In "Aesthetic Histories" our contributors’ shared concern is the inspiring and confounding, healthy and uncomfortable and above all inevitable relationship between history and aesthetic praxis.

EVENTAL AESTHETICS RETROSPECTIVE 1. LOOKING BACK AT 10 ISSUES OF EVENTAL AESTHETICS.

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

Our contributors explore a rich variety of aesthetic problems that bring about the self-reflexive re-evaluation of ideas.

In this special issue on animals and aesthetics, contributors explore encounters with animals in art and thought.

A hijacking is a violent takeover, a misappropriation of something for a purpose other than its intended one, by parties other than those for whom the thing was meant. This issue explores the aesthetic practices and consequences of unauthorized repurposing.

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.

In this issue, our contributors demonstrate how art in the city, art “about” the city, art compared to the city, can bring to attention the insidious forces underlying every city’s gleaming, wide-awake veneer.

This issue profiles various attempts, both successful and fraught, to engage the divide between asceticism and opulence, between materialism and poverty.

This handsomely produced volume contains 22 contributions from international scholars, which were originally presented at the 2000 Conference of the International Society for Phenomenology, Fine Arts, & Aesthetics. The papers center around the theme of gardens and include a wide range of topics of interest to phenomenologists but also, perhaps, to gardeners with a philosophical bent. A sampling of topics: Leonardo's Annunciation Hortus Conclusus and its reflexive intent; hatha yoga--a phenomenological experience of nature; the Chinese attempt to miniaturize the world (...) in gardens; conflating and compressing time in commodified space and architecture; constructing the deconstructive landscape (the ruin aesthetic); and a phenomenological-anthropological aproach to Zen gardens. The volume is lightly indexed by name (mostly philosophers). Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com). (shrink)

Is aesthetics a product of evolution? Are human aesthetic behaviors in fact evolutionary adaptations? The creation of artistic objects and experiences is an important aesthetic behavior. But so is the perception of aesthetic phenomena qua aesthetic. The question of evolutionary aesthetics is whether humans have evolved the capacity not only to make beautiful things but also to appreciate the aesthetic qualities in things. Are our near-universal love of music and cute baby animals essential to our species’ evolutionary development, which took (...) place over thousands of years? In other words, do aesthetic practice and appreciation help people to survive or reproduce? Do aesthetic behaviors help to propel natural selection? If so, what does that tell us about ourselves as human beings? What does it tell us about art, our other aesthetic practices, and aesthetic experience? (shrink)

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, 19 essays document the April 1998 international congress held at Harvard University. They ponder on such topics as the phenomenology of the experience of enchantment, Leonardo's enchantress, the ambiguous meaning of musical enchantment in Kant's Third Critique, art and the reenchantment of sensuous human activity, the creative voice, the allure of the Naza, Henri Matisse's early critical reception in New York, Zizek's sublimicist aesthetic of enchanted fantasy, (...) and enchantment in Baroque festive court performance in France. There is no subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Önsöz -- Giriş -- Osmanlı modernleşmesi -- Osmanlı gazeteciliği -- Edebiyat -- Kısaltmalar -- Dizin.

In this paper I start with Adorno’s famous and provocative statement “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, aimed at asking whether art was still possible in the age of genocides. Then, I take into examination Adorno’s concept of commitment in art – which is closely related to these questions - and the meaning itself of the notion of “Auschwitz” in Adorno’s philosophy. Analyzing what Adorno called “true” art (i.e. art provided with a relevant “truth content”) leads to take into (...) consideration what he understood vice-versa as false or untrue art, in particular mass culture and popular music. Adorno would have probably considered as a sort of blasphemy or heresy the idea itself to write and perform pop-rock songs about such subjects as genocide, but I argue that his views rely on some prejudices that negatively condition his philosophy of art and especially of music. The songs on the Armenian genocide written and performed by the heavy metal band System of a Down serve here as a profitable example that may be of help to foster a critical rethinking of some aspects of Adorno’s aesthetics. (shrink)

This is the first book to present an aesthetics of virtual reality media. It situates virtual reality media in terms of the philosophy of the arts, comparing them to more familiar media such as painting, film and photography. When philosophers have approached virtual reality, they have almost always done so through the lens of metaphysics, asking questions about the reality of virtual items and worlds, about the value of such things, and indeed, about how they may reshape our understanding of (...) the "real" world. Grant Tavinor finds that approach to be fundamentally mistaken, and that to really account for virtual reality, we must focus on the medium and its uses, and not the hypothetical and speculative instances that are typically the focus of earlier works. He also argues that much of the cultural and metaphysical hype around virtual reality is undeserved. But this does not mean that virtual reality is illusory or uninteresting; on the contrary, it is significant for the altogether different reason that it overturns much of our understanding of how representational media can function and what we can use them to achieve. The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of art, philosophy of technology, metaphysics, and game studies. (shrink)

This article discusses the level of preservation of religious beliefs in modern Armenian society. The Church is carrying out targeted activities to increase its ranks, which it could not do during the Soviet era. The Armenians have always maintained their faith without the mediation of the church. This article examines the role of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the formation of moral and spiritual values in our society between two generations. The government used to take care of all (...) social groups and created conditions enabling Armenian society to function within its country, to develop their culture and values, and to refrain from other ideas and values. (shrink)

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations (...) concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles. (shrink)

Preface -- Introduction -- The burden of English -- Who claims alterity? -- How to read a "culturally different" book -- The double bind starts to kick in -- Culture: situating feminism -- Teaching for the times -- Acting bits/identity talk -- Supplementing Marxism -- What's left of theory? -- Echo -- Translation as culture -- Translating into English -- Nationalism and the imagination -- Resident alien -- Ethics and politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and certain scenes of teaching -- Imperative (...) to re-imagine the planet -- Reading with Stuart Hall in "pure" literary terms -- Terror: a speech after 9/11 -- Harlem -- Scattered speculations on the subaltern and the popular -- World systems and the creole -- The stakes of world literature -- Rethinking comparativism -- Sign and trace -- Tracing the skin of day. (shrink)

This book aims to introduce the Armenian version of Philo's writings also to those scholars not acquainted with Armenian Studies. The subject is approached from different perspectives - historical, hermeneutical, philological, linguistic - with special attention given to the reception of Philo in Armenian Christianity.

In Armenien stand von den Fortsetzungen des Eusebianischen Geschichtswerkes, die die Zeit von Konstantin I. bis in die erste Hälfte des 5. Jahrhunderts behandelten, also einen Zeitabschnitt, der für die Herausbildung der armenischen christlichen Theologie grundlegend war, nur die Kirchengeschichte des Sokrates Scholastikos in hohem Ansehen, da man glaubte, sie sei der armenischen christologischen Position am nächsten. So ist sie uns in zwei armenischen Übersetzungen überliefert, einer wortgetreuen, ausführlichen Version, die aus der sogenannten hellenisierenden Übersetzerschule stammt, und einer in einem (...) verständlichen zeitgenössischen Armenisch verfaßten Kurzversion. Die als erstes genannte Übersetzung ist für die Konstituierung des griechischen Textes des Werkes des Sokrates von großer Bedeutung, wie es Günther Christian Hansen in dessen Edition ausführlich belegt (Sokrates Scholastikos, Kirchengeschichte, Berlin 1995 [GCS], S. XXVIIff.]). Sie hat aber wegen ihrer engen Orientierung an der griechischen Sprache in Armenien nur einen kleinen Kreis von griechisch Gebildeten erreichen können. Die Kurzversion dagegen fand weite Verbreitung. Bei ihrer in der Forschung umstrittenen Datierung schließt sich Thomson der Auffassung an, daß das Kolophon in einer der Handschriften, das eine Datierung enthält und den Übersetzer nennt, auf die Kurzversion zu beziehen ist (S. 9ff. mit allen notwendigen Literaturangaben). Sie sei also auf das Jahr 695/6 zu datieren. Und es handele sich nicht um eine Übersetzung aus dem Original, sondern lediglich um eine Überarbeitung der älteren langen Version (S. 11f.). Ein wichtiger Beitrag zur Forschung ist auch das Bemühen, den Übersetzer P'ilon Tirakac'i und den Auftraggeber der Übersetzung Nerseh Kamsarakan zu verifizieren (S. 36-40). (shrink)