the dialectical interpretation, which i san explicit driving force of his discourse, poses serious difficulties and starts to undermine itself. Ostentatious redundancy is therefore shown to play an important role in all the avant-garde's aspects as well as to govern Eco's reinterpretation of the concept of "avant-garde" itself and his critical re-examination of modernist aesthetics. Finally, it has a strong connection with Eco's theory of the open work. Advocating a further development of the concept of ostentatious redundancy, the author argues that it may and should, with all its necessary internal complexity, be used for analysing contemporary artistic practices. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Umberto Eco stands out in the Library of Living Philosophers series as the volume on the most interdisciplinary scholar hitherto and probably the most widely translated. The Italian philosopher's name and works are well known in the humanities, both his philosophical and literary works being translated into fifteen or more languages. Eco is a founder of modern semiotics and widely known for his work in the philosophy of language and aesthetics. He is also a leading figure (...) in the emergence of postmodern literature, and is associated with cultural and mass communication studies. His writings cover topics such as advertising, television, and children's literature as well as philosophical questions bearing on truth, reality, cognition, language, and literature. The critical essays in this volume cover the full range of this output. This book has wide appeal not only because of its interdisciplinary nature but also because of Eco's famous "high and low" approach, which is deeply scholarly in conception and very accessible in outcome. The short essay "Why Philosophy?" included in the volume is exemplary in this regard: it will appeal to scholars for its wit and to high school students for its intelligibility. (shrink)

In 1962 Umberto Eco published his Opera aperta. Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee, in which he dealt with the televised space and its influence on the development of plot in contemporary narratives. The analysis of the aesthetic of television led him to highlight the exclusive capacity of television to transmit events in real time: Live TV.Eco affirms in particular that through the editing in Live TV, the role of choice completely changes in comparison to what happens in the editing (...) phase within the cinematographic narrative. In Live TV, choice becomes a proper composition, a form of narrative, a means of unifying in a discursive way a set of isolated images within the framework of a wider set of events taking place at the same time and intersecting one another. This impromptu narrative brings with it the use of some recursive forms, which represent an important narrative tool enabling a weaving of the narrative space. Eco identified those recursive forms in some jazz figures such as the riff, the recursive form of which allows for the creation of an organic composition full of improvisation. A few years later, the importance of figures of this kind was also noted by Deleuze-Guattari, who posited that ritornello has an important function of organizing the exterior space, or chaotic space. Based on these considerations, this paper deals with the phenomenon of repetition, recursivity, and patterns, to bring these concepts into the construction of narrative spaces. The central point of the paper is that the birth of Live TV started a phenomenon of exteriorization of the inner data of the narrative construction. This phenomenon of externalization makes possible the understanding of data through spatial terms, and one starts to use recursive formulas to navigate it. (shrink)

The ancient aesthetics of yijing has played a crucial role in traditional Chinese philosophy, literature and art since the eighth century CE. Defined variously by early and contemporary writers, yijing links an artist's emotional domain to objects in the world. This article conceptualises yijing as an ecological aesthetics and distinguishes it from an environmental aesthetics. In particular, two aspects of yijing render it an eco-aesthetics: subject-object correspondence (or 'engagement'); and empathic identification with the environment (or 'bio-empathy'). (...) Three brief case studies from urban planning, environmental conservation and the creative arts demonstrate the contemporary importance of yijing to ecological issues. (shrink)

The essay outlines the debate around the question on the existence of Medieval Aesthetics starting from the publication of Arte e bellezza nell’estetica medievale by Umberto Eco. Since the last decade of the 20th century, the question on Medieval Aesthetics receives a particular attention from a methodological point of view also because it is close to different disciplines as History, History of Art, Aesthetics and History of Philosophy. A renewed interest in the image theme, in History and (...) History of Art, permits to study the pre-modern period without using anachronistic categories like that of “Art”. In the field of Aesthetics scholars rethink how to approach the question about its history. In this context, History of Philosophy reviews its own categories asking how it is possible to talk about thematic objects that traditionally belong to Aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper offers a re-reading of the works of Umberto Eco, be they academic, journalistic or literary, with a pseudologic tone: his desire to investigate the mechanisms of lying, and their relation with fiction, falsification, error, secrecy, and conspiracy. The study will review some of his main academic texts in the fields of semiotics, rhetoric, and aesthetics, and will make some references to his recent novels and essay compilations, as well as offer an explanation of how the evolution of (...) his thoughts takes a pessimistic turn. The face of the lie, which initially was aesthetic consolation and consumerist delusion, and then a game of intelligence, a creative stimulus and an interpretive challenge, changes when serves the purpose of extortion, manipulation, and war. In short, it could be argued that Eco became increasingly disappointed by deceptions, and lost faith in fakes and forgeries. (shrink)

By comparing chemistry to art, chemists have recently made claims to the aesthetic value, even beauty, of some of their products. This paper takes these claims seriously and turns them into a systematic investigation of the aesthetics of chemical products. I distinguish three types of chemical products - materials, molecules, and molecular models - and use a wide variety of aesthetic theories suitable for an investigation of the corresponding sorts of objects. These include aesthetics of materials, idealistic (...) class='Hi'>aesthetics from Plato to Kant and Schopenhauer, psychological approaches of Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Arnheim, and semiotic aesthetics of Nelson Goodman and Umberto Eco. Although the investigation does not support recent claims, I point out where aesthetics does and can play an import role in chemistry. Particularly, Eco's approach helps us understand that and how aesthetic experience can be a driving force in chemical research. (shrink)