*Winner of the American Society for Aesthetics 2019 Outstanding Monograph Prize*Until now, research on art schools has been largely occupied with the facts of particular schools and teachers. This book presents a philosophical account of the underlying practices and ideas that have come to shape contemporary art school teaching in the UK, US and Europe. It analyses two models that, hidden beneath the diversity of contemporary artist training, have come to dominate art schools. The first of these is essentially an old approach: a training guided by the artistic values of a single artist-teacher. The second dates from the 1960s, and is based around the group crit, in which diverse voices contribute to an artist’s development. Understanding the underlying principles and possibilities of these two models, which sit together in an uneasy tension, gives new insights into the character of contemporary art school teaching, demonstrating how art schools shape art and artists, how they can be a potent engine of creativity in contemporary culture and how they contribute to artistic research. A Philosophy of the Art School draws on first-hand accounts of art school teaching, and is deeply informed by disciplines ranging from art history and art theory, to the philosophy of art, education and creativity. Read more

Games are a unique art form. Games work in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be and what to care about during the game. Game designers sculpt alternate agencies, and game players submerge themselves in those alternate agencies. Thus, the fact that we play games demonstrates the fluidity of our own agency. We can throw ourselves, for a little while, into a different and temporary motivations. This volume presents a new theory of games that insists on their unique value. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part of our systems of communication and our art. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. When we play games, we can pursue a goal, not for its own value, but for the value of the struggle. Thus, playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life. We adopt an interest in winning temporarily, so we can experience the beauty of the struggle. Games offer us a temporary experience of life under utterly clear values, in a world engineered to fit to our abilities and goals.Games also let us to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, it turns out, are a special technique for communication. They are a technology that lets us record and transmit forms of agency. Our games form a "library of agency" and we can explore that library to develop our autonomy. Games use temporary restrictions to force us into new postures of agency. Read more

With Friedrich Schiller's (1759—1805) essential aesthetic writings, The German Library now includes the third and final volume of works by the influential playwright, historian, and philosopher. The informative introduction by Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom sketches the various dimensions (historical, anthropological, philosophical, social, and personal) of Schiller's complex aesthetic views, and analyzes the impact of his attempts to develop concepts at odds with the social fragmentation of his time. Through all of his theoretical and dramatic work, Schiller remains our contemporary: The questions that he posed still concern us today. Read more

Art as the Absolute is a literary and philosophical investigation into the meaning of art and its claims to truth. Exploring in particular the writings of Kant and those who followed after, including Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, Paul Gordon contends that art solves the problem of how one can “know” the absolute in non-conceptual, non-discursive terms.The idea of art's inherent relation to the absolute, first explicitly rendered by Kant, is examined in major works from 1790 to 1823. The first and last chapters, on Plato and Nietzsche respectively, deal with precursors and “post-cursors” of this idea. Gordon shows and seeks to reddress the lack of attention to this idea after Hegel, as well as in contemporary reassessments of this period. Art as the Absolute will be of interest to students and scholars studying aesthetics from both a literary and philosophical perspective. Read more

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This essay collection explores the crucial connections between aesthetic experience and the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. After examining philosophical accounts of embodiment and aesthetic experience, the essays apply somaesthetic theory to the diverse fine arts and the art of living. Read more

Why was mythology of vital importance for the romantics? What role did mythology play in their philosophical and literary work? And what common sources of influence inspired these writers across Britain and Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century?In this wide-ranging study, Owen Ware argues that the romantics turned to mythology for its potential to transform how we see ourselves, others, and the world. Engaging with authors such as William Blake, Friedrich Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ware shows why they believed that neither perception nor reason alone can sustain a vision of the unity of all things. A new mode of cognition is necessary, they claimed, one that revives the poetic origin of mythology and reveals our own mythmaking powers. Return of the Gods investigates the rise of mythology in the British and German traditions and the romantics' practices of reinterpreting old myths and inventing new ones. Their shared aim was nothing less than to elevate the human imagination to higher stages of self-development in which philosophy and poetry, as well as intellect and imagination, form an integrated whole. Far from calling us to return to the past, the romantics' work on mythology points us to a future where we can live in harmony with the personal, social, and natural worlds we inhabit.Owen Ware combines intellectual history with philosophical analysis and literary criticism to offer a bold reflection on why mythology mattered for the romantics--and why it still matters today. Read more

The Didi-Huberman Dictionary is a specialized introduction to the thought of contemporary French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, best known for his path-breaking philosophy of image and for his impact on the ‘visual turn’ in theoretical humanities.With over 150 entries, including 125 main entries, the dictionary is a useful research tool for students coming to Didi-Huberman’s work for the first time. Entries range from Theodor Adorno and Anthropology through to Materiality and Memory and on to Aby Warburg and Witnessing. Researchers already familiar with his work, but who want to develop a multi-faceted and more comprehensive understanding of the philosophical and cultural references woven into his thought, will gain deeper knowledge of the nuances of his conceptual apparatus, given the interreferential and intertextual aspects of his work.The dictionary identifies and explains his key figures, inspirations and philosophical metaphors as well as introduces Didi-Huberman’s polemics with other contemporary philosophers, including Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière. Entries on concepts and motifs from Didi-Huberman’s major texts that are (as of yet) not translated into English - Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (1992), and Ninfa moderna (2002) - are also included.This is your one-stop, go-to resource for learning more about the innovative, exciting work of Georges Didi-Huberman. Read more

Philosophy of Art is a textbook for undergraduate students interested in the topic of philosophical aesthetics.It introduces the techniques of analytic philosophy as well as key topics such as the representational theory of art, formalism, neo-formalism, aesthetic theories of art, neo-Wittgensteinism, the Institutional Theory of Art. as well as historical approaches to the nature of art.Throughout, abstract philosophical theories are illustrated by examples of both traditional and contemporary art including frequent reference to the avant-garde in this way enriching the readers understanding of art theory as well as the appreciation of art.Unique features of the textbook are:* chapter summaries* summaries of major theories of art and suggested analyses of the important categories used when talking and thinking of art* annotated suggested readings at the ends of chapters.Also available in this series:Epistemology Pb: 0-415-13043-3: £12.99Ethics Pb: 0-415-15625-4: £11.99Metaphysics Pb: 0-415-14034-X: £12.99Philosophy of Mind Pb: 0-415-13060-3: £11.99Philosophy of Religion Pb: 0-415-13214-2: £12.99 Read more

Leon Krier is one of the best-known—and most provocative—architects and urban theoreticians in the world. Until now, however, his ideas have circulated mostly among a professional audience of architects, city planners, and academics. In The Architecture of Community, Krier has reconsidered and expanded writing from his 1998 book Architecture: Choice or Fate. Here he refines and updates his thinking on the making of sustainable, humane, and attractive villages, towns, and cities. The book includes drawings, diagrams, and photographs of his built works, which have not been widely seen until now.   With three new chapters, The Architecture of Community provides a contemporary road map for designing or completing today’s fragmented communities. Illustrated throughout with Krier’s original drawings, The Architecture of Community explains his theories on classical and vernacular urbanism and architecture, while providing practical design guidelines for creating livable towns.    The book contains descriptions and images of the author’s built and unbuilt projects, including the Krier House and Tower in Seaside, Florida, as well as the town of Poundbury in England. Commissioned by the Prince of Wales in 1988, Krier’s design for Poundbury in Dorset has become a reference model for ecological planning and building that can meet contemporary needs. Read more

Written by an experienced drummer and philosopher, Groove is a vivid and exciting study of one of music's most central and relatively unexplored aspects. Tiger C. Roholt explains why grooves, which are forged in music's rhythmic nuances, remain hidden to some listeners. He argues that grooves are not graspable through the intellect nor through mere listening; rather, grooves are disclosed through our bodily engagement with music. We grasp a groove bodily by moving with music's pulsations. By invoking the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of "motor intentionality," Roholt shows that the "feel" of a groove, and the understanding of it, are two sides of a coin: to "get" a groove just is to comprehend it bodily and to feel that embodied comprehension. Read more

This book examines the affinity between “theory” and “deconstruction” that developed in the American academy in the 1970s by way of the “Yale Critics”: Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, sometimes joined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.With this semi-fictional collective, theory became a media event, first in the academy and then in the wider print media, in and through its phantasmatic link with deconstruction and with “Yale.” The important role played by aesthetic humanism in American pedagogical discourse provides a context for understanding theory as an aesthetic scandal, and an examination of the ways in which de Man’s work challenges aesthetic pieties helps us understand why, by the 1980s, he above all had come to personify “theory.”Combining a broad account of the “Yale Critics” phenomenon with a series of careful reexaminations of the event of theory, Redfield traces the threat posed by language’s unreliability and inhumanity in chapters on lyric, on Hartman’s representation of the Wordsworthian imagination, on Bloom’s early theory of influence in the 1970s together with his later media reinvention as the genius of the Western Canon, and on John Guillory’s influential attempt to interpret de Manian theory as a symptom of literature’s increasing marginality. A final chapter examines Mark Tansey’s paintings Derrida Queries de Man and Constructing the Grand Canyon, paintings that offer subtle, complex reflections on the peculiar event of theory-as-deconstruction in America. Read more

Portraits are everywhere. One finds them not only in museums and galleries, but also in newspapers and magazines, in the homes of people and in the boardrooms of companies, on stamps and coins, on millions of cell phones and computers. Despite its huge popularity, however, portraiture hasn’t received much philosophical attention. While there are countless art historical studies of portraiture, contemporary philosophy has largely remained silent on the subject. This book aims to address that lacuna. It brings together philosophers (and philosophically minded historians) with different areas of expertise to discuss this enduring and continuously fascinating genre. The chapters in this collection are ranged under five broad themes. Part I examines the general nature of portraiture and what makes it distinctive as a genre. Part II looks at some of the subgenres of portraiture, such as double portraiture, and at some special cases, such as sport card portraits and portraits of people not present. How emotions are expressed and evoked by portraits is the central focus of Part III, while Part IV explores the relation between portraiture, fiction, and depiction more generally. Finally, in Part V, some of the ethical issues surrounding portraiture are addressed. The book closes with an epilogue about portraits of philosophers. Portraits and Philosophy tangles with deep questions about the nature and effects of portraiture in ways that will substantially advance the scholarly discussion of the genre. It will be of interest to scholars and students working in philosophy of art, history of art, and the visual arts. Read more

Mathew Abbott presents a powerful new film-philosophy through the cinema of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Mathew Abbott argues that Kiarostami’s films carry out cinematic thinking: they do not just illustrate pre-existing philosophical ideas, but do real philosophical work.Crossing the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, he draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Alice Crary, Noël Carroll, Giorgio Agamben, and Martin Heidegger, bringing out the thinking at work in Kiarostami’s most recent films: Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, ABC Africa, Ten, Five, Shirin, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love. Read more

The time of the landscape is not the time when people started describing gardens, mountains and lakes in poems or representing them in works of art: it is the time when the landscape imposed itself as a specific object of thought. It is the time when both the harmony of arranged gardens and the disharmony of wild nature led to a revolution in the criteria of the beautiful and in the meaning of the word “art.” It coincided with the birth of aesthetics, understood as a regime for shaping how art is seen and thought, and also with the French Revolution, understood as a revolution in the very idea of what binds together a human community. The time of the landscape is the time when the conjunction of these two upheavals brought into focus, however hazily, a common horizon: that of a revolution that no longer concerns only the laws of the state or the norms of art, but the very forms of sensible experience.This brilliant and wide-ranging book will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy, literature, the visual arts, and the humanities generally, and to anyone interested in critical theory and philosophy. Read more

This study uses new arguments to reinvestigate the relation between aesthetics and politics in the contemporary debates on democratic theory and radical democracy. First, Carl Schmitt and Claude Lefort help delineate the contours of an aesthetico-political understanding of democracy, which is developed further by studying Merleau-Ponty, Rancière, and Arendt. The ideas of Merleau-Ponty serve to establish a general "ontological" framework that aims to contest the dominant currents in contemporary democratic theory. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, and Rancière share a general understanding of the political as the contingently contested spaces and times of appearances. However, the articulation of their thought leads to reconsider and explore under-theorized as well as controversial dimensions of their work.This search for new connections between the political and the aesthetic thought of Arendt and Merleau-Ponty on one hand and the current widespread interest in Rancière's aesthetic politics on the other make this book a unique study that will appeal to anyone who is interested in political theory and contemporary continental philosophy. Read more

In recent decades, theoretical and critical studies have oscillated between, on the one hand, wrestling otherness from a condition in which it is dependent on and defined relative to the notion of the same and, on the other hand, pursuing an approach to sameness and universality uncontaminated by otherness. Yet these concepts continuously prove mutually dependent. Together, they constitute a dynamic and productive tension which this book addresses. Inquiring into the representations and nature of self-other relationships in art, literature and culture, the chapters are written in and to a contemporary world struggling with the critical question of otherness and its present-day status. Given the complexity and multidimensional nature of otherness, a multilateral focus is called for and so this collection of selected essays brings together a range of scholarly disciplines and inquiries to engage in a multilateral discussion of otherness. Read more

John Dewey was the foremost philosophical figure and public intellectual in early to mid-twentieth century America. He is still the most academically cited Anglophone philosopher of the past century, and is among the most cited Americans of any century. In this comprehensive volume spanning thirty-five chapters, leading scholars help researchers access particular aspects of Dewey's thought, navigate the enormous and rapidly developing literature, and participate in current scholarship in light of prospects in key topical areas. Beginning with a framing essay by Philip Kitcher calling for a transformation of philosophical research inspired by Dewey, contributors interpret, appraise, and critique Dewey's philosophy under the following headings: Metaphysics; Epistemology, Science, Language, and Mind; Ethics, Law, and the Starting Point; Social and Political Philosophy, Race, and Feminist Philosophy; Philosophy of Education; Aesthetics; Instrumental Logic, Philosophy of Technology, and the Unfinished Project of Modernity; Dewey in Cross-Cultural Dialogue; The American Philosophical Tradition, the Social Sciences, and Religion; and Public Philosophy and Practical Ethics. Read more

In this book, Barry and Gail Lord focus their two lifetimes of international experience working in the cultural sector on the challenging questions of why and how culture changes. They situate their discourse on aesthetic culture within a broad and inclusive definition of culture in relation to material, physical and socio-political cultures. Here at last is a dynamic understanding of the work of art, in all aspects, media and disciplines, illuminating both the primary role of the artist in initiating cultural change, and the crucial role of patronage in sustaining the artist. Drawing on their worldwide experience, they demonstrate the interdependence of artistic production, patronage, and audience and the remarkable transformations that we have witnessed through the millennia of the history of the arts, from our ancient past to the knowledge economy of the twenty-first century. Questions of cultural identity, migration, and our growing environmental consciousness are just a few examples of the contexts in which the Lords show how and why our cultural values are formed and transformed. This book is intended for artists, students, and teachers of art history, museum studies, cultural studies, and philosophy, and for cultural workers in all media and disciplines. It is above all intended for those who think of themselves first as audience because we are all participants in cultural change. Read more

Marcel Duchamp once asked whether it is possible to make something that is not a work of art. This question returns over and over in modernist culture, where there are no longer any authoritative criteria for what can be identified (or excluded) as a work of art. As William Carlos Williams says, “A poem can be made of anything,” even newspaper clippings.At this point, art turns into philosophy, all art is now conceptual art, and the manifesto becomes the distinctive genre of modernism. This book takes seriously this transformation of art into philosophy, focusing upon the systematic interest that so many European philosophers take in modernism. Among the philosophers Gerald Bruns discusses are Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas.As Bruns demonstrates, the difficulty of much modern and contemporary poetry can be summarized in the idea that a poem is made of words, not of any of the things that we use words to produce: meanings, concepts, propositions, narratives, or expressions of feeling. Many modernist poets have argued that in poetry language is no longer a form of mediation but a reality to be explored and experienced in its own right. But what sort of experience, philosophically, might this be? The problem of the materiality or hermetic character of poetic language inevitably leads to questions of how philosophy itself is to be written and what sort of communitydefines the work of art―or, for that matter, the work of philosophy.In this provocative study, Bruns answers that the culture of modernism is a kind of anarchist community, where the work of art is apt to be as much an event or experience―or, indeed, an alternative form of life―as a formal object. In modern writing, philosophy and poetry fold into one another. In this book, Bruns helps us to see how. Read more