This article examines the philosophical issues that arise when preserving urban geological sites or urban geosites. These are preserved not only because of their geological value but also because of aesthetic, cultural, and economic reasons. To do so, it examines the geosite constituted by Olot and its surroundings, a city in Spain that extends amid four dormant volcanoes. It explores the metaphysical paradox that these geosites have become what they are due to the preservation of destruction: human-caused interventions, mostly extraction (...) of materials and exploitation of the land, are precisely what made these geosites visible as sites worth preserving and determining their metaphysical status. It further explores the preservation criteria and shows how they have determined the status of the geosite. Second, it shows how in such urban geosites the collapse of two diametrically opposed conceptions of time – the geological eon and the lived human time – occurs. Lastly, it discusses aesthetic aspects of such geosites by considering aesthetic experience as a primarily cognitive endeavor and shows how metaphysical, epistemological, and aesthetic issues of preservation of geosites are inextricably linked. (shrink)

Even though the American thinker John Dewey and the Italian Luigi Pareyson belong to two different philosophical traditions, on the aesthetic ground they show many resonances and similarities. Using Pareyson’s words, “just as it happens between people, who in particularly happy encounters […] reveal themselves to each other,” it is therefore possible to have Dewey’s aesthetics and Pareyson’s dialogue with each other, highlighting their affinities. This operation can strengthen the idea that the aesthetic experience is a way to fulfil human (...) existence. Thus, the hermeneutic character of Pareyson’s aesthetics in combination with Deweyan pragmatist aesthetic theory not only have great importance for the artistic experience, but also considerable value for human beings’ everyday lives. -/- Starting from some Deweyan resonances in Pareyson’s aesthetics, the discourse focuses on his aesthetics in its educational and hermeneutic significance within the dialogue between the two philosophers, coming, finally, to Dewey’s and Pareyson’s aesthetics in connection with so-called “everyday aesthetics.” Although a Deweyan influence on Pareyson is ascertained, and the similarities between them are not superficial at all, it is worth bearing in mind the different backgrounds of the two philosophers in order to accurately situate their reflections. (shrink)

Poetry is the most complex and intricate of human language used across all languages and cultures. Its relation to the worlds of human experience has perplexed writers and readers for centuries, as has the question of evaluation and judgment: what makes a poem "work" and endure. The Poem as Icon focuses on the art of poetry to explore its nature and function: not interpretation but experience; not what poetry means but what it does. Using both historic and contemporary approaches of (...) embodied cognition from various disciplines, Margaret Freeman argues that a poem's success lies in its ability to become an icon of the felt "being" of reality. Freeman explains how the features of semblance, metaphor, schema, and affect work to make a poem an icon, with detailed examples from various poets. By analyzing the ways poetry provides insights into the workings of human cognition, Freeman claims that taste, beauty, and pleasure in the arts are simply products of the aesthetic faculty, and not the aesthetic faculty itself. The aesthetic faculty, she argues, should be understood as the science of human perception, and therefore constitutive of the cognitive processes of attention, imagination, memory, discrimination, expertise, and judgment. (shrink)

During the past few decades, everyday aesthetics has established itself as a new branch of philosophical aesthetics alongside the more traditional philosophy of art. The Paths from Philosophy of Art to Everyday Aesthetics explores the intimate relations between these two branches of contemporary aesthetics. The essays collected in this volume discuss a wide range of topics from aesthetic intimacy to the nature of modernity and the essence of everydayness, which play important roles both in the philosophy of art and everyday (...) aesthetics. With these essays, the writers and editors of this volume wish to commemorate professor Arto Haapala on his 60th birthday. -/- This collection of articles is intended for scholars and students working in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, and art studies. (shrink)

Many artists, art critics, and poets suggest that an aesthetic appreciation of artworks may modify our perception of the world, including quotidian things and scenes. I call this Art-to-World, AtW. Focusing on visual artworks, in this paper I articulate an empirically-informed account of AtW that is based on content related views of aesthetic experience, and on Goodman’s and Elgin’s concept of exemplification. An aesthetic encounter with artworks demands paying attention to its aesthetic, expressive, or design properties that realize its purpose. (...) Attention to these properties make percipients better able to spot them in other entities and scenes as well. The upshot is that an aesthetic commerce with artworks enlarges the scope of what we are able to see and has therefore momentous epistemic consequences. (shrink)

Many artists, art critics, and poets suggest that an aesthetic appreciation of artworks may modify our perception of the world, including quotidian things and scenes. I call this Art-to-World, AtW. Focusing on visual artworks, in this paper I articulate an empirically-informed account of AtW that is based on content-related views of aesthetic experience, and on Goodman’s and Elgin’s concept of exemplification. An aesthetic encounter with artworks demands paying attention to its aesthetic, expressive, or design properties that realize its purpose. Attention (...) to these properties make percipients better able to spot them in other entities and scenes as well. The upshot is that an aesthetic commerce with artworks enlarges the scope of what we are able to see and has therefore momentous epistemic consequences. (shrink)

This essay begins with some observations on the main features and availability of the aesthetic experience of the night sky to us. In the second part, the aesthetics of the starry sky is interpreted in terms of time experience, complementing the usual approach in terms of immense space. These remarks on this broad and abundant subject can partly be linked to the intellectual historical interpretation of the birth of modern aesthetics, and partly to the vital discourse of environmental aesthetics, which (...) proves that these two approaches can work together and bring to the fore the aesthetic relevance and fruitfulness of this subject. (shrink)

Culture can be defined as “group typical behaviour patterns shared by members of a community that rely on socially learned and transmitted information”. Once thought to be a distinguishing characteristic of humans relative to other animals it is now generally accepted to exist more widely, with especially abundant evidence in non-human primates, cetaceans, and birds. More recently, cumulative cultural evolution has taken on this distinguishing role. CCE, it is argued, allows humans, uniquely, to ratchet up the complexity or efficiency of (...) cultural traits over time. This “ratchet effect” gives the capacity to accumulate beneficial modifications over time beyond the capacities of a single individual. Mesoudi and Thornton define a core set of criteria for identifying CCE in humans and non-human animals that places emphasis on some performance measure of traits increasing over time. They suggest this emphasis is also pertinent to cultural products in the aesthetic domain, but is this the case? Music, art and dance evolve over time, but can we say they gain beneficial modifications that increase their aesthetic value? Here we bring together perspectives from philosophy, musicology and biology to build a conceptual analysis of this question. We summarise current thinking on cumulative culture and aesthetics across fields to determine how aesthetic culture fits into the concept of CCE. We argue that this concept is problematic to reconcile with dominant views of aesthetics in philosophical analysis and struggles to characterise aesthetic cultures that evolve over time. We suggest that a tension arises from fundamental differences between cultural evolution in aesthetic and technological domains. Furthermore, this tension contributes to current debates between reconstructive and preservative theories of cultural evolution. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relations between art and everyday life in the city from the vantage points of urban aesthetics and sociology, where the “city” refers as well to a normative world. The aim is to show how art/artistic life contributed to the normative change and new urban lifestyles. First, I focus on Baudelaire’s theory of beauty and life in modern metropolis or the city as “poetic object” and dandyism as an art of the self, seen as a crucial normative (...) change: the emergence of new norms of excellence and art of living, such as creativity and self-fashioning. Second, I discuss a recent yet related normative change, described by Boltanski and Chiapello as a passage to the “project-oriented city”, seen as a new way of working and living that fuses cultures of creativity and uncertainty. Third, I tackle the “creative city” hailed by Florida, where the creative lifestyle of “creative people” is the new mainstream setting the norms for society: individuality, diversity and openness, but also impermanent relationships and loose ties. I will argue that extending the hyper-mobile and flexible creative lifestyle from the extraordinary figure of the artist to ordinary people, as everyday urban life, triggers both benefits and risks. (shrink)

What is the role of aesthetics, everyday aesthetics in particular, in processes of solving social problems? Many if not most social problems arise from and affect our daily lives. As far as these problems contain aesthetic aspects, these typically are also of an everyday kind. In this paper, I address the relations between social problems and everyday aesthetics in five sections. I will start by briefly describing what I mean by social problems. Second, I will outline what solving such problems (...) means. Then, I will move on to defining aesthetics for the purposes of this article. Fourth, I will focus on the main question, the potential role of everyday aesthetics in solving social problems. Lastly, I will drill down a bit deeper into my own experiences in this matter in order to concretize the general points and give examples stemming from my working life. (shrink)

Through the concept of enjoyment in Levinas, this paper examines the phenomenological and ontological dimension of everyday aesthetics. Enjoyment, in Levinas, forms an essential element in the constitution of the subjectivity of the human being and is no longer to be seen as a moment of ‘inauthenticity’ or ‘alienation’. The experience of the objects of everyday experience is not related to that of objects of representation or of tools, but rather to that of a system of nourishment into which the (...) subject is integrated, as in an ‘element’ or ‘atmosphere’. This constitutive closeness of enjoyment indicates the fundamental difference between what we understand as everyday aesthetics and other aesthetics characterised by contemplation or disinterest. (shrink)

This article’s assumption is that ordinary aesthetics does not necessarily imply a distancing from art and artists; rather, it can benefit from the input of creators when they use everyday scenes or objects as their theme. This approach focuses on the practice of twentieth-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, who depicted compositions of common objects such as bottles, jars, and vases. Through Morandi’s meditative and artistic search, these objects are given value and aesthetic elevation in his paintings. Thomas Leddy’s aesthetics of (...) everyday life will also be called upon in my analysis, insofar as the author recognizes a continuity between the ordinary and the extraordinary, through auratic experiences. If Morandi discovers the extraordinary in the trivial, this is achieved through a gradual process of selection regarding the objects he favoured, which allows for the interaction of various levels of aesthetic intensity. Morandi’s objects and models and their preparation suggest a circulation between aesthetic degrees that, in turn, suggests a timeless “language of things” fixed through the discourse of the paintings. Along these lines, it will be necessary to address the enchantment related to common things, a mesmerizing presence of which we became more aware through Morandi compositions. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to deepen the concept of emerging urban mobility technology. Drawing on philosophical everyday and urban aesthetics, as well as the postphenomenological strand in the philosophy of technology, we explicate the relation between everyday aesthetic experience and urban mobility commoning. Thus, we shed light on the central role of aesthetics for providing depth to the important experiential and value-driven meaning of contemporary urban mobility. We use the example of self-driving vehicle (SDV), as potentially mundane, public, (...) dynamic, and social urban robots, for expanding the range of perspectives relevant for our relations to urban mobility technology. We present the range of existing SDV conceptualizations and contrast them with experiential and aesthetic understanding of urban mobility. In conclusion, we reflect on the potential undesired consequences from the depolitization of technological development, and potential new pathways for speculative thinking concerning urban mobility futures in responsible innovation processes. (shrink)

My aim is to argue that Jean Luc Nancy’s conception of Being can be particularly valuable for underlining Everyday Aesthetics’ specificity and thus for revealing its philosophical worth, one that I believe is overshadowed when treating Everyday Aesthetics solely as an extension of traditional aesthetics. Nancy’s ontology is nevertheless rooted in the Heideggerian perspective of Being, and is thus seemingly opposite to an Anglo-American approach, which is the sort of ground that Everyday Aesthetics seems to rely on. This paper will (...) be divided into three parts: first, I discuss what separates Everyday Aesthetics from the European approach – Heidegger included – and why this rupture is legitimate. Secondly, I present what I consider to be the strongest philosophical points that Everyday Aesthetics puts forward. Finally, I show why Nancy’s work, in its specific way of challenging Western thought, can make a considerable contribution to Everyday Aesthetics. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to introduce everyday aesthetics in education. First, it presents everyday aesthetics as a subdiscipline within philosophical aesthetics, that revisits sensory perception as the backdrop of all experience, claims ordinary life is a proper venue for aesthetic inquiry, and problematizes the impact aesthetic preferences have on habitual decisions. Second, the paper argues that among the diverse matters students learn in school, they learn—explicitly or implicitly—what and how to perceive, as well as the pedagogical purposes of (...) daily perception. School models the relationships that students will develop between what they perceive, what they think about it, and how they act accordingly. Next, the paper elaborates on the notions of “school aesthetic matrixes” and “space and place in school”. School aesthetic matrixes refer to perceptual patterns that allow characterizing relationships between daily perception and the pedagogical project of a school. They manifest through expressions such as prison school, home school, mall school, etc. Space and place in school allude to concomitant experiences, of corporeal basis, that allow describing how we inhabit the world. What distinguishes them is the approach each one gives to the senses and the body. The paper concludes by calling attention to the comprehension and role of perception in education, urging to mind the aesthetic-pedagogical character that students develop throughout 12 years of schooling. Ultimately, the key relationships we develop with ourselves, others, and the world, entail a basic perceptual dimension that can be educated to become more purposefully and integrally present in life. (shrink)

This article discusses multisensorial aesthetic experience of environmental materiality via a craft process. The locally situated study investigates the interrelations of humans and environment through soil. In focus is how craft practitioners use their material sensitivity to reflect the idea of interdependency in the context of the contemporary environmental discourse. This is done through presenting an artistic research project in which craft is used to explore the human imprint in a particular geological environment, the Venice Lagoon. The case study Traces (...) from the Anthropocene: Working with Soil combines environmental research methods of contaminated soil and artistic research in the field of ceramic art. Craft making provides an embodied way to engage with the local environment. The cultural value and environmental disruption of the lagoon area forms a context for reflecting the aesthetic experience to better understand how we are active participants, in continuous flux with our material environment. (shrink)

Our aesthetic practices, by which we aim for better well-being, are intertwined with fostering sustainability. This article focuses on Yuriko Saito’s aesthetics of sustainability, an idea denoting a new kind of aesthetic sensibility informed by and featuring both environmental and cultural sustainability. Saito’s idea is based on our aesthetic relationship with everyday experiences. In this article, I defend the idea, on the one hand, by considering the immanence of change as a sense of contemporary everydayness and, on the other hand, (...) by regarding mindfulness as a practice. Situating the discussion in the European context emphasises the aesthetics of sustainability as a sustainability transformation, that is, an ongoing societal change powered by the continuous cultivation of aesthetic sensibility. (shrink)

This study looks at the emerging branch of everyday aesthetics from the perspective of the fracture which exists in its core, as a result of the double reading of the everyday: the first, which elevates it to the realm of the extraordinary and the second, in which it remains strictly ordinary. Our purpose here is to repair this fracture by turning to David Hume’s functionalist aesthetics, where disinterest and utility are reconciled through sympathy and the affective experience of otherness that (...) it provides. Once transferred to the everyday sphere, sympathy facilitates understanding between these two versions, since the aesthetic appreciation of everyday objects or common activities requires, like the second version, that they remain in the practical environment and, like the first, to see something special in them, which is the possibility of one’s own or another’s well-being. (shrink)

Este trabajo pretende abordar los juicios estético-morales establecidos por Yuriko Saito en el ámbito reciente de la estética de lo cotidiano, a la luz de la belleza funcionalista del pensador ilustrado David Hume. Para ello, se desentraña el mecanismo afectivo sobre el que descansa la experiencia estética tanto en el caso del objeto intrascendente de todos los días sobre el que teoriza Saito, como en el caso del objeto utilitario sobre el que discurre Hume y que demuestra que el juicio (...) de gusto es uno solo, en ambos pensadores, con el juicio moral. Se concluye así que la simpatía por obra de la cual existe la belleza en el joven Hume, al acabar virando hacia una empatía prematura en el Hume maduro, refuerza el entronque con Saito, con su preocupación por el otro y su deseo de alcanzar un mundo mejor. (shrink)

In this paper, I combine sources from environmental psychology with insights from the everyday aesthetics literature to explore the concept of ‘everyday heritage’, formerly introduced by Saruhan Mosler. Highlighting the potential of heritage in its everyday context shows that symbolic, aesthetic, and broadly conceived affective factors may be as important as architectural, historical, and artistic issues when it comes to conceiving of heritage value. Indeed, there seems to be more to a heritage site than its official inscription on the UNESCO (...) register. A place is included as part of our heritage primarily because it matters to us. People live in, form relationships with, and derive existential and affective meanings from it. Above and beyond its official significance, a heritage site is thus a living dimension that plays a vital role in the everyday life and social practices of people, who transform it into a place of human significance. (shrink)

This article discusses Everyday Aesthetics seen from philosophical hermeneutics where aesthetics is understood as a form of knowledge. Two approaches are made, one concerning content, i.e. the knowledge made apparent to us in the aesthetic situation which is usually, but not exclusively, an exception to the everyday; another concerning the appearance of knowledge in form which, likewise, is also in danger of becoming isolated from the everyday. Everyday Aesthetics is reviewed through the same two approaches to understand how it differs (...) from hermeneutics and where possible exchanges between them appear. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose some philosophical reflections arising from the encounter with a work of art, namely the Squatting Aphrodite, which is one of the Roman copies that is held in the same room as the Venus de Milo in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. From the description of this artwork and the effect it has on the spectator, I draw three main consequences: the conceptual difference between ordinary sensibility and everyday aesthetics; the criticism of aesthetic conformity, and (...) the political implications of adopting an ordinary perspective towards aesthetic experience. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyse the notion of familiarity in Dewey’s pragmatism in order to show its important role as a tool for human beings to interpret the reality, manage it, and act within it. Starting from an examination of Deweyan transactional realism, the discourse focuses on familiarity and its related terms (such as “familiar,” “to familiarize,” but also opposites such as “unknown” or “strange”) in Dewey’s thought, to finally come to highlight its fundamental hermeneutic role. This might be useful (...) to account for a subject of Deweyan thought not so deeply highlighted by scholarship and, at the same time, to show pragmatism’s closeness to hermeneutics regarding the relation between the human being and the real. (shrink)

Everyday Aesthetics was born in the 21 st Century as a sub-discipline of Anglo-American Aesthetics and it has spread in the international debate. However, the contribute of historical perspective has not properly explored yet. Is it possible to trace the history of everyday aesthetics before the official birth of this discipline? I will try and give an affirmative answer by focusing on an exemplary category: that of the decorum. Using the history of ideas, I will analyse the Greek concept of (...) prepon and the similar Latin concepts of decorum which express the idea of ‘convenience’ or ‘fitness to purpose’ in the ethical and rhetorical sphere. Later I will analyse the evolution of the concept of decorum in the theory of Ancient and Renaissance architecture. My goal is to demonstrate that in Ancient and Renaissance culture decorum is a category that refers to the objects and practices of everyday life but also a principle that regulates appropriate behaviour in the sphere of good manners. Consequently, given its pervasiveness in the different areas of everyday life, the concept of decorum can be a paradigmatic example to trace the history of everyday aesthetics. (shrink)

Overview essay of the field of feminist aesthetics updated Winter, 2021.

The aim of what I propose to call “existential aesthetics” is to investigate the various ways in which art and certain kinds of aesthetic practice or aesthetic experience can be of existential importance to people. Section I provides a definition of existential aesthetics, while Section II delineates this emerging field from cognate areas of research. Sections III and IV explore various subcategories and examples of existential aesthetics. Section V seeks to identify important avenues for future research and Section VI presents (...) some concluding thoughts about the potential of existential aesthetics and why philosophers should be encouraged to fulfill this potential. (shrink)

I argue that silence is replete with aesthetic character and that it can be a rewarding object of aesthetic appreciation, assessment, and appraisal. The appreciation of silence might initially seem impossible, for, it might seem, there is nothing there to behold. Taking up this challenge, I attempt to dispel the sense of paradox. I contend that, despite our never actually experiencing absolute silence, there is much to enjoy in the silences that we do experience. I go on to argue that (...) proper appreciation of silence is a two-way street, involving quiet on the outside and stillness on the inside. I conclude by offering some suggestions for how to make the aesthetic appreciation of silence part of a flourishing life. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the origins of banality and the reasons why some phenomena appear banal to us. I discuss the issue by analysing three interrelated areas of aesthetic investigation: artworks, everyday objects, and banal things. By identifying the source of banality, my goal is to understand what makes banal things different from other kinds of things. I consider the following questions: 1) when, why, and how does an object become banal?; 2) what happens when something becomes banal?; 3) (...) are banal things aesthetically appealing? Drawing on Wolfgang Welsch’s notion of anesthetization and Walter Benjamin’s account of aura, I argue that banality consists in the absence of both an ontological and an axiological character in objects, which makes them appear trivial or insignificant to us. I conclude by showing that although art, everydayness, and banality represent different aesthetic dimensions, objects constantly move from one of these dimensions to the other. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethical dimensions of aesthetic engagement, the central theme of Arnold Berleant’s aesthetics. His recent works on social aesthetics and negative aesthetics explicitly argue for the inseparability of aesthetics from the rest of life, in particular ethical concerns. Aesthetic engagement requires overcoming the subject-object divide and adopting an attitude of open-mindedness, responsiveness, reciprocity, and collaboration, as well as the willingness and readiness to expose negative aesthetics for what it is. These requirements characterize not only the nature of (...) aesthetic experience but also, perhaps more fundamentally, our mode of being in the world and the accompanying ethical responsibility. Among the present paper’s principal aims is to show how this view of aesthetic and ethical stance is also shared by the important aspects of the Japanese worldview, aesthetics, and artistic practices. (shrink)

New and complex technologies are exceedingly present and in widespread use in contemporary cities globally. The urban lifeworld is saturated with various applications of information and computing technologies, but also more rudimentary forms of technology construct and create the urban everyday life as we know it. Many forms of urban technologies are perceived first through their everyday aesthetic qualities: how they look, feel, sound, or are otherwise encountered within the streetscape. Philosophical aesthetics, however, has tended to overlook everyday technologies as (...) a topic, often due to unquestioned ideas of how a city should ideally look and feel. Thus, a more realistic approach to contemporary cities is needed, in which the deep-seated role of technologies is recognized and the experiences related to their entangled uses become acknowledged. This paper brings together recent developments in urban aesthetics with some of the core ideas of postphenomenological approaches to new urban technologies. (shrink)