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.

Reviews the book, The Oxford history of Western philosophy edited by Anthony Kenny . Written by a team of some of the most distinguished scholars, this authoritative and finely detailed compendium traces the history of Western philosophy from its earliest beginnings among the Presocratics to the current era. This paperback volume should no doubt be a welcome addition to the reference library of all theoretical/philosophical psychologists. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Reviews the book, Genes, genesis, and God: Values and their origins in natural and human history by Holmes Rolston III . Drawn from a series of lectures given by the author in November of 1997 at the University of Edinburgh as part of the Gifford Lectures, this book addresses the question of whether the supremely social and human phenomena of religion and ethics can be ultimately reduced to the phenomena of biology. Challenging much of what passes for unassailable truth (...) in sociobiological and similar natural science circles, Rolston argues that religion, ethics, and science—as emergent phenomena in human culture—are not only crowning and distinctive achievements in human cultural history but that it is impossible to adequately conceive of them as having resulted from simple evolutionary or biological processes. To this end, the author argues that genetic and evolutionary processes are anything but blind, selfish, and contingent. Indeed, Rolston cogently argues that not only are our sciences of nature not value free, but nature itself is laden with values. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Reviews the book, The dream of reason: A history of philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance by Anthony Gottlieb . Seldom in the history of histories—particularly histories of philosophy—have there been authors capable of producing accessible, entertaining, insightful, and accurate treatments of their subject matter. An unfailingly pleasant read, Gottlieb’s history shows how many of philosophy’s most revolutionary breakthroughs have consistently been co-opted by other branches of learning, leading to the unfortunate illusion that philosophers never make (...) any progress. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Reviews the book, Challenges to theoretical psychology by Wolfgang Maiers, Betty Bayer, Barbara Duarte Esgalhado, Rene Jorna, and Ernst Schraube . This stimulating and wide-ranging collection is composed of selections from the program of the Seventh Biennial Conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology that was held in Berlin, Germany in April and May of 1997. The 55 essays are grouped into ten major thematic fields: Psychological Understanding and the Role of Theory; Critical History of Psychology; Foundational Issues (...) in the Sciences of Mind; Agency, Action, and Consciousness; Implications of Life Narratives for Psychological Theorization; Social Practice, Discourse, and Subjects; Psychological Studies and the Notion of Culture; Technology and the Body in Psychology; Feminist Research and Subjectivity; Postmodernism, Marxism, and Critical Psychology. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Reviews the book, From soul to mind: The emergence of psychology, from Erasmus Darwin to William James by Edward S. Reed . Seeking to tell "a new story about the development of psychology," this lively and well-written history of psychology begins with the "realization that we do not actually know what constituted psychology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" . Reed argues that because most historians of psychology devote the bulk of their attention to the work of theorists rather (...) than experimentalists, seldom examined the history and origins of ideas concerning what should and should not be counted as psychology, and pretty much refused to discuss ideas that were later proven to be mistaken, they have produced an overly narrow and fable-like picture of the early history of the discipline. In an attempt to remedy this on-going error in the historiography of psychology, Dr. Reed urges us to examine the historical, literary, and cultural context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that gave birth to the development of the career of "being a psychologist." 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Reviews the book, Psychological concepts and biological psychiatry by Peter Zachar . Almost from the very beginning of its disciplinary history clinical psychology has sought to align itself philosophically and methodologically with the natural sciences, particularly medicine and neurology. Contradicting the common-place assumption that common sense or folk psychology has been proven uninformative and futile, Zachar provides explicit philosophical and psychological arguments that demonstrate why such accounts are not only vital to proper scientific explanation but inevitable as well. 2012 (...) APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Reviews the book, The body by Donn Welton . Over the last century, the nature and meaning of human embodiment has emerged as one of the more significant areas of philosophical and psychological inquiry. From at least the time of Edmund Husserl, many thinkers in the Continental tradition have striven to re-conceptualize the body and its relationship to self and other in such a way as to avoid the pitfalls of more traditional, reductionistic attempts that view the body solely in (...) physical or biological terms. In this helpful volume, part of Blackwell’s Readings in Continental Philosophy series, Welton has brought together for the first time many of the foundational twentieth-century writings on the concept of embodiment. This book provides not only a cluster of theories articulated by philosophers seeking to move beyond the inherent limitations and contradictions of Modern philosophy, but also new appropriations and insights from psychoanalysis, social history, literary theory, and gender theory. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Reviews the book, The Metaphysical Club: A story of ideas in America by Louis Menand . In this highly entertaining and readable history, Menand examines the lives and thinking of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, members of an informal discussion group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1872 that called itself the Metaphysical Club. Beginning with the Civil War and ending in 1919 with the Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Abrams, this (...) insightful and thought-provoking book tells a story of the creation of the ideas and values that have shaped how Americans think and how we live. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

v. 1. Indian aesthetics.--v. 2. Western aesthetics.

Study with reference to Indic theory of aesthetics and Sanskrit poetics.

Illustrations: Numerous Colour and 15 B/w Illustrations Description: The volumes of the PROJECT OF HISTORY OF SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE IN INDIAN CIVILIZATION aim to discover the central aspects of India's heritage and present them in an interrelated manner. In spite of their unitary look, these volumes recognize the difference between the areas of material civilization and those of ideational culture. The Project is not being executed by a single group of thinkers, methodologically uniform or ideologically identical in their (...) commitments. Rather, contributions are made by different scholars of diverse ideological persuasions and methodological approaches. The Project is marked by what may be called 'methodological pluralism'. In spite of its primarily historical character, this project, both in its conceptualization and execution, has been shaped by scholars drawn from different disciplines. It is the first time that an endeavour of such unique and comprehensive character has been undertaken to study critically a major world civilization. History of art, unlike that of science, is not an accumulation of facts. It comprises concurrences and overlappings cutting across the linearity of time. Based on this premise the essays in this volume delve into the discourse as also forms of creativity in the Indian tradition in terms of both the perennial and the ephemeral aspects of aesthetic experience. The essays form four groups dealing with (a) core concepts which permeate the discourse on aesthetic theories, and having ramifications in many other disciplines and domains; (b) The Rasa theory in the framework of classical philosophical traditions of Vedanta, Mimamsa, Samkhya, and Kashmir Saivism, and (c) the comprehension of the foundational concepts of aesthetic theory, namely, Rasa and Dhvani from the perspectives of Indian thought traditions addressing also music, dance and the visual arts. There is no clear-cut demarcation between the four groups of essays though in their own framework they illustrate a transition from the discourse (sastra) to practice (prayoga) i.e., from theorizing on the nature of aesthetic experience to the process of concretizing it into forms of music, dance, architecture, and painting. The contributions highlight the fact that the history of Indian aesthetic tradition comprises various textual and performing traditions that have flourished in the Indian subcontinent. What we have is not a single history but multiple histories based on various philosophical and methodological approaches adopted by art historians. Some of these histories pertain to the technical details of a given art form, and some with the changes that have occurred in the evolution and development these forms. While some historical accounts focus on the relevant biographical details of the artists, some art histories focus on the social, cultural, political, and even the economic conditions of civilization that determine the nature of an art form. Considering the multi-dimensional and multi-level complexities of Indian civilization and culture, the contributions to this volume have investigated into a number of factors which are directly and indirectly relevant for comprehending the complexities of the Indian aesthetic tradition. (shrink)

v. 1. Aesthetic beauty & bliss in Indian literature & philosophy -- v. 2. Two streams of Indian Art. pt. 1. History, thoughts, and canon of Indian iconography -- pt. 2. The Tāntrika iconography -- pt. 3. Indian gesturology -- pt. 4. Primitive arts, crafts, and ālpanā.

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) spent most of his life as a private scholar in Naples. His Estetica, which first appeared in 1902, has remained a seminal work not only for aesthetics but also for general linguistics. As the full title indicates, this is not a narrow work dealing with the theory of art and criticism. For Croce intended this to be the first part of his "philosophy of the spirit" and he thus presents a systematic general theory intended (...) to solve all philosophical problems. The work presents an account of the structure of the human mind and shows how art arises naturally from that structure, as well as introducing the influential notion of the organic unity of a work of art. As a result, art is shown to be integral to any life and an essential aspect of what it is to be human. This new translation of the first and most important part of the work (Theory) supersedes the defective translation by D. Ainslie, first published in 1909. It is based on the most recent Italian edition (1990). In his foreword the translator addresses the difficulties in translating certain key words in the Italian original, "scienza", "fantasia", and of course, "estetica" itself. He also furnishes the reader with helpful explanatory annotation. This publication will be of cardinal importance for all those interested in the philosophy of art, the history of criticism, and the history of linguistics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetics As First EthicsLevinas and the Alterity of Literary DiscourseHenry McDonald (bio)1Notwithstanding the considerable amount of scholarly attention paid since the 1980s to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy of “the other,” critics and theorists have generally approached the relation between ethics and aesthetics in his work warily. Although readings of poetry and fiction inspired by Levinas’s philosophy continue to grow at a rapid rate, arguments applying that philosophy to literary (...) and aesthetic theory have been few and tentatively advanced. Some critics have contended that Levinas was something of a Platonic moralist who “disparaged” and “denounced” art and literature as failing to conform to his idea of what was “ethical.”1 If there is a critical consensus on the issue, it would seem to be that Levinas believed that art and ethics are incompatible.2Based on the aesthetic writings that Levinas produced over a four-decade period, as well as on the role literature played in the genesis and development of his ethical philosophy, such assessments seem puzzling. A Lithuanian Jew who studied with Husserl and Heidegger in 1929–30, Levinas (1906–95) came to philosophy initially through literature, especially Russian literature and Shakespeare: “the whole of philosophy,” he said, “is only a meditation of Shakespeare.”3 In the first work of his philosophical maturity, Existence and Existents (1947), discussions of aesthetics and literature introduce and develop the notion of being as il y a (there is), an account which, in giving emphasis [End Page 15] to being’s “horror” (horreur), simultaneously critiques ontology and places ethics on a tragic basis.4 The il y a, along with its temporal counterpart, the entretemps (between times), introduced just one year later in “Reality and Its Shadow” (1948), are of particular importance to his writings on aesthetics, produced during a period from the 1940s through the 70s.5 The latter provide abundant evidence of the potential for ethical meaning, indeed transcendence, he attributed to the artwork, as in “The Poet’s Vision” (1956), in which he asserts: “Literature is the unique adventure of a transcendence beyond all the horizons of the world... the authenticity of art must herald an order of justice” [“The Poet’s Vision” 134, 137]. Although Levinas never completed anything approximating a “system of aesthetics,” it is nonetheless true that in pieces ranging from developed essays on literary theory and aesthetics to brief commentaries on dozens of literary figures and works, he gave substantive indications of the ways in which his radically nonconceptual, nonontological account of ethics might alter our understanding of the status of “the literary artwork.”Most crucial among those indications is the close connection he posited between the alterity, or otherness, of the artwork and its tragic nature, which he defined in terms of his antiontological accounts of “being” and especially “time” (entretemps, “between times”). As early as “Reality and Its Shadow,” Levinas proposed the thesis, extended in his later essays, that the alterity of art and literature was located not in any ontological or conceptual “beyond”—in a spiritual dimension “which sets itself up as knowledge of the absolute” [1]—but in the “interstices” of language [3], in the “between times” (entretemps) of its modes of temporality: which can be accessed only by way of “the tragic” in art. Time in Levinas’s aesthetics is signified diachronically, from within a region of diaspora. What Levinas terms “alterity,” or otherness, points not toward a privileged, interpersonal dimension freed from the problematics of modernity, but strives to expose the complicity between the West’s concept of rationality and its history of barbarism exemplified by the Holocaust, its history, as Levinas put it, of “National Socialism, Stalinism, the camps, the gas chambers, nuclear weapons, terrorism and unemployment.”6 Art and literature demonstrate a utopian, emancipatory potential in revealing the fissures and hidden pathways that run through the hegemonic structures and totalizing frameworks of modernity.A central aspect of such an aesthetics is its privileging of music and musicality, which Levinas shares with a more recent thinker and critic, Paul Gilroy.7 Like Gilroy, Levinas deploys “musicality,” which he characterizes as “writing in its significance without signifiers” [157] not just to “refute,” as Gilroy... (shrink)

Many physicians assert that new cost-control mechanisms inappropriately interfere with clinical decision-making. They claim that high costs arise from poorly practiced medicine, and argue that effective utilization of resources is best promoted by advancing the scientific and ethical ideals of medicine. However, the claim is not warranted by empirical evidence. In this essay, I show how it rests upon aesthetic considerations associated with diagnostic elegance. I first consider scientific rationality generally. After a review of analytical empiricist and socio-historical approaches in (...) the philosophy of science, a form of Kant's aesthetic is used to explain how scientific discovery and justification are linked, and to show how meta-theoretical considerations associated with the goals and method of science work together with exemplars of practice. This analysis enables us to understand how the ideals of medicine as a science guide the initial patient history and physical exam in such a way that a parsimonious use of tests is indicated. Aesthetic considerations unite the basic scientific and ethical commitments of the modern medical paradigm and are central for rightly understanding clinical judgment. (shrink)

Introduction. The article is focused on analyzing the aesthetic aspect of A. Kojève’s philosophy, the ability of his philosophy, from an aesthetic point of view, to clarify a number of key problems of the modern political and cultural environment. The purpose of the study is to determine the epistemological attitude of A. Kojève’s philosophy able to clarify the way in which his philosophy problematizes the current cultural and political reality. Methods. Hermeneutics, comparative analysis and deconstruction are used as research methods. (...) Comparative analysis allows us to demarcate A. Kojève’s own line of reasoning, in the context of aesthetic and epistemological theories, as well as Hegelian themes themselves. Hermeneutics is the central method in the work, since the philosophy of A. Kojeve requires interpretation as an aesthetic theory. Deconstruction, formalized to the status of a method according to P. de Man, allows us to detect inconsistencies, the principle of mutual problematization of Kojeve’s philosophy and the current political and epistemological agenda. Scientific novelty of the research. The standard way of interpreting the work of A. Kojève is to evaluate him as an interpreter of G. Hegel. The author analyzes some meaning of A. Kojève’s philosophy, separate from G. Hegel’s explanation of the text. The novelty lies not only in the fact that A. Kojève’s philosophy is defined as theorizing that goes beyond technical hermeneutics (clear presentation), but also as a specific representation of such theorizing as epistemological aesthetic theory. The latter is a rather rare interpretation of the philosophy of A. Kojeve. This allows us to expand the traditional assumption that post-Hegelian epistemesthetics is the property of an extremely limited number of authors (for example, B. Croce). Moreover, such an interpretation of A. Kojève’s theories is a new element in the emerging trend of considering political issues within the framework of epistemological aesthetics. Results. The specific mode of interpreting G. Hegel, which is carried out by A. Kojève, turns the philosophy of the former into a unique aesthetic project. In this project, the category of aesthetic experience comes to the foreground, indicating the empty, formal nature of any discourse. In this regard, any claim to knowledge of reality, to a correct idea of the subject is replaced by the idea of creating the subject of discourse. Consistent treatment of this idea is symptomatic of the philosophy of A. Kojève. This philosophy is a reflection of those historical changes that gave rise to the culture of “aesthetic rationality”: empty and formal. In A. Kojève’s philosophy, one can see how such a culture of the End of History is, contrary to Hegelian ideas, not the era of the struggle decline, but the era of its strange transformation, a symptom of increasing political violence. Conclusions. A. Kojève’s philosophy is considered not as a utopian political project, but as a problematization of the modern cultural and political sphere. The latter is understood as an indication of the inconsistency of ontological discourses of Truth, the discovery in the very essence of discursive practices of an empty, formal principle, and therefore primarily of interest to aesthetics. The modern era of the End of History and the end of the era of persuasive speech gives an idea of the main political paradox (at least for the philosophy of A. Kojève, and at most for the modern political environment). The era of disappointment in discourse should become an era of refusal to fight for discourses, but it becomes an era of maximizing violence, since it is in a situation of disappointment that discourses can only be supported by force. We move from unconvincing speech to convincing violence, but it is possible to understand the origins and specifics of this transition only by considering A. Kojève’s philosophy in the light of such a discipline as aesthetics. (shrink)

All Arts In India Owe Their Roots To The Theoretical Structure Developed By Bharatamuni In His Celebrated Work Natyasastra. His Theory Of Beauty Is Known As The Theory Of Rasa. The Present Volume Has Shown How The Insight Of Bharata Was Developed By The Classical Scholars From Abhinavagupta To Jagannatha Who Propounded The Theories With Names Like Rasa, Alamkara, Riti, Vakrokti, Dhvani Etc. To Employ The Theory Of Beauty From Natya (Drama) To Kavya (Poetry).

Papers presented at the Seminar on Ethics and Aesthetics in Indian Literary Practices, held at Udaipur in Rajasthan, India in 2009; organized by Department of English, Mohanlal Sukhadia University, Udaipur, India.

When Blanchot sketches the obscure space of the other night, he describes it primarily in terms of sound. The vocation of the other night, the domain of inspiration, which is approached because it promises to enable artistic works but ultimately puts them at the utmost risk, turns out to be one’s own “eternally reverberating echo.” In my article, I want to trace how such nocturnal sounds are articulated in works of art across different media, especially by staging breath. Echoing Blanchot, (...) these works indicate how hearing the night and hearing breath, the sound of physical inspiration, coincides with hearing what constitutes the respective work’s medial and material bases. In Virginia Woolf’s novels Jacob’s Room and The Waves, an impersonal, neutral narrative voice resounds in a “murmur of air,” “tremulous with breathing,” spreading darkness across space and time. The visitors’ exploration of Kimsooja’s installation To Breathe: Bottari ends in a completely dark anechoic chamber where visitors start hearing their own breath. By creating this uncanny moment of hearing one’s own respiration as an external and disembodied sound, the spatial installation points to what essentially determines it: the bodily movements of the participants. “Nightmarket,” a track by Burial, is a labyrinthine soundscape consisting mainly of muffled whispering, rustling, crackling and audible breath. Through the acoustic proximity of the recorded breath and the vinyl crackles, the track evokes its own medial constitution and history: it displays traces of the organic basis of voice as well as the analogue medium in the digital. (shrink)

In the story of Coriolanus, as depicted mainly by Plutarch and Shakespeare, we become aware of the norms and parameters of the nobility, the sincerity and the legitimacy of violence, both in diction and action, both political and personal, both as a rhetorical strategy and as a way of living. These attributes indicate a firm culture of violence and a definite system of values, which, within the span of Roman antiquity and history, comprises an early idea of chivalry and (...) which aims at gloria. (shrink)

This paper challenges the assumption that lines, colors, and shapes have aesthetic effects that are the same for everyone. From an interdisciplinary perspective of art history and empirical aesthetics, we argue that assigning aesthetic effects to specific lines or colors may well be a valid theory for some aesthetic encounters, it falls short of explaining universal aesthetic effects. Our analysis proceeds in four steps: We begin by reconsidering the notion of aesthetic effect as defined in the tradition of Goethe. (...) We then demonstrate that doubts regarding the universality of aesthetic effects have existed since the nineteenth century and that the concept of aesthetic sensitivity was introduced around 1900 to account for individual differences. We point to the persistence of the idea of universality and, related to this, sensitivity by considering the ›Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Test‹, first developed in the 1960s by Karl Otto Götz, Daniel Berlyne, and Hans-Jürgen Eysenck. We discuss new empirical research testing interpersonal agreement about aesthetic effects. The findings of these studies indicate a low agreement among the participants about aesthetic effects, raising serious doubts about assumed universality. In a concluding section, we discuss what remains of the universality claim and propose a weak theory of intersubjective agreement about aesthetic effects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience by Bethany HenningFrank X. RyanDewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience Bethany Henning. Lexington Books, 2022.In this important and splendidly crafted book, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom distinct from the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. Unlike the psychological atomism of European Empiricism, from its outset, American philosophy embraced nature's aesthetic splendor and (...) the continuity between our thought and our world. Jonathan Edwards held that relations among ideas reflect beauty in the structure of being. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball" where the cultivation of nature's spontaneous beauty fortifies our moral and spiritual agency. At the apex of this tradition is John Dewey, for whom Henning touts "aesthetic experience as the highest mode of human experience" (55).Although the aesthetic is generally associated with the cognitive evaluation of art, of special significance for Dewey is its non-reflective or unconscious dimension. Henning's appropriation of "unconscious"—the cradle of Freud's infantile id—is intentionally provocative. American culture, reflected in academic thought, has largely resisted appeals to subterranean urges and drives. In so doing, however, we perpetuate a myth of rational and moral exceptionalism that masks our history of colonialism, oppression, and crass commercialism. In accepting the unconscious, European thought has taken strides to acknowledge and address such ills. Despite America's disdain for psychoanalysis, Henning wonders whether it "could have accepted a dynamic unconscious, were it presented with an alternative mythology" (10).Dewey's alternative, says Henning, arises from his underappreciated notion of qualitative immediacy. In Henning's interpretation of this, meaning is embodied as a "sense of fulfillment" among accumulated habits—a "coming to terms with the world around us" through an "aesthetic (directly felt) connection between ourselves and the world." As such, to appreciate meaning, we must affirm the tacit, unconscious depth of experience; that is, we must "welcome aesthetic experience back into our philosophical lives" (5).Embodied meaning signifies that "the sensuous, lived body" is "the primary reality" (69). In this reality, qualitative immediacy is a non-reflective, aesthetic unity punctuated by "impulsions" arising from an organism's needs. Such needs are satisfied in organism-environment interactions where, says Dewey, "the epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins" (LW 10:61). As "a site of adaptive adjustments," Henning continues, "the body is responsive to the [End Page 114] brink of coalescence at the point of contact with the world, in which things that are 'outside of it' belong to it" (71). As such, the body-mind relation is a problem of aesthetics, not epistemology. For Dewey, as for Merleau-Ponty, the body "is the organic and dynamic condition of my thought" (75). The body is not a thing, however, but a process "always organically involved in exchanges" (86).Following the feminist thought of Susan Bordo, Henning agrees that the ascendance of the body amounts to a kind of philosophical recovery. Seventeenth-century science eviscerated the organic "female" universe of the Middle Ages. But this loss of an integrated world evoked existential fright, which Descartes tried to calm by subjugating feminine vagaries of the body to a masculine cognitive certitude bent upon controlling the whole of nature. In America today, this neurosis perpetuates our cultural alienation from our bodies, our environments, and one another (81–84). With the re-emergence of the body, however, it is possible to acknowledge and address this trauma."Feeling," in Dewey's sense, is unconsciously affective: a constant rhythm of disequilibrium and equilibrium, of need and resolution noticed only when a problem rises to the point of requiring our conscious attention. This affective "charge," this rhythm of sensed need and the desire to overcome it, is Dewey's appropriation of Plato's Erōs. Thomas Alexander casts Dewey's Erōs broadly as humanity's aesthetic investment in our world—our collective effort "to transform a biophysical environment into a world filled with meaning" (Alexander 11). But Henning turns to the more familiar sense of Erōs attuned not to the world at... (shrink)

This major work of reference is an indispensable resource for anyone conducting research or teaching in philosophy. An international team of over 100 leading scholars has been brought together under the general editorship of Alan Schrift and the volume editors to provide authoritative analyses of the continental tradition of philosophy from Kant to the present day. Divided, chronologically, into eight volumes, "The History of Continental Philosophy" is designed to be accessible to a wide range of readers, from the scholar (...) looking for original insight and the latest thinking to the student wishing for a masterly encapsulation of a particular thinker's views. By placing continental philosophy within a historical context, "The History of Continental Philosophy" helps define what the continental tradition has been and where it is moving. It will become a landmark publication in its field. Volume 1 covers the period from 1780 until 1848, focusing primarily on the main philosophical figures and developments in Germany during that period, but also including a description of economic and social theories in France that set the stage for the philosophical and social movements that predominated in Germany and France during the second half of the nineteenth century. Volume 2 examines what is often referred to as the 'Age of Revolution' as various responses to Hegel, while also attending to developments in science, mathematics, sociology and aesthetics during the second half of the nineteenth century that would set the stage for the twentieth century. Volume 3 examines the earliest developments in the twentieth century: while attending to a number of key thinkers, it also discusses the emergence of French sociology in the Durkheim school, developments in modern science, the philosophical response to evolution, and the schools of phenomenology and neo-Kantianism. Volume 4, as the title indicates, charts the various responses to phenomenology that appeared in the years following Husserl, with particular attention to the emergence of existentialism and existential theology, as well as its relations with philosophy of science, aesthetics and ethics. Volume 5 surveys some of the main continental movements and philosophers associated with social and political philosophy and philosophy of the human sciences during the period from 1940 through to 1968. Volume 6 looks at the major figures associated with the two dominant movements that emerge in the 1960s - poststructuralism and critical theory - while also attending to the emergence of philosophical feminism and some influential figures in those years not easily situated in the "standard" histories of the period. Volume 7 examines the developments in Continental philosophy in the years, roughly, 1980-95, the period immediately after the hegemony of poststructuralism in France and of Habermas in Germany. Volume 8 attempts to situate the present scene in continental philosophy in terms of various new developments that are framed as attempts to rethink some of the classic themes with which the history of continental philosophy has been more or less consistently engaged. (shrink)

I.Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (1927; revised 1932 and 1933) has come to be widely recognized as a work of rare insight into the formative logic of the state. Much less apparent is that implicit within this theoretical distillation is a new type of political history. There is every indication—given the philosophical, theological, and aesthetic aspects of Schmitt's writings, no less than his overtly personal beliefs in this regard—that a history of the political relative to the (...) modern state, which is the focus of his historical interest, would entail more than the mere rarefaction of traditional, pragmatic…. (shrink)

Rhythm is an underexplored topic in contemporary Anglophone philosophy of music.1 This collection is an attempt to change this trend. It contains twenty-four essays, dealing with issues that range from the ontology of rhythm to questions regarding its existence and relative importance in art forms other than music.I cannot here discuss all of the contributions and my selection should not be taken as indicative of differences in quality among the various chapters.The book’s introduction is worthy of mention, as it is (...) more than a chapter-by-chapter overview. The editors trace a brief history of the philosophical debate on rhythm from antiquity to the present day, stressing the relative lack of interest for this topic.This collection moves therefore in largely uncharted territory, although various essays are firmly grounded in debates that are familiar to contemporary philosophers of art. Ted Gracyk’s essay ‘Rhythm, Resemblance, and Musical Expressiveness’ is an example of this, as it is an attempt to expand on resemblance theories of musical expressiveness by showing that rhythm is crucial to establishing the relevant resemblance between music and expressive behaviour. Gracyk persuasively argues that taking rhythm into account allows resemblance theories to tackle some recurring objections and difficulties. For instance, the centrality of pace and gait to our lives may explain why we automatically focus on music’s resemblance to human movement, as opposed to any of the countless other things it resembles. Moreover, rhythmic entrainment (synchronization to music's rhythm) may be the reason why music sometimes arouses the emotions which it expresses, a claim famously defended by Stephen Davies (2011). Just as it is partly by entraining to other people’s movements that we may come to experience the emotions they experience, we are infected by the music’s mood by entraining to its rhythm. (shrink)

If artworks and their aesthetic properties stand in constitutive relationships to historical context and circumstances, so that some understanding of relevant facts is involved in responding to a work, what becomes of the intuitive view that we see artworks and at least some of their aesthetic properties? This question is raised by arguments in both aesthetics and art history for the historical nature of works of art. The paper argues that the answer needs to take philosophy of perception into (...) account. The principal development that has shaped philosophy of perception in the last thirty years—explaining perceptual experience in terms of contents that represent that such-and-such is the case—is directly relevant to key arguments for the historical nature of art because contents can represent complex kinds and properties. Conceptual realism is especially well-suited for explaining perception of artworks and aesthetic properties because it emphasizes that forms of understanding—in the sense of capacities, abilities and techniques—are involved in perceptual engagement with individual objects and instances of properties. To make this case, the paper examines influential arguments for the historical nature of art and aesthetic properties by Arthur C. Danto and Kendall L. Walton; and examines art-historical discussions by Michael Baxandall, Linda Nochlin and T. J. Clark. The paper argues that the aesthetic properties of an artwork depend on human intentional uses of properties, colours and contours among them, and such uses may themselves be aesthetic. The Wittgensteinian notion of use is contextual and historical, and uses are perceptible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Salonnières and the Philosophes in Old Regime France: The Authority of Aesthetic Judgment*Jolanta T. PekaczDuring the eighteenth century a significant shift occurred in the perception of the authority of aesthetic judgment in France, from a group usually referred to as “polite society” and widely considered the exclusive source of taste (goût) to various competing groups arrogating to themselves the right to judge artistic matters. 1 In the present (...) article I discuss the changing recognition of the genders as arbiters of taste, exemplified by Parisian salonnières on the one hand, and the philosophes on the other, during two eighteenth-century quarrels over the French and Italian operas: the Querelle des Bouffons in the 1750s and the controversy between Gluckistes and Piccinistes in the 1770s. I argue that by the end of the 1770s, as a result of the collapse of the old paradigm of “polite society” of which salons were a part, Parisian salon women lost the position (however illusory it might have been) which they enjoyed in the seventeenth century as arbiters of taste. While the philosophes attended feminine salons, [End Page 277] they rejected the idea of consulting salonnières on the matters of taste (and on other matters), as was previously the case, and relegated them to formal, if not merely decorative, roles of guardians of good manners and propriety, the roles accepted by salonnières.The ousting of the salonnière from aesthetic arbitration exemplified by the two operatic quarrels may be viewed as a continuation of the process of exclusion of salon women from discursive development that began in the seventeenth century, as discussed by Erica Harth in Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (1992) and, most recently, by Joan DeJean in Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (1997). In the seventeenth century the norms of feminine bienséance (decorum, propriety) allowed a woman to establish a salon but made it impossible for a salonnière to create a space intellectually comparable to that of the French Academy. After having lost a gendered competition for intellectual space with the Academy by the 1680s, the salon, as Erica Harth put it, “proved a discursive dead end for women.”In this essay I carry through this argument into the eighteenth century and demonstrate that salon women lost a competition with the philosophes not only in the intellectual but also in the aesthetic sphere. Salonnières did not choose not to make aesthetic judgments out of respect for the exclusive right of the philosophes to make such judgments 2 but rather were silenced by the philosophes and complied in order not to violate the limits of feminine bienséance in the public sphere, that is, to survive as salonnières. The seventeenth-century ideals of feminine bienséance taken over by eighteenth-century salonnières were no longer perceived as sufficient (or legitimate) to recognize women as arbiters of taste. In fact these ideals proved to be as detrimental as a source of authority for salon women in the siècle des lumières as they were ambiguous in the grand siècle.Ironically, not only were the eighteenth-century Parisian salonnières ousted from aesthetic arbitration, but neither did they succeed in their roles as guardians of propriety and good manners for the philosophes, that is, in keeping the Enlightenment discourse civil. In both operatic quarrels the dominant genre of discourse was a pamphlet, a libelle, not a salon conversation. While during the Querelle des Bouffons the philosophes were unanimously pro-Italian, the Gluck-Piccini quarrel caused a deep split among them, followed by fratricidal fighting, which seriously undermined their authority in public matters.I. The negative connotation associated with the epithets pedant, savant, and their derivatives in seventeenth-century French treatises on honnêteté indicates [End Page 278] that the authority of judgment of “persons of quality” in matters of taste resulted from the code of bienséances in social relations. Blaise Pascal probably best summarized arguments for the superiority of an honnête person (as opposed to a professional) in the realm of aesthetics; being an... (shrink)

In discussing the cultural history of the 19th century, Walter Benjamin diagnosed the emergence of the modern novel and its form of narration as the sign of a fracturing experience. The split in experience is related to the scattering of a homogeneous idea of space and time, constituted especially during the Enlightenment and in the German historicism. Benjamin's claim reflected the fracturing temporality of modern communities as well as the transformations in the understanding of the meaning of tradition. Here, (...) I begin by discussing Benjamin's conceptions of experience and memory in detail. Secondly, I consider his ideas on history in the framework of challenging the new forms of narration. In the end, I consider the loss of a unified community, especially by indicating ways in which the after-modern community reflects the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Jean-François Lyotard's thought. Key Words: Benjamin • community • experience • history • Lyotard • memory • narrative • remembrance • time. (shrink)

This dissertation treats two themes crucial for the emergence of modern aesthetics. First, it considers the "aesthetic consciousness," which results from a rejection of the Aristotelian mimesis doctrine, and which seeks to establish art as independent from either morality or nature. Second, it treats the "historical consciousness," required to bring about the aesthetic consciousness, and eventually to raise it to the level of a moral ideal. Thus, the dissertation begins by considering that version of the mimetic argument rejected by the (...) moderns: it treats Lessing's moral interpretation of dramatic catharsis. Lessing's moral interpretation of catharsis, it is argued, jeopardizes the harmony between nature, morality and art on which the mimetic argument rests. Thus, the second chapter treats the first decisive challenge to the mimetic tradition: Rousseau's attack on the moral interpretation of catharsis. This attack follows two steps. First, Rousseau argues that the arts efface man's natural moral character. Second, Rousseau's developmental/historical account of man supports this opposition between art, on the one hand, and nature and morality, on the other. Rousseau, thus, is seen to be the first to introduce a historical consciousness of development into discussions of art, which revises the traditional links between art, nature and morality, and established a direction for Kant and Schiller. ;In light of Lessing and Rousseau, Kant's foundation of an aesthetic consciousness can be more clearly understood. Thus, the third chapter considers Kant's argument for aesthetic by considering three themes: first, Kant's notion of autonomy; second, Kant's analysis of the disinterestedness of the aesthetic judgement; third, his account of genius as the cause of fine art. ;Kant's argument, however, suggests that the aesthetic consciousness supercedes morality. Although Kant himself never pursues this suggestion, Schiller does. Thus, the final chapter treats Schiller's attempt to retrieve the moral and the natural without sacrificing the autonomy of the fine arts. Schiller does this by bringing Rousseau's historical consciousness of the human as a development beyond nature with Kant's aesthetic consciousness. This chapter, therefore, treats three themes. First, it considers how Schiller's distinction between naive and sentimental poetry translates into historical categories: ancient and modern. Second, it shows how the goal of the sentimental poet is a "moral unity" between art and nature, the necessity of which is unknown to the naive poet. Third, it considers how, through the search for a moral unity achieved only through a historical consciousness of progress from naive to sentimental, the nature of art becomes, for the first time, a function of human history. The dissertation concludes with a summary of these themes in terms of the distinction between the good and the beautiful. (shrink)

Abhinavagupta is undoubtedly the most famous Kashmirian medieval intellectual: his decisive contributions to Indian aesthetics, Saiva theology, and metaphysics, and to the philosophy of the subtle and original Pratyabhijna system, are well known. Yet so far his works have often been studied without fully taking into account the specific historical, social, artistic, religious, and philosophical context in which they are embedded. The purpose of this book is to show that this intellectual background is no less exceptional than Abhinavagupta himself. (Series: (...) Leipzig Studies on the Culture and History of South and Central Asia / Leipziger Studien zu Kultur und Geschichte Sud- und Zentralasiens, Vol. 6) [Subject: History, Abhinavagupta, India Studies, Religious Studies]. (shrink)

Benedetto Croce was a historian, humanist, political figure, and the foremost Italian philosopher of the early twentieth-century. A Croce Reader brings together the author's most important works across the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, history, literary criticism, and the Baroque and presents the "other" Croce that has been erased by scholarly tradition, including by Croce himself. Massimo Verdicchio traces the progress of Croce as a thinker, focusing on his philosophy of absolute historicism and its aesthetic implications. Unlike other anthologies, A (...) Croce Reader includes essays from the Aesthetics of 1902 and key studies on Vico, Hegel, and Pirandello. Verdicchio's masterful translation of the source material welcomes specialists and non-specialists alike to discover the "other" Croce for themselves. (shrink)

Focusing on the work of such artists as Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Rosemary Laing, Dierk Schmidt, Hito Steyerl, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, Veronica Tello argues that their practices represent an emergent paradigm of contemporary...

The article highlights the problem of studying historical time in terms of aesthetics and social ethics. The essence of history, according to the author, is not so much in retrospection or reflection, but in the gap between feeling and awareness. Guided by the apophatic method, the author analyzes the historiosophical views of domestic and foreign scholars and comes to the conclusion that the Soviet paradigm is true, where the only vector of human development is the liberation of labor in (...) the name of creating a bright future for the sake of all people and for everyone -/- . (shrink)

Critical study of Indian aesthetics with reference to Sanskrit poetics.

Analyses of the dynamics of change present in Europe are not complete without taking into account the role and function of the critical approach as a founding element of European culture. An appreciation of critical thinking must go hand-in-hand with reflection on its essence, forms, and centuries-long tradition. The European philosophical tradition has thematized the problem of criticism since its appearance. This book contains articles on the history of philosophical criticism and ways that it has been understood in European (...) thought. Individual chapters contain both historical-philosophical and problem-oriented analyses, indicating the relationships between philosophical criticism and rationalism, logic, scepticism, atheism, dialectic procedure, and philosophical counseling, among others. Philosophical reflection on critical thinking allows for an acknowledgment of its significance in the fields of epistemology, philosophy of politics, aesthetics, methodology, philosophy of language, and cultural theory. The book should interest not only humanities scholars, but also scholars in other fields, as the development of an anti-dogmatic critical approach is a lasting and indispensible challenge for all disciplines. (shrink)

On the origin and development of aesthetics in India.

Ranke's work marks a turning point in the development of historiography: it changed from literature to science. Ranke's introduction of reason into historiography gave it a certain aesthetic quality, which modern historical studies have forgotten. Traditional rhetoric, or the use of language for strategic purposes, was discarded for its fictitious nature. In its place, Ranke advocated a synthesis of the scientific principles of research and the more artistic principles of writing history. This synthesis initiated the aesthetics of historiography, and (...) yielded a hidden rhetoric in the form of linguistic patterns of significance, or topoi, which give the facts of the past their sense and meaning for present-day life. Historiography, by its aesthetics, addresses its audience in a way that makes visible the mental forces which constitute the identity of the addressed people in the temporal course of their life. The postmodern recognition of rhetoric in historiography should not lead us back to premodern rhetoric but forward to a rhetoric of historiography which preserves the necessity of liberating reason in historiography and which reflects this reason not simply as a technique of research, but 'With a much wider and deeper approach to historical studies as a question of the aesthetics of historiography. (shrink)