First coined in modernity, the aesthetic is a vague, polysemic and contested concept whose complexities arise from the variety of the ways it has been defined in the history of its theorization, but also in its formative prehistory in theories of art and beauty that preceded its modern coinage. After noting key points of that prehistory, the article traces three major modern tendencies in construing the aesthetic: as a special mode of sensory perception or experience that is relevant to life (...) in general; as a special faculty or exercise of taste focused on judgments of beauty and related qualities such as the sublime; and as a theory of fine art. The idea of aesthetic disinterestedness is critically examined, and contrasts between the concept of art in Western modernity and in pre-modern and Asian culture are also considered. (shrink)

ArgumentEarly modern Europeans routinely compared nature to a theater or spectacle, so it makes sense to examine the practices of observing real spectacles and performances in order to better comprehend acts of witnessing nature. Using examples from the history of fireworks, this essay explores acts of observing natural and artificial spectacles between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries and suggests these acts of observation were mutually constitutive and entailed ongoing and diverse exchanges. The essay follows the changing ways in which (...) audiences were imagined or expected to react to fireworks and shows how these also shaped experiences of natural phenomena. Both natural and artificial spectacles were intended to teach morals about the state and nature, yet audiences rarely seemed to take away what they were expected to learn. The essay examines how performers thus sought to discipline audience observation, before exploring, in conclusion, how spectacle provided a vocabulary for discerning and articulating new natural phenomena, and sites for the pursuit of novel experiments. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe avant-garde's fascination with technology around 1900 grew out of several motivations: to shock the antitechnological bourgeois public; to experience a sense of mastery toward the material world, especially with cars, airplanes, and other machines; and to overcome the nineteenth-century separation of art and technology. The article highlights the radical shifts in the perception of technology that correspond with the emerging hands-on encounter with technological objects in homes, cities and at the workplace at the turn of the century. This (...) technological fundamentalism differed sharply from the anxious and symbolically mediated approach to the “materialism” of the machine in the nineteenth century. It was accompanied by a concept of liberation through technological purity which is reflected by the fact that Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Corbusier did not just design functional objects but also made special efforts to accentuate their functionalism as part of the aesthetic experience of modernity. As French and Italian artists, especially the Futurists, incorporated speed, virility, and the experience of the elementary in the metaphoric construction of technology, they even expressed a kinship with those painters and sculptors who shifted their focus to the rediscovery of the “primitive” magic in the art works from Africa and Polynesia. (shrink)

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment , Kant mentions transcendental and physiological judgments in their relationship to the sublime. He further mentions that for the best physiological treatment, one must look to Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful . Whereas for Burke, the feeling of the sublime “is based on the impulse toward self-preservation and on fear,” for Kant it is the mind that “is not merely attracted by (...) the object, but is also always reciprocally repelled by it,” which provides the basis for the transcendental exposition of aesthetic judgements. How does a reading of Burke in which “we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before the almighty power,” on the one hand, and Kant’s view of relation and purposiveness in transcendental judgements, on the other hand, aid us in a deeper understanding of the fear of God? Furthermore, how might these two authors connect or interact with contemporary theories of emotion, specifically the discussion of ‘ambivalent emotions’? In this paper, I hope to both open a discussion of Burke and Kant in relation to their respective readings of the sublime and the fear of God as well as open a discussion of emotions regarding a ‘mighty object’ to whom my ambivalent emotion is directed. (shrink)

My research into Virtual Reality technology and its central property of immersion has indicated that immersion in Virtual Reality (VR) electronic systems is a significant key to the understanding of contemporary culture as well as considerable aspects of previous culture as detected in the histories of philosophy and the visual arts. The fundamental change in aesthetic perception engendered by immersion, a perception which is connected to the ideal of total-immersion in virtual space, identifies certain shifts in ontology which are relevant (...) to a better understanding of the human being. This understanding was achieved through a broad inquiry into the histories of Virtual Reality, philosophy, and the visual arts and has lead to the formulation of an aesthetic theory of immersive consciousness indicative of immersive culture. The primary subject of this discourse is immersion then: an experience which will be identified within the dissertation as the indispensable characteristic of Virtual Reality. The understanding of immersion arrived at here will be used to fashion a synchronous theory of art particularly informed by encounters and concepts of immersion into virtuality. To sufficiently address this subject in a scholarly fashion, I have researched, found and accumulated aesthetic and philosophic examples of immersive tendencies, as found within the histories of art and philosophy, which subsequently contributed towards the articulation of what I have come to call immersive consciousness. As a result of formulating such an immersive consciousness, a good deal of the basis for the questioning of the Western ontological tradition has been found in the Western tradition itself when we look with new eyes and ask new uncertain questions. Moreover, this immersive consciousness will be used to propose some abstract questions encircling today's electronic-based culture. Through the structuring of the argument within the thesis - and overtly within the conclusion - I have articulated a non-teleological creative strategy which provides the basis for an unconstraining integration of noologies (ways of semblancing the thinking process). This strategy provides a means of exemplifying - and for honoring - various methods of thinking. This structuring strategy is consistent with the 'hacker ethic' as defined by Steven Levy, as a demand that access to computers - and anything which might teach us something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total. To follow this strategy, this dissertation has set out to understand how topical conceptions of virtual immersion connect to pre-existing systems of thought as revealed in art as they have extended out of antecedent ontological self-understandings, historical human self-understandings which have evidenced themselves in the elaboration of technological objectives. To do this I have forged a certain rhizomatic paternity/maternity for Virtual Reality within this dissertation by joining choice immersive examples of simulacra technology into mental connections with the relevant examples culled from the histories of art, architecture, information-technology, sex, myth, space, consciousness and philosophy. (shrink)

Contemporary understandings of nature, or what is ‘natural’, are increasingly subject to debate in our bio-technological age. In this article, I argue that ideas about nature and biology bear a largely unacknowledged relation to normative ideas about sex in western science and philosophy. By examining the concepts of nature and sex in the writings of prominent 18th-century thinkers such as Kant, Rousseau, Burke and Linnaeus, I try to show that in response to the withdrawal, absence or ‘death’ of God that (...) characterizes the Enlightenment worldview, the desire to control sexual expression emerges as a key feature of scientific, aesthetic and philosophical systems of knowledge. Moreover, this desire shapes the concept of nature in such a way that it becomes amenable to the specifically 19th-century figuration of modern biological science. (shrink)

The Aesthetic Field develops an account of aesthetic experience that distinguishes four mutually interacting factors: the creative factor represented primarily by the artist; the appreciative one by the viewer, listener, or reader; the objective factor by the art object, which is the focus of the experience; and the performative by the activator of the aesthetic occurrence. Each of these factors both affects all the others and is in turn influenced by them, so none can be adequately considered apart from them. (...) Thus aesthetic appreciation, for example, has creative, objective, and performative aspects. This situation of four factors, together with social, cultural, technological, and historical influences on them, is called the aesthetic field. Although the factors are theoretically distinguishable, they are experienced as a unity. It is important, therefore, not to confound the theoretical explanation of aesthetic experience with the experience, itself. The aesthetic field has important implications for understanding the various individual arts, new developments in the arts, and the critical appraisal of the arts. Moreover, the concept transforms traditional issues in aesthetics. (shrink)

Summary Humans know when they themselves experience beauty, even though the term itself has been difficult to define adequately for a variety of reasons. Given this centuries’ old failure to give an adequate definition of beauty, perhaps the time has come to enquire whether the experience of beauty, regardless of its source, can be defined in neural terms.

Sir William Chambers was one of the most important English architects in the eighteenth-century, but both in his day and later his international recognition was closely connected with his admiration for and promotion of Chinese art, particularly Chinese landscaping. Between 1757 and 1773, Chambers published three treatises praising the ingenious mixture of nature and art in a Chinese pleasure ground, criticizing the then influential English gardener Lancelot Brown, and trying to goad English garden design into the direction of China. He (...) did not achieve his purposes mainly because he mixed what he knew as genuine about the Chinese gardening art with what he fantasized about it. While recent scholarship has focused on his fantasy, this article examines what Chambers knew or imagined about Chinese landscaping, what he and his detractors were for and against, and how the fiasco of his 1772 and 1773 treatises, which he brought upon himself, nevertheless helped to usher in a new phase in th... (shrink)

This paper reads The Monk by M. G. Lewis in the context of the literary and visual responses to the French Revolution, suggesting that its digestion of the horrors across the Channel is exhibited especially in its depictions of women. Lewis plays with public and domestic representations of femininity, steeped in social expectation and a rich cultural and religious imaginary. The novel’s ambivalence in the representation of femininity draws on the one hand on Catholic symbolism, especially its depictions of the (...) Madonna and the virgin saints, and on the other, on the way the revolutionaries used the body of the queen, Marie Antoinette, to portray the corruption of the royal family. The Monk fictionalizes the ways in which the female body was exposed, both by the Church and by the Revolution, and appropriated to become a highly politicized entity, a tool in ideological argumentation. (shrink)

In this paper the author explores certain fulfilling personal experiences that he describes as the presencing of space, i.e. the way in which an individual’s spatial involvement may put him or her in contact with reality as a whole. These experiences are investigated from a phenomenological perspective, and the differences between them and other similar experiences, such as that of the sublime or topophilia, are highlighted. A neologism is introduced: topoaletheia to name a distinctive type of spatial experience. This concept (...) may enrich the discussion about our involvement with space in our built environments. (shrink)

The natural sciences and religion are two of the primary modern social practices that, for better and worse, shape our relationship to nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson helps us to think about their relation to one another and the virtues needed for the perfection of each. His insights about virtue and the “religious sentiment” shed light on how we moderns might make a home of a world indelibly marked by science, technology, and anthropogenic change. In addition to the quintessentially Emersonian virtue (...) of self‐trust, the virtues of faith, hope, and love are vital for this home‐making endeavor. Emerson, thus, prefigures what prominent environmental ethicists have described as a “turn to virtue in climate ethics,” as well as what some see as a return to religious communities, values, and ideals, as the way forward. By guiding readers through Emerson's early work Nature and his late essay “Worship,” this article provides an account of these three traditionally theological Emersonian virtues of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

In refutation of hedonism, Nozick offered a hypothetical thought experiment, known as the Experience Machine. This paper maintains that end-of-life-suffering of the kind that is resistant to state-of-the-art palliation provides a conceptually equal experiment which validates Nozick’s observations and conclusions. The observation that very many terminal patients who suffer terribly do no wish for euthanasia or terminal sedation is incompatible with motivational hedonism. Although irreversible vegetative state and death are equivalently pain-free, very many people loath the former even at the (...) price of the latter. This attitude cannot be accounted for by hedonism. Following these observations, the goals of palliative care are sketched along four circles. The first is mere removal or mitigation of noxious symptoms and suffering. The second targets sufferings that stymie patients’ life-plans and do not allow them to be happy, the third targets sufferings that interfere with their pursuance of other goods (palliation as a primary good). The fourth is the control of sufferings that do not allow the person to benefit from any human good whatsoever (“total pain” or critical suffering). Only in the fourth circle are people hedonists. (shrink)

Argument of this text is that: to develop aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with aesthetics as philosophy of art but with aesthetics of everyday life; to start with aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with beautiful of ‘pure aesthetics’ but with the dramatic; to analyze the dramatic in sport, we should not open the analysis with analogy between theater and sport, but with sport as a sort of performance; to get at the meaning of sport as a (...) drama, we have to discuss different meanings ‘drama’ has in theory and everyday communication; to map the dramatic in sport as performance, we have to discuss some features of sport which determine its dramatics first, and its potential as spectacle later. To proceed with the argument, we have to take into account contemporary state of aesthetics, recent development of aesthetics of everyday life, and theory of performance, together with Bernard Suits’ definition of game, Gadamer’s idea of play, and Lévy-Strauss’ account on conjunctive and disjunctive ritual. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to build a parallelism between Aristotle’s debate with Plato on the merits of poetry and the debate of Hume with Smith on the nature of sympathy. My arguments is that the Aristotelian concept of pity, as presented in the Poetics, presupposes a mechanism of sympathy which is akin to the Smithian one, as articulated in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Accordingly, I reconstruct Aristotle’s debate with Plato on poetry as a debate on the operation (...) and value of sympathy, and I trace an intriguing contiguity on the way Plato and Hume understood the mechanism of sympathy. (shrink)

The article considers some aspects of the problem of both individual and collective identity in the context of the development of different kinds of warfare in modern western society. The elucidation of these relations requires an unexpected application of aesthetic ideas; in particular the notion of the sublime. It is argued that the experience of combat is one possible ‘real’ form of the sublime. It is further suggested, paradoxically, that sublime combat cannot actually be experienced; it is an ‘inexperience’. The (...) historical significance of modern western war literature, thus, is just that it fills the ‘gap’ left by the destructive inexperience of combat and it allows those who endured it, as well as those who did not, to construct a ‘memory’ of the events themselves. (shrink)

This article suggests an iconic turn in cultural sociology. Icons can be seen, it is argued, as symbolic condensations that root social meanings in material form, allowing the abstractions of cognition and morality to be subsumed, to be made invisible, by aesthetic shape. Meaning is made iconically visible, in other words, by the beautiful, sublime, ugly, or simply by the mundane materiality of everyday life. But it is via the senses that iconic power is made. This new approach to meaning (...) is compared with others — with materialism, semiotics, aestheticism, moralism, realism, and spiritualism. (shrink)

How does Richard Shusterman’s Thinking Through the Body apply to the issues of everyday aesthetics? As it turns out, many chapters contribute significantly to everyday aesthetics, in particular the work on architecture, self-styling, the body as background, lovemaking, and the process of making a photographic portrait. Shusterman’s concentration on the art of living has special importance to everyday aesthetics. Current debates within the field of everyday aesthetics also raise problems for somaesthetics. I also question the limits of somaesthetics and Shusterman’s (...) rejection of defamiliarization in making the ordinary extraordinary. (shrink)

ABSTRACT ABSTRACT: In metaphysics, the adjective ‘Humean’ is used to describe positions that deny the existence of any necessary connection or causal influence in concrete reality. This usage has been significantly reinforced by David Lewis’s employment of ‘Humean’ in the phrase ‘Humean supervenience’. It is, however, not at all clear that this usage is appropriate. Lewis himself raised a doubt about it.

ABSTRACTThis article attempts to construct a distinct formulation of the sublime via an inspection of some of Jacques Derrida's principal works. Through a reading of his assessment of Kantian sublimity and a development of the dialectical from deconstruction, two patterns of the sublime can be formulated. These two constructed patterns of the sublime, which I shall name “sublime of différance” and “aporetic sublime,” are predicated on the notions of infinity and dialecticism. The aporetic sublime includes in its constitutive structure the (...) element of an orientation to an irreducible other. It is argued in the article that these constructions are open to an incorporation of the sublime as located beyond subjectivity and discourse. (shrink)

En este trabajo se analiza el intento de Hume de compatibilizar el reconocimiento de la diversidad en los juicios estéticos con la existencia de principios del gusto universales. La exégesis de su propuesta de una norma del gusto se desarrollará analizando su relación con las aportaciones anteriores de Locke, Shaftesbury, Addison y Hutcheson, fundamentalmente. Asimismo, se valorará su impacto en la estética posterior, sobre todo en la Crítica del juicio de Kant.

Christians have traditionally conceived of the moral life as an imitation of Christ, whereby followers enter into fellowship with God. The American Transcendentalists can be understood as extending rather than dispensing with this legacy. For Emerson, a person cultivates virtues by imitating those she loves and admires. Ultimately, however, the virtues enable her to innovate on received models, to excel by pressing beyond exemplars. Emerson's famous line, “imitation is suicide,” is not a contradiction but a fulfillment of the imitation of (...) Christ, understood in his terms. In his own time, John Brown was the public figure who, for Emerson, most nearly exemplified this innovative imitation of Christ. An examination of exemplarity, of this artful union of imitation and innovation in moral and spiritual formation, sheds light on how modern agents can cultivate the virtues needed to be at home in the modern world. (shrink)

The moral potential of works of art, for good or ill, has been recognised from philosophical antiquity: on the assumption that the moral effects of art are invariably negative, Plato advised the exclusion of artists from any rationally ordered state. Arguably, however, the problem of the moral status of art has become yet more acute in contexts of post-Romantic and other modern artistic exploration of moral ambiguity, and even of some apparent contemporary celebration of the immoral and amoral. Indeed, some (...) tension between commitment to liberal-democratic openness and freedom, on the one hand, and fear about the potential literary and artistic corruption of the young, on the other, is evident in latter-day moralistic trends in children’s literature. However, in the light of some basic exploration of conceptual relationships between the artistic, the aesthetic and the moral, this paper argues that such moralising trends in particular and arguments for artistic censorship in general are mostly wrongheaded and unsustainable. (shrink)

This paper compares the outwardly similar structural formalisms of Marc- Antoine Laugier and Arthur Schopenhauer. Laugier purports to base his aesthetics on an historical argument from the “primitive hut”; but his preferences are really based on aversion to structurally and programmatically non-functional elements. His preferences show disregard for purely aesthetic considerations, such as pleasing proportions. Schopenhauer’s formalism is based on his cognitivist approach to aesthetics, according to which architecture is above all supposed to demonstrate relations between load and support, but (...) in spite of this shows greater sensitivity to sensory beauty. (shrink)

The recent introduction of the concepts of tenderness, vulnerability, and parental care in the field of moral emotions has brought us closer to an understanding of the underlying mechanisms, but has not yet resulted in a systematic evolutionary and proximate analysis. Applying such an analysis, the present article proposes a hypothetical care mechanism that produces different motivational states or moral emotions in response to individuals perceived as vulnerable. The mechanism consists of a care system automatically triggered by vulnerability cues, a (...) system for defense and aggression, and a process of causally attributing changes in the vulnerable object’s well-being. The mechanism may also be useful in explaining moral responses in domains other than harm prevention. (shrink)

Books Christy Mag Uidhir, Art andObjects [Elisa Caldarola, p. 182] • Julie Jaffee Nagel, Melodies of the Mind. Connections Between Psychoanalisis and Music [Michele Gardini, p. 185] • Dominic McIver Lopes, Beyond Art [Filippo Focosi, p. 187] • Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Herta Nagl-Docekal, Erzsébet Ròsza, Elisabeth Weisser-Lohmann, Hegels Ästhetik als Theorie der Moderne [Lorenzo Leonardo Pizzichemi, p. 190] Comments Toward an Integrated Science of Aesthetics. Getting Rid of the Main Misunderstandings in Evolutionary Aesthetics [Mariagrazia Portera, p. 194].