Aesthetics category: 1179 books

Achilles, paragon of aristocratic valor, an “idol of idiot worshippers,” as Shakespeare’s Thersites soliloquizes? The Renaissance bard’s Troy story, his much disregarded Troilus and Cressida, has long baffled readers; why would Shakespeare satirize the noble epic tradition, the ‘divine’...

More than any other area of late-twentieth-century thinking, gender theory and its avatars have been to a large extent a Franco-American invention. In this book, a leading Franco-American scholar traces differences and intersections in the development of gender and queer theories on both sides of...

This book discusses the philosophy of influential contemporary philosopher Peter van Inwagen. Looking at perennial philosophical problems from a modern point of view, Peter van Inwagen’s philosophy masterfully combines positions that have been considered irreconcilable: incompatibilism concerning...

For the past twenty years there has been a virtual consensus in philosophy that there is a special link between fiction and the imagination. In particular, fiction has been defined in terms of the imagination: what it is for something to be fictional is that there is some requirement that a reader...

How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today’s world The demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to which we judge ourselves good or bad,...

As both a literary genre and a view of life, tragedy has from the very beginning spurred a dialogue between poetry and philosophy. Plato famously banned tragedians from his ideal community because he believed that their representations of vicious behavior could deform minds. Aristotle set out to answer...

A dialogue of Plato addressing the true nature of rhetoric, and in which he argues that philosophy is an art.

Chinese Literature Comprising The Analects of Confucius, The Sayings of Mencius, The Shi-King, The Travels of Fâ-Hien, and The Sorrows of Han   The strangest figure that meets us in the annals of Oriental thought is that of Confucius. To the popular mind he is the founder of a religion,...

*This Book is annotated (it contains a detailed biography of the author). *An active Table of Contents has been added by the publisher for a better customer experience. *This book has been checked and corrected for spelling errors. This book is the natural sequel of Social Origins and Primal...

COMMON YORUBA MYTHS & SUPERSTITIONS presents extant traditional beliefs as cognized and practiced by Yoruba people of West Africa.  Insightful, original and visceral, this vintage collection of Yoruba myths and superstitions is made especially for Africans in Diaspora and other cultural...

There exists a very rich, but largely untapped well of African American philosophical thought, in which many Black thinkers were debating the role philosophy played in racial advancement among themselves. One such work that demonstrates this vibrant tradition is William H. Ferris’s The African Abroad...

Deleuze and the Diagram charts Deleuze's corpus according to aesthetic concepts such as the map, the sketch and the drawing to bring out a comprehensive concept of the diagram. In his interrogation of Deleuze's visual aesthetic theory, Jakub Zdebik focuses on artists that hold an important place in...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and another can groan with gravitas in the Library...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Where does a password end and an identity begin? A person might be more than his chosen ten-character combination, but does a bank know that? Or an email provider? What's an 'identity...