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Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry's Ontological Implications

David Jhave Johnston

This book offers a decoder for some of the new forms of poetry enabled by digital technology. Examining many of the strange technological vectors converging on language, it proposes a poetics ... More

This book offers a decoder for some of the new forms of poetry enabled by digital technology. Examining many of the strange technological vectors converging on language, it proposes a poetics appropriate to the digital era while connecting digital poetry to traditional poetry’s concerns with being (a.k.a. ontological implications). Digital poetry, in this context, is not simply a descendent of the book. Digital poems are not necessarily “poems” or written by “poets”; they are found in ads, conceptual art, interactive displays, performative projects, games, or apps. Poetic tools include algorithms, browsers, social media, and data. Code blossoms into poetic objects and poetic proto-organisms. Introducing the terms TAVs (Textual-Audio-Visuals) and TAVITS (Textual-Audio-Visual-Interactives), Aesthetic Animism theorizes a relation between scientific method and literary analysis; considers the temporal implications of animation software; and links software studies to creative writing. Above all it introduces many examples of digital poetry within a playful yet considered flexible taxonomy. In the future imagined here, digital poets program, sculpt, and nourish immense immersive interfaces of semi-autonomous word ecosystems. Poetry, enhanced by code and animated by sensors, reengages themes active at the origin of poetry: animism, agency, consciousness. Digital poetry will be perceived as living, because it is living.Less

The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature

Malcolm Budd

Consists of four self‐contained essays on the aesthetics of nature, which complement one another by exploring the subject from different points of view. The first is concerned with how the idea of ... More

Consists of four self‐contained essays on the aesthetics of nature, which complement one another by exploring the subject from different points of view. The first is concerned with how the idea of aesthetic appreciation of nature should be understood and proposes that it is best understood as aesthetic appreciation of nature as nature—as what nature actually is. This idea is elaborated by means of accounts of what is meant by nature, what is meant by a response to nature as nature, and what an aesthetic response consists in, and through an examination of the aesthetic relevance of knowledge of nature. The second essay, which is divided into three separate chapters, expounds and critically examines Immanuel Kant's theory of aesthetic judgements about nature. The first of these chapters deals with Kant's account of aesthetic judgements about natural beauty; the second with his claims about the connections between love of natural beauty and morality (which are contrasted with Schiller's claim about love of naive nature); and the third examines his theory of aesthetic judgements about the sublime in nature, rejecting much of Kant's view and proposing an alternative account of the emotion of the sublime. The third essay argues against the assimilation of the aesthetics of nature to that of art, explores the question of what determines the aesthetic properties of a natural item, and attempts to show that the doctrine of positive aesthetics with respect to nature, which maintains that nature unaffected by humanity is such as to make negative aesthetic judgements about the products of the natural world misplaced, is in certain versions false, in others inherently problematic. The fourth essay is a critical survey of much of the most significant recent literature on the aesthetics of nature. Various models of the aesthetic appreciation of nature have been advanced, but none of these is acceptable and, it is argued, no model is needed.Less

Aesthetic Creation

Nick Zangwill

The first chapter addresses the criteria of adequacy of a theory of art. Chapters 2-5 are constructive — they advance a positive view of the nature of art, explore its consequences, and defend it ... More

The first chapter addresses the criteria of adequacy of a theory of art. Chapters 2-5 are constructive — they advance a positive view of the nature of art, explore its consequences, and defend it against objections. The last two chapters are destructive — they argue against other views of the nature of art, and they do so by contrast with the kind of view put forward earlier, and in the light of the groundrules laid down in the first chapter.Less

The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology

Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie (eds)

This collection of original essays from leading researchers across a wide range of disciplines engages with a number of issues concerning ‘the aesthetic mind’. It is the only collection which ... More

This collection of original essays from leading researchers across a wide range of disciplines engages with a number of issues concerning ‘the aesthetic mind’. It is the only collection which specifically targets the extent to which the empirical sciences can contribute to our philosophical understanding of the notions of the aesthetic and the artistic. The questions addressed include the following: Why do we engage with things aesthetically and why do we create art? Does art or aesthetic experience have a function or functions? Which characteristics distinguish aesthetic mental states? Which skills or abilities do we put to use when we engage aesthetically with an object and how does that compare with non-aesthetic experiences? What does our ability to create art and engage aesthetically with things tell us about what it is to be a human being?The collection is divided into seven parts: ‘The Aesthetic Mind’, ‘Emotion in Aesthetic Experience’, ‘Beauty and Universality’, Imagination and Make-Believe’, ‘Fiction and Empathy’, ‘Music, Dance and Expressivity’, and ‘Pictorial Representation’.Less

Aesthetic Pursuits: Essays in Philosophy of Art

Jerrold Levinson

This book presents work by Jerrold Levinson, one of the most prominent philosophers of art today, which follows in the line of his four earlier collections, Music, Art and Metaphysics (1990), The ... More

This book presents work by Jerrold Levinson, one of the most prominent philosophers of art today, which follows in the line of his four earlier collections, Music, Art and Metaphysics (1990), The Pleasures of Aesthetics (1996), Contemplating Art (2006), and Musical Concerns (2015). This book specifically complements the last of those by collecting recent work not concerned with music, the art that has occupied Levinson more than any other, focusing instead on literature, film, and visual art, while addressing itself as well to issues about humour, beauty, and the emotions.Less

Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind

Greg Currie, Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin, and Jon Robson (eds)

Through much of the twentieth century, philosophical thinking about works of art, design, and other aesthetic products has emphasized intuitive and reflective methods, often tied to the idea that ... More

Through much of the twentieth century, philosophical thinking about works of art, design, and other aesthetic products has emphasized intuitive and reflective methods, often tied to the idea that philosophy’s business is primarily to analyse concepts. This ‘philosophy from the armchair’ approach contrasts with methods used by psychologists, sociologists, evolutionary thinkers, and others who study the making and reception of the arts empirically. How far should philosophers be sensitive to the results of these studies? Is their own largely a priori method basically flawed and their views on aesthetic value, interpretation, imagination, and the emotions of art to be rethought in the light of best science? The essays in this volume seek answers to these questions, many through detailed studies of problems traditionally regarded as philosophical but where empirical inquiry seems to be shedding interesting light. No common view is looked for or found in this volume: a number of authors argue that the current enthusiasm for scientific approaches to aesthetics is based on a misunderstanding of the philosophical enterprise and sometimes on misinterpretation of the science; others suggest various ways that philosophy can and should accommodate and sometimes yield to the empirical approach. The authors provide a substantial introduction which sets the scene historically and conceptually before summarizing the claims and arguments of the essays.Less

Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception

Bence Nanay

Aesthetics is about some special and unusual ways of experiencing the world. Not just artworks, but also nature and ordinary objects. But then if we apply the remarkably elaborate and sophisticated ... More

Aesthetics is about some special and unusual ways of experiencing the world. Not just artworks, but also nature and ordinary objects. But then if we apply the remarkably elaborate and sophisticated conceptual apparatus of philosophy of perception to questions in aesthetics, we can make real progress. The aim of this book is to bring the discussion of aesthetics and perception together. Many influential debates in aesthetics will look very different and maybe not as difficult to tackle if we clarify the assumptions they make about perception and about experiences in general. The focus of the book is the concept of attention and the ways in which this concept and especially the distinction between distributed and focused attention can help us re-evaluate various key concepts and debates in aesthetics. Some of the key concepts and debates that the book covers are picture perception and depiction, about aesthetic experiences, about formalism, about the importance of uniqueness in aesthetics, about the history of vision debate, and about our identification with fictional characters (among others).Less

The Aesthetics of Argument

Martin Warner

Argument and imagination are often interdependent. This book is concerned with how this relationship may bear on argument’s concern with truth, not just persuasion, and with the enhancement of ... More

Argument and imagination are often interdependent. This book is concerned with how this relationship may bear on argument’s concern with truth, not just persuasion, and with the enhancement of understanding such interdependence may bring. The rationality of argument, conceived as the advancement of reasons for or against a claim, is not simply a matter of deductive validity. Whether arguments are relevant, have force, or look foolish—or whether an example is telling or merely illustrative—cannot always be assessed in these terms. A series of case studies explores how analogy, metaphor, narrative, image, and symbol can be used in different ways to frame one domain in terms of another, severally or in various combinations, and how criteria drawn from the study of imaginative literature may have a bearing on their truth-aptness. Such framing can be particularly effective in argumentative roles inviting self-interrogation, as Plato saw long ago. Narrative in such cases may be fictional, whether parabolic or dramatic, autobiographical or biographical, and in certain cases may seek to show how standard conceptualizations are inadequate. Beyond this, whether in poetry or prose and not only with respect to narrative, the “logic” of imagery enables us to make principled sense of our capacity to grasp imagistically elements of our experience through words whose use at the imaginative level has transformed their standard conceptual relationships, and hence judge the credibility of associated arguments. Assessment of the argumentative imagination requires criteria drawn not only from dialectic and rhetoric, but also from poetics.Less

The Aesthetics of Design

Jane Forsey

This book offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics. Aesthetic theory has traditionally occupied itself with fine art in all its forms, sometimes with craft, ... More

This book offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics. Aesthetic theory has traditionally occupied itself with fine art in all its forms, sometimes with craft, and often with notions of beauty and sublimity in art and nature. In so doing, it has largely ignored the quotidian and familiar objects and experiences that make up our daily lives. Yet how we interact with design involves aesthetic choices and judgements as well as practical, cognitive and moral considerations. This work challenges the discipline to broaden its scope to include design, and illustrates how aesthetics helps define our human concerns. Subjecting design to as rigorous a treatment as any other aesthetic object exposes it to three main challenges that form the core of this book. First, design must be distinguished from art and craft as a unique kind of object meriting separate philosophical attention, and is here defined in part by its functional qualities. Second, the experience of design must be defended as having a particularly aesthetic nature. Here Forsey adapts the Kantian notion of dependent beauty to provide a model for our appreciation of design as different from our judgments of art, craft and natural beauty. Finally, design is important for aesthetics and philosophy as a whole in that it is implicated in broader human concerns. Forsey situates her theory of design as a constructive contribution to the recent movement of Everyday Aesthetics, which seeks to re-enfranchise philosophical aesthetics as an important part of philosophy at large.Less

Aesthetics of Negativity

William S. Allen

Blanchot’s writings are distinctive for the ways that negativity takes place in them in terms of the experience of literature, the possibility of the work, and the nature of its language. However, ... More

Blanchot’s writings are distinctive for the ways that negativity takes place in them in terms of the experience of literature, the possibility of the work, and the nature of its language. However, this role in his thinking is unique and is not to be subsumed to the negativity found in the thought of Hegel or Heidegger, although it partakes of aspects of both. Instead, negativity for Blanchot operates at the level of the ontological status of language, which oscillates undecidably between the assertion and negation of meaning and thereby affects the experience of literature and the possibility of the work with an irreducible ambiguity. To explicate the significance of this negativity it is necessary to turn to another figure for whom it has become as central, Adorno, whose Hegelian background is much stronger, but who also works against this tradition to form his own negative understanding of dialectics that is crucially exemplified in the work of art. For Adorno, the work of art exists as a particular model of its historical and material context, one that both demonstrates its contradictions and also indicates what has been obscured by them. The negativity of the work is thus both that of the critique that it levels against this context and of the possibilities that it negatively raises in its place. To study the two writers together it is necessary to find the place where their thinking converges, which occurs most critically in the area of post-Kantian aesthetics and the question of autonomy.Less

Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making

Yuriko Saito

Everyday aesthetics was recently proposed as a challenge to the contemporary Anglo-American aesthetics discourse dominated by the discussion of art and beauty. This book responds to the subsequent ... More

Everyday aesthetics was recently proposed as a challenge to the contemporary Anglo-American aesthetics discourse dominated by the discussion of art and beauty. This book responds to the subsequent controversies regarding the nature, boundary, and status of everyday aesthetics and argues for its legitimacy. Specifically, its discussion highlights the multifaceted aesthetic dimensions of everyday life that are not fully accounted for by the commonly held account of defamiliarizing the familiar. Instead, the appreciation of the familiar as familiar, negative aesthetics, and the experience of doing things are all included as being worthy of investigation. These diverse ways in which aesthetics is involved in everyday life are explored through conceptual analysis as well as by application of specific examples from art, environment, and household chores. The significance of everyday aesthetics is also multi-layered. This book emphasizes the consequences of everyday aesthetics beyond the generally recognized value of enriching one’s life experiences and sharpening one’s attentiveness and sensibility. Many examples, ranging from consumer aesthetics and nationalist aesthetics to environmental aesthetics and cultivation of moral virtues, demonstrate that the power of aesthetics in everyday life is considerable, affecting and ultimately determining the quality of life and the state of the world, for better or worse. In light of this power of the aesthetic, everyday aesthetics has a social responsibility to encourage cultivation of aesthetic literacy and vigilance against aesthetic manipulation. Ultimately, everyday aesthetics can be an effective instrument for directing humanity’s collective and cumulative world-making project for the betterment of all its inhabitants.Less

Aesthetics on the Edge: Where Philosophy Meets the Human Sciences

Dominic McIver Lopes

Recent years have seen an explosion of research on the biological, neural, and psychological foundations of artistic and aesthetic phenomena, which had previously been the province of the social ... More

Recent years have seen an explosion of research on the biological, neural, and psychological foundations of artistic and aesthetic phenomena, which had previously been the province of the social sciences and the humanities. Meanwhile, it is a boom time for meta-philosophy, many new methods have been adopted in aesthetics, and philosophers are tackling the relationship between empirical and theoretical approaches to aesthetics. These eleven essays propose a methodology especially suited to aesthetics, where problems in philosophy are addressed principally by examining how aesthetic phenomena are understood in the human sciences. Since the human sciences include much of the humanities as well as the social, behavioural, and brain sciences, the methodology promises to integrate arts research across the academy. The volume opens with four essays outlining the methodology and its potential. Subsequent essays put the methodology to work, shedding light on the perceptual and social-pragmatic capacities that are implicated in responding to works of art, especially images, but also music, literature, and conceptual art.Less

Affects, Actions and Passions in Spinoza: The Unity of Body and Mind

Chantal Jaquet

Nowadays there is a great enthusiasm for the Spinozan conception of the union of mind and body among modern researchers, such as Damasio. The fact that the Spinozan model has become very relevant is ... More

Nowadays there is a great enthusiasm for the Spinozan conception of the union of mind and body among modern researchers, such as Damasio. The fact that the Spinozan model has become very relevant is an opportunity to reflect on the impact and value of these references to Spinoza, which historians of philosophy eye with caution because they are all too often based on second-hand knowledge, and frequently distort the philosopher's thought. That is why it is crucial to reexamine the question of the mind-body relationship and its affective modalities in Spinoza from a philosophical angle and identify a model for interpreting it that is capable of informing contemporary debates.Less

The Afterlives of Georges Perec

Rowan Wilken and Justin Clemens (eds)

Georges Perec is widely acknowledged as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His far-reaching influence has inspired many fields of creativity, extending far beyond literature ... More

Georges Perec is widely acknowledged as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His far-reaching influence has inspired many fields of creativity, extending far beyond literature itself.The Afterlives of Georges Perec examines the impact of Perec’s ideas, writing and analytical experimentation in architecture, art and design, media, electronic communications and computing, and studies of the everyday. It asks: what are the lessons that architects, artists, game-designers and writers can draw from Perec’s fascination with creative constraints? What do his descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life reveal about use of information and communications technologies? What happens if we readLife A User’s Manual as a toolbox of ideas for games studies? How might his fascination with the ‘infra-ordinary’ shed light on the uses of contemporary social media? What insights might Perec’s use of algorithmic writing generate for the digital humanities? Through an examination of such questions, this collection takes Perec scholarship beyond its existing limits to offer new ways of rethinking our present.Less

Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics

Gerhard Richter

This book argues that the concept of “afterness” is a key figure in the thought and aesthetics of modernity. It pursues questions such as: What does it mean for something to “follow” something else? ... More

This book argues that the concept of “afterness” is a key figure in the thought and aesthetics of modernity. It pursues questions such as: What does it mean for something to “follow” something else? Does that which follows mark a clear break with what came before it, or does it in fact tacitly perpetuate its predecessor as a consequence of its inevitable indebtedness to the terms and conditions of that from which it claims to have departed? Indeed, is not the very act of breaking with, and then following upon, a way of retroactively constructing and fortifying that from which the break that set the movement of following into motion had occurred? The book explores the concept and movement of afterness as a privileged yet uncanny category through close readings of writers such as Immanuel Kant, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida. It shows how the vexed concepts of afterness, following, and coming after shed new light on a constellation of modern preoccupations, including personal and cultural memory, translation, photography, hope, and the historical and conceptual specificity of what has been termed “after Auschwitz.” The book’s various analyses illuminate Lyotard’s apodictic statement that “after philosophy comes philosophy. But it has been altered by the after.” The book demonstrates, that much hinges on our interpretation of the “after”.Less

All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage

Peter Szendy

The world of international politics has been recently rocked by a seemingly endless series of scandals that are all tied to various practices of auditory surveillance: the NSA’s warrantless ... More

The world of international politics has been recently rocked by a seemingly endless series of scandals that are all tied to various practices of auditory surveillance: the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, Edward Snowden’s revelations, and the “News of the World” scandal are just the most sensational examples of what appears to be a universal practice today. What is the source of this unceasing battle of different forms of listening? Whence this generalized principle of eavesdropping? Peter Szendy’s All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage answers these questions by tracing the long history of moles from the Bible, through Jeremy Bentham’s “panacoustic” project, all the way to the intelligence gathering network called “Echelon.” This archeology of auditory surveillance runs parallel with the analysis of its representations in literature (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce, Kafka, Borges), opera (Monteverdi, Mozart, Berg), and film (Lang, Hitchcock, Coppola, De Palma). Following in the footsteps of Orpheus, the book proposes a new concept of “overhearing” that connects the act of spying to an excessive intensification of listening. Relying on the works of Freud, Deleuze, Foucault, Adorno, and Derrida, Szendy’s work attempts to locate at the heart of listening the ear of the Other that manifests itself as the originary division of a “split-hearing” that turns the drive for mastery and surveillance into the death drive.Less

Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel Between Literature and Music

Peter Kivy

This book constitutes a defence of musical formalism against those who would put literary interpretations on the absolute music canon. In Part I, the historical origins of both the literary ... More

This book constitutes a defence of musical formalism against those who would put literary interpretations on the absolute music canon. In Part I, the historical origins of both the literary interpretation of absolute music and musical formalism are laid out. In Part II, specific attempts to put literary interpretations on various works of the absolute music canon are examined and criticized. Finally, in Part III, the question is raised as to what the human significance of absolute music is, if it does not lie in its representational or narrative content. The answer is that, as yet, philosophy has no answer, and that the question should be considered an important one for philosophers of art to consider, and to try to answer without appeal to representational or narrative content.Less

Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics

Frank Sibley

John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (eds)

Includes some of the most significant of Sibley’s published papers as well as five new essays previously unpublished. The point of the book is not a systematic introduction to aesthetics, but rather ... More

Includes some of the most significant of Sibley’s published papers as well as five new essays previously unpublished. The point of the book is not a systematic introduction to aesthetics, but rather a theoretical discussion of some core topics. The first three papers study the difference and the relation between aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties. Papers 4–6 show how aesthetic properties depend on non-aesthetic ones. In papers 7–9 is discussed the difficulty in finding criteria of aesthetic merit. The distinction between attributive and predicative use of adjectives and its application to the cases of beautiful and ugly is considered in Chs 12–14. The nature of aesthetic and the relation between concepts of the aesthetic of art are the arguments of papers 10 and 15. Finally, papers 11 and 16 investigate the impossibility of isolating and defining a ‘purely music’ experience and illustrate the ontological status of works of visual art respectively.Less

Art and Abstract Objects

Christy Mag Uidhir (ed.)

The standard way of thinking about non-repeatable (single-instance) artworks such as paintings, drawings, and non-cast sculpture is that they are concrete things (i.e. material, causally efficacious, ... More

The standard way of thinking about non-repeatable (single-instance) artworks such as paintings, drawings, and non-cast sculpture is that they are concrete things (i.e. material, causally efficacious, located in space and time). For example, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is currently located in Paris, Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc weighs 73 tonnes, Vermeer’s The Concert was stolen in 1990, and Michaelangelo’s David was attacked with a hammer in 1991. By contrast, consider the current location of Melville’s Moby Dick or the weight of Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ or how one might go about stealing Puccini’s La Bohemme. The standard view of repeatable (multiple-instance) artworks such as novels, poems, plays, operas, films, and symphonies is that they must be abstract things (i.e. immaterial, casually inert, outside space-time). Although novels, poems, and symphonies may not appear to be stock abstract objects, most philosophers of art claim that for the basic intuitions, practices, and conventions surrounding such works to be preserved, repeatable artworks must be abstracta. The purpose of this volume is to examine how philosophical enquiry into the nature of art might productively inform or be productively informed by enquiry into the nature of abstracta taking place within other areas of philosophy such as metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind and language. The aim is to provide a general methodological blueprint from which those within philosophy of art and those without can begin building responsible, and therefore mutually informative and productive, relationships between their respective fields.Less