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This book proposes that aesthetics begin not with concepts of being or semblance, but with a concept of appearing. Seel examines the existential and cultural meaning of aesthetic experience. In doing so, he brings aesthetics and philosophy of art together again, which in continental as well as analytical thinking have been more and more separated in the recent decades.
This book marks a new departure in ethics, which has up to now been a question of ‘the good life’ in relation to other people, based on Greek concepts of friendship and the Judaeo-Christian ‚caritas.’ No early moral teaching discussed man’s relation to the origin of foodstuffs and the system that produced them; doubtless the question was of little interest since the production path was so short.
This book explores ‘environmental forms’ in terms of their relationships to the socio-politico-ecological transformations currently in progress. Today, the environment is a central theme in political discourse, scientific work and everyday life. It is multi-dimensional: it is a living space, a socio-ecological system and a field of research and action. However, despite the presence and diversity of existing approaches, the ways in which policies address environmental issues remain mainly focused on control, highlighting the techno-ecological, managerial and curative dimensions of public actions. Although public action tends to instrumentalise the environment, the humanities and social sc...
Popular culture today manifests itself in a dense network of styles and genres, while the aesthetic preferences of the audience are highly differentiated. Besides, popular culture also implies a diversity of aesthetic strategies, discourses and value systems that traverse the symbolic demarcations between styles and genres and are effective across different artistic fields and individual media. Aesthetic concepts such as camp, retro or trash are expressions of a transgressive mode of production that facilitates a multitude of cross-connections between aesthetic spaces of experience. The volume brings together authors from different disciplines who approach aesthetic concepts in popular culture on a historical, theoretical and methodological level, analyze them on the basis of various aesthetic phenomena, or discuss aspects relevant to their theoretical contextualization, such as the emergence and establishment of artistic practices and aesthetic value systems.
How does art influence us? In The Subject of Aesthetics, Tone Roald approaches aesthetics as a psychological discipline, showing how works of art challenge our habitual ways of perceiving the world. While aesthetics has traditionally been a philosophical discipline, Roald discusses how it is very much alive in the realm of psychology – a qualitative psychology of lived experience. But what actually constitutes an aesthetics of lived experience? The book answers that question by analyzing people’s own engagement with visual art. What emerges is that the object of aesthetics is indeed the subject.
The fourth volume of the collected papers of the ICLA congress “The Many Languages of Comparative Literature” includes articles that study thematic and formal elements of literary texts. Although the question of prioritizing either the level of content or that of form has often provoked controversies, most contributions here treat them as internally connected. While theoretical considerations inform many of the readings, the main interest of most articles can be described as rhetorical (in the widest sense) – given that the ancient discipline of rhetoric did not only include the study of rhetorical figures and tropes such as metaphor, irony, or satire, but also that of topoi, which wer...
This book offers a personalized account of some of the central theoretical movements in literary studies and in the humanities over the past thirty years, together with an equally personal view of a possible future. It develops the provocative thesis that interpretation alone cannot do justice to the dimension in which cultural phenomena and cultural events become tangible and have an impact on us.
Theodor Adorno’s reputation as a cultural critic has been well-established for some time, but his status as a philosopher remains unclear. In Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy Andrew Bowie seeks to establish what Adorno can contribute to philosophy today. Adorno’s published texts are notably difficult and have tended to hinder his reception by a broad philosophical audience. His main influence as a philosopher when he was alive was, though, often based on his very lucid public lectures. Drawing on these lectures, both published and unpublished, Bowie argues that important recent interpretations of Hegel, and related developments in pragmatism, echo key ideas in Adorno’s thought. At the...
In this book Peter Dews explores some of the most urgent problems confronting contemporary European thought: the status of the subject after postmodernism, the ethical and existential dimensions of critical theory, the encounter between psychoanalysis and philosophy, and the possibilities of a non-foundational metaphysical thinking. His approach cuts across the hostile boundaries which that usually separate different theoretical traditions. Lacan and the Frankfurt School are brought into dialogue, as are deconstruction and Ricoeur's hermeneutics. Current questions of language, communication and critique are located in a broader context, as the author ranges back over the history of modern ph...
Images have caused uproar, violence and even casualties in the meeting of religions and cultures during the last years. Iconoclasm and iconolatry are on the agenda once more. Late Modern Culture is dominated by images and is understood in concepts such as aestheticization and symbolisation. Theological debate is likewise performed through images, symbols and rituals rather than through doctrines and beliefs. In this book, authors from various research backgrounds seek to clarify the terms of reference, and explore the diversity and disagreements in their use from a Christian perspective.