Kristeller's article ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’ is a classic statement of the view, now widely adopted but rarely examined, that aesthetics became possible only in the eighteenth-century with the emergence of the fine arts. I wish to contest this view, for three reasons. Firstly, Kristeller's historical account can be questioned; alternative and equally plausible accounts are available. Secondly, ‘the modern system of the arts’ appears to have been neither a (...) system nor an agreed upon entity, but only a historical construct of Kristeller's own making that matches up with no known historical reality. Thirdly, while the concept of the fine arts existed in the eighteenth century, the assumption that it had an impact on the rise of aesthetic theory remains unproven and unnecessary. A more satisfactory account of aesthetic thought in antiquity can be given, once the ‘fine-arts’ objection has been cleared away. (shrink)

Kristeller's article ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’ is a classic statement of the view, now widely adopted but rarely examined, that aesthetics became possible only in the eighteenth-century with the emergence of the fine arts. I wish to contest this view, for three reasons. Firstly, Kristeller's historical account can be questioned; alternative and equally plausible accounts are available. Secondly, ‘the modern system of the arts’ appears to have been neither a (...) system nor an agreed upon entity, but only a historical construct of Kristeller's own making that matches up with no known historical reality. Thirdly, while the concept of the fine arts existed in the eighteenth century, the assumption that it had an impact on the rise of aesthetic theory remains unproven and unnecessary. A more satisfactory account of aesthetic thought in antiquity can be given, once the ‘fine-arts’ objection has been cleared away. (shrink)

Abstract…observations of skylfull pylotts is the onlye waye to bring it in rule; for it passeth the reach of naturall philosophy. – Michael Gabriel, 1576 (Collinson, 1867, p. 30)Abstract The tension between empirical data and formal theory pervades the entire history of geomagnetism, from the Middle Ages up to the present day. This paper explores its early-modern history (1500–1800), using a hybrid approach: it applies a methodological framework used in modern geophysics to interpret early-modern developments, exploring to (...) what extent formal conjectures shaped observation and vice versa. A range of pertinent case studies supports classification of this entire period as proto-scientific, characterised by the initial formation of theories being largely disconnected from observational constraints, and their subsequent evolution being advanced primarily by their empirical falsification, and not necessarily associated with the introduction of an alternative. The few exceptional instances of purely data-driven discovery were essentially due to an improved signal-to-noise ratio. (shrink)

L’histoire du Kronprinzenpalais, dans sa lente émergence vers la reconnaissance de son existence, ainsi que du rôle majeur qu’il joua sur la scène muséale allemande, en tant que premier musée d’art moderne, demeure étroitement lié au sort de son unique conservateur, Ludwig Justi. Cet article s’attache à restituer les innovations didactiques et muséographiques menées par Justi, les très nombreuses expositions temporaires aussi bien que l’enrichissement des collections, de même que la fondation de la revue Museum der Gegenwart, lesquels eurent un (...) rayonnement sur l’ensemble des musées d’art allemands. (shrink)

Transparence et opacité fut écrit à la fin des années 1960 et parut pour la première fois en 1975. Cet essai majeur sur les fondements théoriques de l'art moderne avait disparu des librairies depuis près de vingt ans. Partant d'une analyse de la théorie de l'art de Konrad Fiedler, qui écrivit entre 1876 et 1895, Philippe Junod se livre en fait à une archéologie de la modernité et envisage l'ensemble de la théorie de l'art et de l'esthétique depuis Platon et (...) Aristote. Il établit que l'idée d'art moderne naît quand sont abandonnées aussi bien la voie du réalisme que celle de la peinture d'idées, le naturalisme comme le symbolisme, pour en venir à une troisième voie, celle de l'opacité où l'œuvre opère dans son autonomie, sans transparence ni référence, en faisant prévaloir les droits de la vision et du visible sur ceux de la reconnaissance et du déchiffrement. À un moment où le moderne apparaît comme un moment de l'histoire de l'art, l'enquête riche et minutieuse de Philippe Junod permet de comprendre les questionnements et les enjeux de toute une époque dont nous sortons à peine. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper I explore a recently conceived notion of a modern liberal arts education which brings the ancient Aristotelian search for first principles into a modern metaphysics of Kant and Hegel. In the second part I examine two ways in which this modern conception of a liberal arts education intervenes in important social and political debates in Western culture. My concluding comments centre on the belief that twenty-first-century liberal arts education needs to (...) provide more resistance to a culture of capitalism by orienting itself to the tradition from a modern standpoint. (shrink)

Art In Its Time takes a close look at the way in which art has become integral to the everyday 'ordinary' life of modern society. It explores the prevalent notion of art as transcending its historical moment, and argues that art cannot be separated from the everyday as it often provides material to represent social struggles and class, to explore sexuality, and to think about modern industry and our economic relationships.

Bogue provides a systematic overview and introduction to Deleuze's writings on music and painting, and an assessment of their position within his aesthetics as a whole. Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts breaks new ground in the scholarship on Deleuze's aesthetics, while providing a clear and accessible guide to his often overlooked writings in the fields of music and painting.

The first sustained phenomenological approach to modern art, taking a new approach and drawing upon an unsual selection of thinkers.

For Malraux, modernity in art is not only about modern art; it is also about the birth of what he aptly terms “the first universal world of art.” This event was a consequence of the process of metamorphosis which is central to Malraux’s account of the relationship between art and time. The article explains this event, noting also that modern aesthetics has not provided an explanation. (This is the English version of the final which will be in French.).

Sixteen of the 20th century's leading artistic innovators talk forcefully about their work — from Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger's 1912 presentation of cubist theory to Henry Moore's comments, three decades later, on sculpture and primitive art. Four newly added essays by Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, El Lissitzky, and Fernand Léger.

The first book to focus on the intersection of Western philosophy and the Asian martial arts, _Striking Beauty_ comparatively studies the historical and philosophical traditions of martial arts practice and their ethical value in the modern world. Expanding Western philosophy's global outlook, the book forces a theoretical reckoning with the concerns of Chinese philosophy and the aesthetic and technical dimensions of martial arts practice. _Striking Beauty_ explains the relationship between Asian martial arts and the Chinese philosophical traditions of Confucianism, (...) Buddhism, and Daoism, in addition to Sunzi's _Art of War_. It connects martial arts practice to the Western concepts of mind-body dualism and materialism, sports aesthetics, and the ethics of violence. The work ameliorates Western philosophy's hostility toward the body, emphasizing the pleasure of watching and engaging in martial arts, along with their beauty and the ethical problem of their violence. (shrink)

To improvise together for the pure curiosity, joy, and beauty of it constitutes a central but often neglected ability of human beings. Integrating pragmatic, practical, and technical skills with conceptual understanding, improvisation is adaptive and collaborative. It seems made to counter the challenges of living in a fleeting present, unconstrained by physical and historical boundaries, and very likely has deep evolutionary roots. I present an account of joint improvisation in the performative arts based in reviews of empirical research in the (...) cognitive sciences, phenomenology, neuroscience, and philosophy, using examples from modern dance and jazz music. The account may be used for generating cross-disciplinary hypotheses about improvisation for investigation within a multitude of fields and is meant to encourage interdisciplinary work and collaboration between practitioners and academic researchers. The major goal is to elucidate the interaction dynamics that underlies joint improvisation by considering the variety of processes that support sensorimotor, experiential, emotional, meta-cognitive, and collaborative forms of interaction and lead to the coordination and synchronization of behavior. I claim that improvisation is an intelligent cognitive skill associated with meta-awareness, open to monitoring and control. It involves both automatized and flexible behavior and can occur without conscious awareness. Improvising in principle is independent of verbal language and higher-order thought, but nevertheless profits from the presence of multiple converging processes. (shrink)

Annotation. In this volume, the third in his classic series of texts surveying the history of art theory, Moshe Barasch traces the hidden patterns and interlocking themes in the study of art, from Impressionism to Abstract Art. Barasch details the immense social changes in the creation, presentation, and reception of art which have set the history of art theory on a vertiginous new course: the decreased relevance of workshops and art schools; the replacement of the treatise by the critical review; (...) and the interrelation of new modes of scientific inquiry with artistic theory and praxis. The consequent changes in the ways in which critics as well as artists conceptualized paintings and sculptures were radical, marked by an obsession with intense, immediate sensory experiences, psychological reflection on the effects of art, and a magnetic pull to the exotic and alien, making for the most exciting and fertile period in the history of art criticism. (shrink)

Man is a "homo theologicus." The dominion of the cyberculture is determining the oblivion of the Sacred in a new fashion, creating fictional transcendences that replace traditional reality with cyberconstructions. We aim to show how man is essentially a theologal being and how the Byzantine notion of ϑέωσις (deification) as expressed in sacred arts can be a way of preserving human essence from its alienation in the fictional transcendences of cyberbeing. We approach cyberculture as a process of ontological desubstantiation via (...) artificial "intelligence" and virtual reproductions. We explain the dual phenomenon of the implanting of a decentered, networked techno-hedonism and the spread of the "avatar syndrome" as a cyber-disease that inhibits in man his responsibility to be real. By contrast, we underscore the importance of the fact that in cyberbeing the "enchantment before beings" as anticipation of radical freedom is especially safeguarded. While the modern aesthetic is mostly deprived of mystic origin and transcendental telos and proves useless against cyberbeing's desubstantiating power, Byzantine aesthetic as an ontological healing way can contribute to the de-oblivion of human essence. This implies that sacred Byzantine arts as aesthetic therapy open the horizon in which man experiences his essence as perpetual bliss in the meaning of Being. (shrink)

Passivité et création est un livre ancré dans une double pratique: la peinture et la philosophie. Sa composition s'inspire du trajet suivi par Maurice Merleau-Ponty dans l'élaboration de son cours au Collège de France de 1954-1955: "Le problème de la passivité: le sommeil, l'inconscient, la mémoire". A partir de l'étude de la pratique de certains artistes et de l'analyse de textes philosophiques, il s'agit de décrire une passivité de forme particulière, une passivité "opérante", corrélative d'une forme dynamique de la subjectivité. (...) Cette passivité, "dimension d'un mouvement dont je suis le médiateur, mais qui d'une certaine façon se fait en moi sans moi, à mon insu", de nombreux artistes du 20. siècle s'en sont faits les témoins (Arp, Bacon, Dubuffet, Klee, Michaux, Rauschenberg, Schwitters, Spoerri, Nicolas de Staël, Bram Van Velde...), appelant aussi cette expérience "inconscient", "hasard", "imprévu", "surprise". Dans la perspective esquissée ici, l'accès aux autres cesse alors d'être un "problème". L'autre a déjà sa part dans mon expérience la plus singulière. Mon expérience peut devenir expérience pour d'autres parce qu'elle s'inscrit au sein d'une dimension phénoménologique qui n'est ni de moi ni d'autrui, mais commune. Quel est le rôle de cette passivité structurelle dans la création comprise comme transformation de la vision et du monde lui-même? Et comment peut-on en retourner la fragilité en pouvoir? (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)

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy, nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect (...) to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world. (shrink)

The essays in this volume exhibit many sides of the perceptual complex that is the aesthetic field and develop them in different ways. They reinvigorate our understanding of such arts as music and architecture; they range across the natural landscape to the urban one; they reassess the place of beauty in the modern environment and reassess the significance of the contributions to aesthetic theory of Kant and Dewey; and they broach the kinds of meanings and larger understanding that aesthetic (...) engagement with the human environment can offer. (shrink)

Contents Acknowledgements vii Illustrations ix Preface xi Further Bibliography of A.C. Crombie xiii 1 Designed in the Mind: Western visions of Science, Nature and Humankind 1 2 The Western Experience of Scientific Objectivity 13 3 Historical Perceptions of Medieval Science 31 4 Robert Grosseteste 39 5 Roger Bacon [with J.D. North] 51 6 Infinite Power and the Laws of Nature: A Medieval Speculation 67 7 Experimental Science and the Rational Artist in Early Modern Europe 89 8 Mathematics and Platonism (...) in the Sixteenth-Century Italian Universities and in Jesuit Educational Policy 115 9 Sources of Galileo Galilei’s Early Natural Philosophy 149 10 The Jesuits and Galileo’s Ideas of Science and of Nature [with A. Carugo] 165 11 Galileo and the Art of Rhetoric [with A. Carugo] 231 12 Galileo Galilei: A Philosophical Symbol 257 13 Alexandre Koyré and Great Britain: Galileo and Mersenne 263 14 Marin Mersenne and the Origins of Language 275 15 Le Corps à la Renaissance: Theories of Perceiver and Perceived in Hearing 291 16 Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the History of Optics: i, Alhazen and the Medieval Tradition; ii, Kepler and Descartes 301 17 Contingent Expectation and Uncertain Choice: Historical Contexts of Arguments from Probabilities 357 18 P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis, F.R.S. : Précurseur du Transformisme 407 19 The Public and Private Faces of Charles Darwin 429 20 The Language of Science 439 21 Some Historical Questions about Disease 443 22 Historians and the Scientific Revolution 451 23 The Origins of Western Science 465 Appendix to Chapter 10: 479 Sources and Dates of Galileos Writings [with A. Carugo] Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico [with A. Carugo] Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier Corrections to Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought 495 Index 497. (shrink)

This view encouraged theorists to consider artistic geniuses the high-priests of humanity, creators of works that reveal the invisible essence of the world."--BOOK JACKET.

This paper addresses the relations between art and everyday life in the city from the vantage points of urban aesthetics and sociology, where the “city” refers as well to a normative world. The aim is to show how art/artistic life contributed to the normative change and new urban lifestyles. First, I focus on Baudelaire’s theory of beauty and life in modern metropolis or the city as “poetic object” and dandyism as an art of the self, seen as a crucial (...) normative change: the emergence of new norms of excellence and art of living, such as creativity and self-fashioning. Second, I discuss a recent yet related normative change, described by Boltanski and Chiapello as a passage to the “project-oriented city”, seen as a new way of working and living that fuses cultures of creativity and uncertainty. Third, I tackle the “creative city” hailed by Florida, where the creative lifestyle of “creative people” is the new mainstream setting the norms for society: individuality, diversity and openness, but also impermanent relationships and loose ties. I will argue that extending the hyper-mobile and flexible creative lifestyle from the extraordinary figure of the artist to ordinary people, as everyday urban life, triggers both benefits and risks. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relations between art and everyday life in the city from the vantage points of urban aesthetics and sociology, where the “city” refers as well to a normative world. The aim is to show how art/artistic life contributed to the normative change and new urban lifestyles. First, I focus on Baudelaire’s theory of beauty and life in modern metropolis or the city as “poetic object” and dandyism as an art of the self, seen as a crucial (...) normative change: the emergence of new norms of excellence and art of living, such as creativity and self-fashioning. Second, I discuss a recent yet related normative change, described by Boltanski and Chiapello as a passage to the “project-oriented city”, seen as a new way of working and living that fuses cultures of creativity and uncertainty. Third, I tackle the “creative city” hailed by Florida, where the creative lifestyle of “creative people” is the new mainstream setting the norms for society: individuality, diversity and openness, but also impermanent relationships and loose ties. I will argue that extending the hyper-mobile and flexible creative lifestyle from the extraordinary figure of the artist to ordinary people, as everyday urban life, triggers both benefits and risks. (shrink)

Feminist epistemology and feminist art theory are characterized by an opposition to modernity's separation of art, politics, and knowledge into three autonomous spheres. However, this opposition is not enough to distinguish them from other philosophies. In this paper I examine parallels between the two fields of inquiry in order to discover what makes them distinctively feminist. Feminist epistemology sees interconnections between knowledge and politics, feminist art theory sees connections between art and politics. We need to explore as well connections between (...) art and knowledge. Compared to feminist epistemology, feminist art theory has had much less exposure, and in this paper I emphasize what the former can learn from the latter. In particular, I suggest that feminist art can answer a call made by feminist theories of knowledge for a kind of transformative knowledge. If we focus on the features of activist art explored by feminist art theories, we see that feminist art is particularly suited to engage emotions as well as the intellect. It is an example of nonpropositional knowledge, and is interactive rather than striving to pass down lessons from above. Feminist art celebrates the power of art to “make strange” and to unsettle fixed identities which can transform our understanding of the world. There is a tendency in some feminist art theory to separate the more concrete work (rediscovering women artists, recognizing women's crafts as art forms, and investigating sexist imagery in art), from the theoretical project of reenvisioning the relations of art to its sociopolitical context. I conclude by arguing that without an awareness of the dialectical relationship between the concrete and the theoretical, feminist art theories run the risk of losing their feminist specificity. They would then amount to little more than abstract pronouncements of the interconnections between art, politics, and knowledge. We need to maintain the feminist specificity of feminist politics in our theories of art and knowledge, and I use examples throughout the essay, drawn particularly from feminist activist art, with this goal in mind. (shrink)

In this publication, the author attempts to develop an aesthetic theory from Heidegger's phenomenological concepts. She analyzes Heidegger`s concepts of truth, world, space, and related concepts and establishes a formal, contextual and material method of analysis for the purpose of examining works of art. This new method of analysis is applied to three pieces by the artist Joseph Beuys as a case study.

Modern interpreters have often regarded Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics as a mystery, or even a bit of an embarrassment. In his treatises on natural science and ethics, Aristotle is constantly concerned to review the opinions of his predecessors and of people in general; where appropriate, he also takes note of experiential observations, some of them highly specialized. However, the traditional view of the Posterior Analytics is that it advances an almost Cartesian picture of sciences as deductive systems founded on intuitively (...) evident first premises. How are these to be reconciled? (shrink)

This original new book argues for a reassessment of Plato's challenge to the arts. Plato was the first great figure in Western philosophy to assess the value of the arts; he argued in the Republic that traditionally accepted forms of poetry, drama, and music are unsound. While this view has been widely rejected, Janaway argues that Plato's hostile case is a more coherent and profound challenge to the arts than has sometimes been supposed. Denying that Plato advocates "good art" in (...) any modern sense, Janaway seeks both to understand Plato's critique in the context of his own philosophy and to locate him in today's philosophy of art, showing how issues in aesthetics arise from responses to his charges. (shrink)

Hegel’s assertion that, for us moderns, art is a matter of the past has obscured his genuine interest in the art of his time and modern art in general. This article attempts to correct this situation. First, it contextualizes the claim in its historical and conceptual aspects; second, it returns to Hegel’s approaches to modern art, neglected hitherto by interpreters. This revision implies clarifying what for Hegel is the modern, whose concept comes from the freedom and autonomy (...) of thought, and does not conform to what, in developments of Aesthetics, after Hegel, represent tendencies and prescriptions such as the avant-garde or turns such as aesthetic modernity and postmodernity. Modern art is the product of an artist who freely disposes of the means and content of art since he places himself above them. (shrink)