Aesthetics category: 1179 books

En las situaciones de crisis de régimen, cuando las convicciones más sólidas se erosionan, es posible ver y pensar lo que de ordinario nos resulta invisible; no es de extrañar, pues, que sea entonces cuando la filosofía cobre un papel especialmente destacado. Son estos los momentos en los que...

Scientists often try to understand the world by building simplified and idealised models of it. Adam Toon develops a new approach to scientific models by comparing them to the dolls and toy trucks of children's imaginative games, and offers a unified framework to solve difficult metaphysical problems and help to make sense of scientific practice.

What makes art wonderful is that it is absolutely indifferent to fact. Art invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment. Wilde was at the height of his form when these brilliant essays on art, literature,...

In 1972, the French theorists Deleuze and Guattari unleashed their collaborative project-which they termed schizoanalysis-upon the world. Today, few disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have been left untouched by its influence. Through a series of groundbreaking applications of Deleuze...

In this concise and illuminating study, Jacques Rancière, one of the world's most popular and influential living philosophers, examines the life and work of the celebrated nineteenth-century French poet and critic, Stéphane Mallarmé. Ranciere presents Mallarmé as neither an aesthete in...

Leland de la Durantaye helps us understand Beckett’s strangeness and notorious difficulty by arguing that Beckett’s lifelong campaign was to mismake on purpose—not to denigrate himself, or his audience, or reconnect with the child or savage within, but because he believed that such mismaking is in the interest of art and will shape its future.

Various art forms inscribe, program or perform the preference of relationship. In so doing, they put otherness high on their aesthetic agenda by caring about the cultural other, the other of gender, race, class or history. Such art forms from different periods promote a mode of sensibility to the...

Offering new critical approaches to Dada as quintessential part of the Avant-Garde, Dada and Existentialism: the Authenticity of Ambiguity reassesses the movement as a form of (proto-) Existentialist philosophy. Dada is often dismissed as an anti-art movement with a merely destructive theoretical...

The Work of Difference addresses a fundamental ontological question: What is literature? And at the heart of this question, it argues, is the problem of the new. How is it that new works or new forms are possible within the rule-governed orders of history, language use, or the social? How are new...

Cognition Switch: An Artefact for the Transmission of New Ideas Issue #5: April 2019 Featuring Ideas by: Michael Strauss, Ed Simon, Raja Halwani, Robert Noggle, Archie Brown, Michael Robertson, Nancy Weiss Malkiel, Peter Levine, Laurie Gwen Shapiro, Julian Baggini, Christopher Kavanagh, and Johanna Hanink

A compelling guide to the fundamental place of humour and comedy within Western culture—by one of its greatest exponents Written by an acknowledged master of comedy, this study reflects on the nature of humour and the functions it serves. Why do we laugh? What are we to make of the sheer...

This book engages with the question of making sense of seeing in today’s technologically dominated world. It does so by exploring the notion of the ‘hypermodern’, a term which is used to capture the drive in contemporary culture to achieve ever greater speed and efficiency. The volume draws...

What if Immanuel Kant floated down from his transcendental heights, straight through Alice’s rabbit hole, and into the fabulous world of Lewis Carroll? For Ben-Ami Scharfstein this is a wonderfully instructive scenario and the perfect way to begin this wide-ranging collection of decades of startlingly...

Since its publication in 1890, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler has been a recurring point of fascination for readers, theater audiences, and artists alike. Newly married, yet utterly bored, the character of Hedda Gabler evokes reflection on beauty, love, passion, death, nihilism, identity, and a host of other...