Aesthetics category: 1179 books

Oscar Wilde non pubblicò mai una raccolta di aforismi anche se il pensiero di creare tale raccolta gli venne una volta, poco prima di recarsi in Francia, nel 1897, quando era ancora nel carcere di "Reading", ma a tale progetto non seguì mai una realizzazione. Quindi, proprio gli aforismi,...

Raffinato cantore del decadentismo, dandy impareggiabile, umanista finissimo, autore di successo, spirito libero e anticonformista, Oscar Wilde è al centro di un'infinita bibliografia, ma non vi è fonte migliore per ricostruirne e ripercorrerne l'intensa vicenda umana della sua ricchissima corrispondenza....

Why are the visual arts so important and what is it that makes their forms significant? Countering recent interpretations of meaning that understand visual artworks on the model of literary texts, Crowther formulates a theory of the visual arts based on what their creation achieves both cognitively...

With the emerging dominance of digital technology, the time is ripe to reconsider the nature of the image. Some say that there is no longer a phenomenal image, only disembodied information (0-1) waiting to be configured. For photography, this implies that a faith in the principle of an "evidential...

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, philosophers have pondered the nature and purpose of the arts, but artists have gone on making them and audiences enjoying them regardless of these musings. None of their theories have met with universal or even popular acceptance. But here is theory that places...

Instead of treating art as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate, Elizabeth Grosz argues that art-especially architecture, music, and painting-is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory...

Drawing on art, media, and phenomenological sources, Showing Off!: A Philosophy of Image challenges much recent thought by proposing a fundamentally positive relationship between visuality and the ethical. In philosophy, cultural studies and art, relationships between visuality and the ethical are...

Building upon Husserl’s challenge to oppositions such as those between form and content and between constituting and constituted, The Concept of Passivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology construes activity and passivity not as reciprocally exclusive terms but as mutually dependent moments of acts of...

In Autonomy Nicholas Brown theorizes the historical and theoretical argument for art's autonomy from its acknowledged character as a commodity. Refusing the position that the distinction between art and the commodity has collapsed, Brown demonstrates how art can, in confronting its material determinations,...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. You can't think about travel without thinking about luggage. And baggage has baggage. Susan Harlan takes readers on a journey with the suitcases that support, accessorize, and accompany...

Bento's Sketchbook is an exploration of the practice of drawing, as well as a meditation on how we perceive and seek to explore our ever-changing relationship with the world around us.

Crito (Ancient Greek: Κρίτων [krítɔːn]; in English usually /ˈkraɪːtoʊ/ KRY-toh, also /ˈkriːtoʊ/ KREE-toh) is a short but important dialogue by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. It is a conversation between Socrates and his wealthy friend Crito regarding justice (δικη),...

'The artist is certainly the child of his age, but all the worse for him if he is at the same time its pupil, even worse its minion.' On the Aesthetic Education of Man is one of the most profound works of German philosophy, in which Friedrich Schiller analyses politics, revolution and the history...

"Kociejowski draws on all these aspects of his life in these engaging, idiosyncratic personal essays ... [that] proffer the reader equal measures of autobiography, insight and quirky charm." -Michael Dirda, The Washington Post In the game of bocce, no matter how intensely you study...