On a contemporary Humean-influenced view, the responses of suitably idealized appreciators are presented as tracking, or even determining, facts about artistic value. Focusing on the intra-personal case, this paper argues that (i) facts about the refinement and reconfiguration of aesthetic character together with (ii) the manner in which autobiography and character are implicated in artistic appreciation make it de facto unlikely that we can reliably come to know how our ideal counterpart would respond to a given artwork. Attribution of superhuman (...) abilities to our ideal counterpart partially addresses this worry, but undermines a central feature of the theoretical motivation for the idealizing model. Insofar as response-dependent accounts of artistic value are inextricably tied to an idealizing view of critics, we have reason to reject them. (shrink)

On a contemporary Humean-influenced view, the responses of suitably idealized appreciators are presented as tracking, or even determining, facts about artistic value. Focusing on the intra-personal case, this paper argues that facts about the refinement and reconfiguration of aesthetic character together with the manner in which autobiography and character are implicated in artistic appreciation make it de facto unlikely that we can reliably come to know how our ideal counterpart would respond to a given artwork. Attribution of superhuman abilities to (...) our ideal counterpart partially addresses this worry, but undermines a central feature of the theoretical motivation for the idealizing model. Insofar as response-dependent accounts of artistic value are inextricably tied to an idealizing view of critics, we have reason to reject them. (shrink)

It is rather intriguing that we will often try to persuade people of what we find beautiful, even though we do not believe that they may subsequently base their judgement of taste on our testimony. Typically, we think that the experience of beauty is such that we cannot leave it to others to be had. Moreover, we are often aware of the contingency of our own judgements’ foundation in our own experience. Nevertheless, we do think that certain aesthetic, evaluative conceptions (...) do relate to specific experiences in a non-trivial way, especially that of aesthetic excellence. Now certain analytical aestheticians ascribe truth values to aesthetic judgements of various kinds. Such ascription would evidently have a bearing on the problem of aesthetic experience’s relevance for evaluation, as we may in the end be better off neglecting the experiential altogether in virtue of treating aesthetic values in objectivist ways, as natural properties, or as reducible to such properties, descriptions of which will then indeed be true or false.1 However, I think that it is too early yet to bury subjectivism. So let us instead defend it and try to get a better grasp on its suppositions. In this we may profit from ideas advanced by David Wiggins, who neither denies the role played by objective properties, nor neglects the subjective import. According to him, aesthetic values are somehow kinds of relations, which are established by an elaborate process of criticism and refinement of perceptions of, and feelings toward specific natural properties.2 The argument in this paper suggests that the analysis of a paradigmatic pair regarding ‘aesthetic excellence’ provides us with inter-. (shrink)

"George Hagman looks anew at psychoanalytic ideas about art and beauty through the lens of current developmental psychology that recognizes the importance of attachment and affiliative motivational systems. In dialogue with theorists such as Freud, Ehrenzweig, Kris, Rank, Winnicott, Kohut, and many others, Hagman brings the psychoanalytic understanding of aesthetic experience into the 21st century. He amends and extends old concepts and offers a wealth of stimulating new ideas regarding the creative process, the ideal, beauty, ugliness, and -perhaps his most (...) original contribution-the sublime. Especially welcome is his grounding of aesthetic experience in intersubjectivity and health rather than individualism and pathology. His emphasis on form rather than the content of an individual's aesthetic experience is a stimulating new direction for psychoanalytic theory of art. With this work Hagman stands in the company of his predecessors with this deeply-learned, sensitively conceived, and provocative general theory of human aesthetic experience." Ellen Dissanayake, author of "Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began" and "Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why.". (shrink)

How should we pursue aesthetic value, or incorporate it into our lives, if we want to? Is there an ideal of aesthetic life? Philosophers have proposed numerous answers to the analogous question in moral philosophy, but the aesthetic question has received relatively little attention. There is, in essence, a single view, which is that one should develop a sensibility that would give one sweeping access to aesthetic value. I challenge this view on two grounds. First, it threatens to undermine our (...) "aesthetic love", or the meaningful attachments we form with aesthetic items, e.g., poems, paintings, songs, or items of design and dress. Second, it fails to accommodate the motivational character of our encounter with beauty, which can diminish our desire to pursue the wider world of aesthetic value. I conclude that whatever the aesthetic ideal is, it must reconcile our desire to broaden our access to aesthetic value with our desire to maintain and cultivate our meaningful aesthetic attachments. I motivate the alternative thought that having style is the aesthetic ideal. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to understand how sortals determine what aesthetic properties an object has. It is argued that Frank Sibley’s notion of an ideal of beauty does not help us to achieve that aim. Instead, it is argued, the special aesthetic relevance of sortals is better understood by reference to the (non-aesthetic) ideas of normality and functionality associated with sortals. In passing, the paper also argues that there must be a maximum degree of beauty if non-comparative judgments (...) of beauty are possible, as they seem to be. (shrink)

In “Artistic Worth and Personal Taste,” Jerrold Levinson develops a problem for those who think we should strive to be “ideal critics” in our aesthetic lives. He then offers several solutions to this problem. I argue that his solutions miss the mark and that the problem he characterizes may not be genuine after all.

I examine the prospects for an ideal observer theory in aesthetics modelled on Roderick Firth’s 1952 paper ‘Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer’. The first generation of philosophers to consider an Ideal Aesthetic Observer found fault with Firth’s omniscience condition; more recent writers have criticized the affective component of an IAO’s response. In the end, most discussants reject the possibility of an IAO theory. Though the IAO theory gets the model wrong for answering meta‐aesthetic questions, revisiting the debate prompts (...) useful reconsideration of the role of the critic and the nature of aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

Despite a prevalence of articles exploring links between sport and art in the 1970s and 1980s, philosophers in the new millennium pay relatively little explicit attention to issues related to aesthetics generally. After providing a synopsis of earlier debates over the questions ‘is sport art?’ and ‘are aesthetics implicit to sport?’, a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience will be developed. Aesthetic experience, it will be argued, vitally informs sport ethics, game logic, and participant meaning. Finally, I will (...) argue that embodying pragmatic conceptions of art as its ideal metaphor re-opens space to best realize the deep potential of sport as a meaningful human practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Idealization of Contingency in Traditional Japanese AestheticsRobert Wicks (bio)In many popular writings that date from the initial decades of the twentieth century, and also in recent scholarly studies, "Japanese aesthetics"—insofar as we can speak sweepingly of a complicated, multidimensional, and dynamic historical phenomenon—is characterized with a set of adjectives whose present linguistic entrenchment is clearly evident. Specifically we read that traditional Japanese aesthetics is an (...) class='Hi'>aesthetics of imperfection, insufficiency, incompleteness, asymmetry, and irregularity, not to mention perishability, suggestiveness, and simplicity.1 Given this collection of qualities, we are presented with a matching set of paradigmatic Japanese aesthetic experiences and objects, both as illustrations and as legitimations of this close-to-standard portrait. Examples include the suggestive moon covered by drifting clouds, the irregularly formed ceramics of ceremonial teacups, the simple and asymmetrical arrangement of unpolished rocks in the dry landscape garden, the bold and dashing monochromatic strokes typical of Zen calligraphy, transient cherry blossoms, serene and cloud-capped mountain summits, lonely thatched huts, sunsets in the foggy twilight, the call of a crane that breaks through the silence, and the light autumn rain that drizzles upon a secluded pond.Upon further reflection, it becomes noticeable that some familiar Japanese aesthetic objects do not easily conform to this standard picture, and this raises doubts about the typical characterization of Japanese aesthetics. The quintessentially Japanese shōji screens and tatami mats, for instance, are uniformly rectangular rather than irregular in form. They are, moreover, neither asymmetrical, nor imperfect, nor incomplete, nor insufficient. How then, can these perfectly regular screens and mats—items crucial to the aesthetics of Japanese domestic architecture—fit neatly into the usually encountered portrait of traditional Japanese aesthetics, if it is said to be fundamentally "the worship of imperfection"?2 Or similarly if "imperfection" is [End Page 88] the keynote of this aesthetics, how does one explain the meticulously raked surfaces of the dry landscape garden or the impeccably perfected movements requisite for performing the Japanese tea ceremony?3Since such examples do not obviously fit into an "aesthetics of imperfection and insufficiency," some reconsideration of the prevailing characterization of Japanese aesthetics is needed to accommodate these, along with other examples of "perfected" items and arrangements. In short, the main difficulty is that the concept of "perfection" has been underthematized.4 To develop a revaluation of the presently submerged status of "perfection" in most scholarly discussions of Japanese aesthetics, I will highlight the familiar principle of aesthetic complementarity but contextualize the experiential foundations of this principle in a specifically Japanese-philosophic manner, namely, in reference to a fundamental feature of time-consciousness, as described by Dōgen (1200-53). This historical grounding will align the principle of complementarity with some of the acknowledged Zen Buddhist sources of traditional Japanese aesthetics.5 The upshot will be that the above-cited collection of adjectives typically used to describe the prevailing atmosphere of Japanese aesthetics—imperfection, asymmetry, incompleteness, suggestibility, etc.—presents only half of the aesthetic and philosophic story and, moreover, tends to pass over what can be appreciated as a more consequential underlying concept, namely, the idea of "contingency."In what follows, basic reflections on the phenomenology of time-consciousness will lead to the claim that, in many paradigmatic instances of traditional Japanese aesthetics, we have before us a situation that is aptly describable as "the idealization of contingency." This involves the assertion of a philosophic proposition through an aesthetic presentation (i.e., the proposition is expressed using metaphor, symbolism, or analogy). In the case of traditional Japanese aesthetics, the main proposition is the Buddhist-associated one that the foundation of things is contingent, conditional, and nonabsolute (i.e., there are no absolute foundations). The aesthetic presentation of this proposition will, as we shall see, make ample room for "perfection" in understanding Japanese aesthetics: By means of juxtaposing contingent, perishable individuals (which usually have an "imperfect" appearance) against a perfected, polished, and idealized background, the contingency of the individuals is thereby aesthetically highlighted and made more readily appreciable.The resulting criticism of the standard characterization is thus a simple one: The typical group of concepts used to describe traditional Japanese aesthetics has neglected to give due... (shrink)

This essay discusses certain problems raised by Edmund Husserl’s conception of meaning with regard to the analysis of aesthetic experience. By referring to Jacques Derrida’s critique of phenomenological idealism I show that the metaphor of “stratification”, adopted by Husserl in his “Ideas” to a problem of discursive expression, if applied to the analysis of a work of art i.e. painting, allows to avoid the objection of “metaphysics of presence” commonly raised towards the phenomenological method.To present the major issue from the (...) perspective of artistic practice, I interpret Honore de Balzac’s short story “Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu”. In conclusion I show that aesthetic consciousness establishes an affective and receptive dimension that is no longer logocentric. This is the main reason why modern phenomenology should focus on the problem of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

This essay discusses certain problems raised by Edmund Husserl’s conception of meaning with regard to the analysis of aesthetic experience. By referring to Jacques Derrida’s critique of phenomenological idealism I show that the metaphor of “stratification”, adopted by Husserl in his “Ideas” to a problem of discursive expression, if applied to the analysis of a work of art i.e. painting, allows to avoid the objection of “metaphysics of presence” commonly raised towards the phenomenological method.To present the major issue from the (...) perspective of artistic practice, I interpret Honore de Balzac’s short story “Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu”. In conclusion I show that aesthetic consciousness establishes an affective and receptive dimension that is no longer logocentric. This is the main reason why modern phenomenology should focus on the problem of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Korean art and music have a long history, but aesthetic research on them has only been around for a little over a hundred years. Critiques and discourses on traditional arts such as poetry, calligraphy, and painting can be traced back to the Joseon or even Goryeo dynasties, but the modern discussion on the common features of Korean aesthetics was conducted much later than that in Western Europe, where the field of aesthetics was established in the mid to late (...) eighteenth century. Early aestheticists who tried to explain aesthetic consciousness in Korean culture and art converged on the concept of Jayeon, which can be translated provisionally as “nature,” seemingly diverging from western aesthetics’ focus on the concept of “beauty.” Jayeon shares the same Chinese characters as ziran, an early Daoist concept, but jayeon in a Korean aesthetic context does not appear to be limited to the connotation of its Chinese origin. This article unpacks the different ways in which jayeon captures the key characteristics of Korean art and aesthetics. (shrink)

This article supports H. L. A. Hart's “any reasons” thesis (defended consistently from the first edition of The Concept of Law in 1961 to the Postscript to the second edition of 1994) that legal officials may accept law for any reasons, including non‐moral reasons. I develop a conception of non‐moral aesthetic ideals of official conduct which may provide legal officials with reasons to accept and apply even morally iniquitous law. I use this conception in order to rebut Gerald Postema's (...) and Joseph Raz's criticisms of Hart's view, and suggest that my revisions offer reasons for renewed confidence in Hart's account of law's normativity. (shrink)

This book provides an original treatment of the concept of good and beauty in ancient Egypt. It seeks to examine the dimensions of _nefer,_ the term used to describe the good and the beautiful, within the context of ordinary life. Because the book is based upon original research on ancient Egypt it opens up space for a review of the aesthetics of other African societies in the Nile Valley. Thus, it serves as a heuristic for further research and scholarship.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Divine and Artistic Ideal:Ideas and Insights for Cross-Cultural Aesthetic EducationMing Dong Gu (bio)IntroductionPeople in different cultural traditions would praise an excellent work of art as a masterpiece that has attained the status of the divine. This is a practice inherited from the ancient past. In high antiquity, when people did not have sufficient knowledge of artistic creation, they attributed creative inspirations and superb art to gods. In ancient (...) Greece people believed that all the arts were created by the Muses, daughters of the supreme god Zeus.1 Accordingly, they viewed divine creation as the highest order of representation and used the divine as the yardstick to measure artistic excellence. In early Greek thought Plato, through the mouth of Socrates, praised Homer as "the best and most divine of all."2 Citing the exquisite lyric poetry by Tynnnichs of Chalcis as evidence, he declared, "the god would show us, lest we doubt, that these lovely poems are not of man or human workmanship, but are divine and from the gods, and that the poets are nothing but interpreters of the gods, each one possessed by the divinity to whom he is in bondage."3In the Chinese tradition similar ideas existed from high antiquity. In early Chinese thought there is a parable in Zhuangzi's (369–286 BC) philosophical writing. It narrates how a skillful carpenter was commissioned by a king to make an ornate music stand. When the stand was finished, people, struck by the life likeness of the carved birds and animals on the stand, believed that he was able to make such superb art work because he was endowed with the divine power of gods.4 In literary criticism Yan Yu (fl. 1180-1235), a literary theorist whose views have exerted a lasting impact on Chinese poetry and poetics, proclaimed the divine to be the ultimate standard for [End Page 88] the poetic art: "There is only one ultimate achievement in poetry: it is called 'entering the divine.' When poetry enters the domain of the divine, it has reached its perfection and limit. Nothing can be added to it!"5 In other traditions, if people want to pass the highest praise for an excellent work of art, a simple exclamation, "That is divine!" would be sufficient.Thus, across cultures art has been related to the divine. Without reference to it, aesthetic conceptions of art and artistic creation would not be what they are today. This is because in many traditions the divine used to be viewed as the ultimate aesthetic ideal, and aesthetics is full of notions, ideas, and concepts related to it, without which artistic criticism and aesthetic education would be in a much impoverished state. The divine in art, however, is a slippery category in aesthetics that has been intuitively explored since high antiquity. In this article I will examine some critical and theoretical data on the divine, divine creation, and divine spirit in artistic representation from the Chinese and Western traditions and explore how the Chinese and Western traditions employ ideas of the divine for artistic conceptions and aesthetic education. On the basis of comparison and contrast, I will try to obtain some rational insights into the relationship between artistic creation and the divine in terms of logical analysis. Finally, I will make some efforts to reconceptualize the insights drawn from both traditions and explore to what extent the divine is still relevant to present-day aesthetics, how an aesthetic ideal may be conceived according to ideas of the divine in artistic representation, and in what ways an artwork may be considered to have entered the divine realm of the artistic ideal.God, Nature, and the Artistic IdealDespite vast differences in aesthetic conceptions, we can observe a discernable movement in the Chinese and Western notions of the divine in art from theistic and intuitive characterization to rational and logical conceptualization. This movement is characterized by a shift in emphasis from a personal god to impersonal nature, and from divine creator to human creator. Chinese and Western traditions started with a similar concern: What is the aesthetic ideal in artistic representation? Both traditions believe that the artistic ideal is... (shrink)

Relying on aesthetic testimony seems problematic. For instance, it seems problematic for me to simply believe or assert that The Velvet Underground's debut album The Velvet Underground and Nico (1964) is amazing solely because you have told me so, even though I know you to be an honest and competent music critic. But why? After all, there do not seem to be similar reservations regarding testimony from many other domains. In this paper, I will argue that relying on aesthetic testimony (...) seems problematic because we are attached to an ideal of aesthetic authenticity and feel that living up to this ideal is anathema to simply relying on aesthetic testimony. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how the logical-philosophical paradigm, which allows Hegel to encapsulate the living being in the Science of the Logic, plays a relevant role in his conception of the Ideal in his Lectures on Fine Art. To that end, I will first consider nature’s beauty as confronted to art’s beauty by taking into account the critical readings of this passage, particularly Adorno’s. Although this critique is rooted in Hegel’s text, that very same text can (...) also be a means for a counter-critique and a different way of confronting the matter. This leads to the moving of the question to the proper forum: not an investigation on two contrasting forms of beauty, but rather the relationship between the living being and art in the structure of the concept of beauty and the Ideal. The distinction between nature and art is not annihilated in the relation; and if this relationship were to be lost, art could not be thoroughly thought, because art, by taking the living being to its extreme, translates it into the Ideal, the pivotal notion of Hegel’s aesthetic paradigm. (shrink)

While the “symbolic” meaning of early body ornamentation has received the lion’s share of attention in the debate on human origins, this paper sets out to explore their aesthetic and agentive dimensions, for the purpose of explaining how various ornamental forms would have led interacting groups to form a cultural identity of their own. To this end, semiotics is integrated with a new paradigm in the archaeology of mind, known as the theory of material engagement. Bridging specifically Peirce’s pragmatic theory (...) and Malafouris’ enactive take on aesthetics allows us to appreciate the formation of aesthetic ideals through the agentive effects of material signs. It is thus proposed that, by attending to the interrelation between form, effect, and affect, members of social groups would have come to appreciate the ways in which their ornamental culture resembles and differs from that of neighbouring groups. Following the Lund conception of cultural semiotics, I argue that models of Ego-culture would have come to evolve along Alter-cultures that also employ ornaments, and against Alius-cultures that have yet to develop or adopt personal decoration. The aesthetic ideals associated with early body ornaments must have therefore played a catalytic role in the formation and communication of group membership. I thus close by proposing that the origins of new cultural identities can be explained by tracing the co-development of ideas and ideals. (shrink)

Aesth. Hegel, Aesthetics Aesth. Ed. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man CI1PR Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right Civil War Marx, The Civil War in France CPE Marx, Critique of Political Economy Em. Hegel, Enzyklopadie der ...

The aesthetic domain is a social one. We coordinate our individual acts of creation, appreciation, and performance with those of others in the context of social aesthetic practices. More strongly, many of the richest goods of our aesthetic lives are constitutively social; their value lies in the fact that individuals are engaged in joint aesthetic agency, participating in cooperative and collaborative project that outstrips what can be realized alone. I provide an account of nature and value of two such social (...) aesthetic goods—aesthetic communities and aesthetic traditions—and further argue that such goods are a core constituent of an aesthetically good life. At the same time, I argue that the ideals of the dominant theory of aesthetic value, aesthetic value hedonism, are incompatible with a full commitment to these social aesthetic goods; the hedonist is thereby alienated from the other participants within aesthetic communities and traditions. This sets up a dilemma for the hedonist: either the hedonist must bite the bullet, accepting that the theory leads to a problematic form of aesthetic alienation; or, we must reject aesthetic value hedonism and adopt a different theory of aesthetic value which accommodates the value of social aesthetic goods. I argue that we should take the second horn of the dilemma. (shrink)

Though much of what we learn about the world comes from trusting testimony, the status of aesthetic testimony – testimony about aesthetic value – is equivocal. We do listen to art critics but our trust in them is typically only provisional, until we are in a position to make up our own mind. I argue that provisional trust (but not full trust) in testimony typically allows us to develop and use aesthetic understanding (understanding why a work of art is valuable, (...) or similar); and aesthetic understanding is an essential component of aesthetic virtue. Aesthetic virtue is the orientation of a whole person towards aesthetic value and aesthetic reasons, through action, non‐cognitive and cognitive attitudes. The ideal (aesthetically virtuous) way to make aesthetic judgements is through your own aesthetic understanding. (shrink)

The problem of fiction and emotion is the problem of how we can be moved by the contemplation of fictional events and the plight of fictional characters when we know that the former have not occurred and the latter do not exist. I will give a general sketch of the philosophical treatment of the issue in the present day, and then turn to the eighteenth century for a solution as effective as the best that are presently on offer. The solution (...) is to be found in the account of ideal presence given by Henry Home, Lord Kames. (shrink)

Based on a conception that a musical composition is constituted by normative properties, it is argued that every such composition has one ideal performance—a performance that fulfils all the aesthetic-normative properties that the composition determines. A performance is conceived of (and evaluated) as inherently and essentially ‘intentionalistic’—being, by its very nature, a performance of a certain composition. This conception allows for various different performances, none of which is preferable over the others. The properties concerned are conceived of broadly as comprising (...) not only the tones themselves and various ‘theoretical’ features such as thematic relations, harmonic progressions, rhythmical structures, but also descriptive, emotive, and ‘rhetorical’ properties, which are ‘objective’ properties of the composition. It is further claimed that these are indicated in the score when properly understood in the light, inter alia, of pertinent conventions, which are the business of theoreticians and musicologists to determine. The main significance of the result lies both in highlighting some important implications of the intentionalistic character of a performance, and in the style of conceptual connection it indicates between a musical composition, its aesthetic-normative properties, and features of performance or ways of fulfilling them. (shrink)

What is it to have and act on a personal ideal? Someone who aspires to be a philosopher might imaginatively think “I am a philosopher” by way of motivating herself to think hard about a philosophical question. But doing so seems to require her to act on an inaccurate self-description, given that she isn’t yet what she regards herself as being. J. David Velleman develops the thought that action-by-ideal involves a kind of fictional self-conception. My aim is to expand our (...) thinking about personal ideals by developing another way of understanding them. On this view action-by-ideal involves a kind of metaphorical self-conception. I investigate some salient differences between these views with the aim of understanding the different perspectives they take on the rationality of action-by-ideal. Where the fiction view runs into problems of literary coherence, the metaphor view exploits the richness of poetic invention. But action-by-ideal is a complex phenomenon about which there may be no tidy story to be told. This paper is an attempt to clarify and understand more of this messy terrain. (shrink)

This article focuses on the intimate relationship between German aesthetic theory, particularly the philosophies of Kant and Schiller, and the pragmatic tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that many aspects of Kantian aesthetic theory – his development of reflective judgement, genius, and common sense – are reflected in the thinking of C. S. Peirce. I conclude, however, that such a comparison risks selling short the way that German idealism influenced American thinkers and instead suggest that it (...) is more fruitful to concentrate on ‘aesthetic experience’. I argue that attending to the aesthetic dimensions of experience might re-orient contemporary approaches to pragmatism that continue to focus on the way that pragmatism might intervene in debates in epistemology and philosophy of language. (shrink)

All three believed that the modern world could be remade according to this model, though none succeeded in his endeavor. At times Schiller seemed to recognize the failure of the model; in his mature writing Hegel dropped the model; and Marx, as he grew older, fundamentally modified the model. Nevertheless, focusing upong their attempts and failures allows an explanation of certain aspects of one of the fundamental concerns of current Marx studies: Marx's humanism and the relationship between his earlier and (...) later thought. Using this approach, Kain shows that Marx's development cannot be divided into two neat periods - an early humanistic or philosophical period and a later scientific period - as some scholars argue, nor can one argue for an essential unity to his thought as other scholars do. Instead Kain finds Marx continually shifting his views in his attempt to come to grips with the issues that concern him. But Kain also finds a deep-seated humanism in Marx's later writings which grows out of, but differs from, the humanism of his early work. (shrink)

In his Aesthetics Hegel gives full expression to his seminal theory of art. He surveys the history of art from ancient India, Egypt, and Greece through to the Romantic movement of his own time, criticizes major works, and probes their meaning and significance; his rich array of examples gives broad scope for his judgement and makes vivid his exposition of his theory. The substantial Introduction is Hegel's best exposition of his general philosophy of art, and provides the ideal way (...) into his Aesthetics. In Part I he considers the general nature of art: he distinguishes art, as a spiritual experience, from religion and philosophy; he discusses the beauty of art and differentiates it from the beauty of nature; and he examines artistic genius and originality. Part II provides a sort of history of art, divded into three periods called Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic. Part III deals individually with architecture, scuplture, painting, music, and literature. (shrink)

Mencius’ aesthetics unfolded around the ideal personality in his mind. Such an ideal personality belonged to a great man who was sublime, practical and honorable, and it was presented as the beauty of magnificence or the beauty of masculinity. Mencius put forward many propositions such as the completed goodness that is brightly displayed is called greatness, nourishing one’s grand qi 气 (the great morale personality), only after a man is a sage can he completely suits himself to his own (...) form, the saints only apprehended before me that of which my mind approves along with other men, being conscious of sincerity on self-examination, and flowing abroad, above and beneath, like that of Heaven and Earth, all of which described an ideal personality through the course of its formation and its psychological experience. As a prominent school before the Qin dynasty, Mencius’ aesthetics greatly developed the Confucian teaching of internal sage. It shared many similarities with Zhuangzi’s thought and was also an aesthetic mode opposed to the latter. Both kinds of aesthetics were prominent: Mencius’ teaching was like imposingly towering and muscularly overflowing majestic mountains; Zhuangzi’s thought was like gracefully flowing water with an air of femininity. In real life though, Mencius’ teaching has greater practical significance in addressing the unbearable lightness of being, a disease of modernity. (shrink)

Aesthetic education plays an important role in people's education and training. Guided by Marxist aesthetic education view, studying the construction of aesthetic education in the new era is not only an important condition for shaping a sound personality and an inevitable requirement for guiding people's better life in the new era, but also a theoretical basis for guiding the cultivation of innovative talents in the new era, and a realistic need for dealing with the misunderstanding of aesthetic education in the (...) new era. As an important part of socialist cultural construction, aesthetic education can cultivate people's perception, acceptance and creativity of beauty, shape individual's lofty ideals and sentiments by purifying the soul and casting the soul, transform the objective world and beautify the subjective world according to the law of beauty, establish a beautiful world outlook, outlook on life and values, and promote people's quality promotion and all-round development. From the perspective of aesthetic education, we media's own characteristics enable it to become a platform for teachers' teaching and students' learning at the same time, and with the new changes shown by the relationship between the media and the audience, we media can become an effective carrier to enhance college students' aesthetic education, providing us with a good opportunity to effectively enhance college students' aesthetic education. (shrink)

_The Continental Aesthetics Reader_ brings together classic and contemporary writings on art and aesthetics from the major figures in continental thought. The second edition is clearly divided into seven sections: Nineteenth-Century German Aesthetics Phenomenology and Hermeneutics Marxism and Critical Theory Excess and Affect Embodiment and Technology Poststructuralism and Postmodernism Aesthetic Ontologies. Each section is clearly placed in its historical and philosophical context, and each philosopher has an introduction by Clive Cazeaux. An updated list of readings for this (...) edition includes selections from Agamben, Butler, Guattari, Nancy, Virilio, and Žižek. Suggestions for further reading are given, and there is a glossary of over fifty key terms. Ideal for introductory courses in aesthetics, continental philosophy, art, and visual studies, _The Continental Aesthetics Reader_ provides a thorough introduction to some of the most influential writings on art and aesthetics from Kant and Hegel to Badiou and Rancière. (shrink)