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Hailed by Lingua Franca as a "breakthrough book in aesthetics," this lucid and persuasive work explores unnoticed relations between art and everyday life. In a revised and expanded edition, David Novitz proposes a new and refreshingly different direction for the study of the philosophy of art
Ours is the age of the picture. Pictures abound in our newspapers and magazines, in storybooks and on the glossy pages of instruction manuals. We find them on billboards and postage stamps, on the television screen and in the cinema. And in all of these cases pictures inform us: they explain, they clarify, they elucidate - and at times, too, they entertain and delight us. Images on the television screen have all but replaced the printed word as a source of information about the world; and nowadays, too, picture books and comic strips are consulted much more readily, and with much less intellectual effort, than the printed word. There can be little doubt but that pictures have come to play a very important role in communication. It strikes me as odd that, in what is nothing less than a visual age, philosophers have had so little to say about the visual image and its use in communication. Hardly anything has been done to explain the way in which pictures are used to inform us; the way in which they influence our thinking, our attitudes and our perception of the world. My aim in this work is to fill this gap, and in so doing to provide a viable account of pictorial communication.
How do we define 'culture?' In this volume, Adam Muller brings together contributions from established and emerging scholars in a number of different disciplines who each examine the concept of culture as it is understood and deployed within their respective fields.
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Table of contents
Is there a single right interpretation for such cultural phenomena as works of literature, visual artworks, works of music, the self, and legal and sacred texts? In these essays, almost all written especially for this volume, twenty leading philosophers pursue different answers to this question by examining the nature of interpretation and its objects and ideals. The fundamental conflict between positions that universally require the ideal of a single admissible interpretation (singularism) and those that allow a multiplicity of some admissible interpretations (multiplism) leads to a host of engrossing questions explored in these essays: Does multiplism invite interpretive anarchy? Can oppos...
The Bloomsbury Companion to Aesthetics presents a practical study guide to emerging topics and art forms in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Placing contemporary discussion in its historical context, this companion begins with an introduction to the history of aesthetics. Surveying the central topics, terms and figures and noting the changes in the roles the arts played over the centuries, it also tackles methodological issues asking what the proper object of study in aesthetics is, and how we should go about studying it. Written by leading analytic philosophers in the field, chapters on Core Issues and Art Forms cover four major topics; - the definition of art and the ontology of art w...
The essays in this volume exhibit many sides of the perceptual complex that is the aesthetic field and develop them in different ways. They reinvigorate our understanding of such arts as music and architecture; they range across the natural landscape to the urban one; they reassess the place of beauty in the modern environment and reassess the significance of the contributions to aesthetic theory of Kant and Dewey; and they broach the kinds of meanings and larger understanding that aesthetic engagement with the human environment can offer.