Aesthetics category: 1179 books

Taste, perhaps the most intimate of the five senses, has traditionally been considered beneath the concern of philosophy, too bound to the body, too personal and idiosyncratic. Yet, in addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in human experience,...

First published in 1988, the aim of this book can be stated in Nietzsche’s words: ‘To look at science from the perspective of the artist, but at art from that of life’. The title contests the notions that science alone can provide us with the most objective truth about the world, and that artistic...

This book investigates the significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for aesthetic understanding. Focusing on the aesthetic elements of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work, the authors explore connections to contemporary currents in aesthetic thinking and the illuminating power of Wittgenstein’s...

Disgust has a strong claim to be a distinctively human emotion. But what is it to be disgusting? What unifies the class of disgusting things? Colin McGinn sets out to analyze the content of disgust, arguing that life and death are implicit in its meaning. Disgust is a kind of philosophical emotion,...

This vintage book contains the first volume of Arthur Schopenhauer’s 1818 treatise, "The World As Will And Idea". One of the most influential philosophical works of the nineteenth century, it is Schopenhauer’s greatest endeavour, and constitutes the summation of a lifetime of contemplation....

“A fresh, revelatory, golden eagle’s eye-view of western literature.” —Financial Times Early in Grammars of Creation, George Steiner references Plato’s maxim that in “all things natural and human, the origin is the most excellent.” Creation, he argues, is linguistically fundamental...

Renowned scholar George Steiner explores the power and presence of the unseen in art. “It takes someone of [his] stature to tackle this theme head-on” (The New York Times).   There is a philosophical school of thought that believes the presence of God in art, literature, and music—in...

Francis Hutcheson’s first book, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, was published in 1725, when its author was only thirty-one, and went through four editions during his lifetime. This seminal text of the Scottish Enlightenment is now available for the first time in a...

Love in the Post (2013) is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s book The Post Card. Like the book, the film plays with fact and fiction, weaving together the stories of a scholar of literature and a film director, alongside insights from critics and philosophers. Theo Marks works in a university...

Towards a Conceptual Militancy is aimed at the interested art-viewing public, artists, the politically disillusioned, and readers of both European Philosophy, particularly of Speculative Realism/OOP, and Accelerationism. This book calls on the artist to mount a defence of subjective freedom in opposition...

Bernard Stiegler's work on the intimate relations between the human and the technical have made him one of the most important voices to have emerged in French philosophy in the last decade. At the same time both an accessible summation of that work and a continuation of it, The Re-Enchantment of the...

Everything changes on what begins as a typical day in the life of the aptly named Mr. Mann, a forty-eight-year-old, buttoned-down, middle management type in a pinstriped grey suit, who feels himself losing touch with his job, his wife, his children, and the rest of his urban life. He wins tickets...

This third volume of American University Publications in Philos­ ophy continues the tradition of presenting books in the series shaping current frontiers and new directions in phi. osophical reflection. In a period emerging from the neglect of creativity by positivism, Professors Dutton and Krausz...

If anything marks the image, it is a deep ambivalence. Denounced as superficial, illusory, and groundless, images are at the same time attributed with exorbitant power and assigned a privileged relation to truth. Mistrusted by philosophy, forbidden and embraced by religions, manipulated as “spectacle”...