Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.

Ame Naess, John Rodman, George Sessions, and others, designated herein as ecosophers, propose an egalitarian anti-anthropocentric biocentrism as a basis for a new environmental ethic. I outline their “hands-off-nature” position and show it to be based on setting man apart. The ecosophic position is thus neither egalitarian nor fully biocentric. A fully egalitarian biocentric ethic would place no more restrictions on the behavior of human beings than on the behavior of any other animals. Uncontrolled human behavior might lead to the (...) destruction ofthe environment and thus to the extinction of human beings. I thus conclude that human interest in survival is the best ground on which to argue for an ecological balance which is good both for human beings and for the whole biological community. (shrink)

This new translation is an extremely welcome addition to the continuing Cambridge Edition of Kant’s works. English-speaking readers of the third Critique have long been hampered by the lack of an adequate translation of this important and difficult work. James Creed Meredith’s much-reprinted translation has charm and elegance, but it is often too loose to be useful for scholarly purposes. Moreover it does not include the first version of Kant’s introduction, the so-called “First Introduction,” which is now recognized as indispensable (...) for an understanding of the work. Werner Pluhar’s more recent translation, which does include the First Introduction, is highly accurate when it confines itself to rendering Kant’s German. However, it is often more of a reconstruction than a translation, containing so many interpretative interpolations that it is often difficult to separate out Kant’s original text from the translator’s contributions. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews have provided a translation that compares to or exceeds Pluhar’s in its literal approach to the German, but that confines all interpretative material to footnotes and endnotes, so that the text itself, with all its unclarities and ambiguities, lies open to view. In addition, Guyer, as editor of the volume, has provided a great deal of valuable supplementary material. This includes an introduction with an outline of the work and details of the history of its composition and publication, and a wealth of endnotes offering clarifications of the text, background information, and, most strikingly, many references to related passages in Kant’s voluminous writings, particularly in connection with Kant’s earlier writings related to aesthetics. The edition also records differences among the first three editions of the work, and—of particular interest—erasures from and additions to Kant’s manuscript of the First Introduction. Although the introduction and endnotes reflect interpretative views that are sometimes disputable, this supplementary material makes the present edition into a valuable resource even for those able to read the text in German. (shrink)

I reply to Andrea Baldini's critical discussion of my "Street Art: The Transfiguration of the Commonplaces" (2010) by taking up the question: what is "the street" in street art? I argue that the relevant notion of the street is a space whose function it is to facilitate self-expression. I show how this clarifies and extends the theory developed in Riggle (2010). I then argue, contra Baldini, that street art is not always subversive, and when it is, it is not always (...) in virtue of its challenging the co-opting of public space by commercial art. (shrink)

This treatise on aesthetics begins by showing that the word "art" is used as a name not only for "art proper" but also for certain things which are "art falsely so called." These are craft or skill, magic, and amusement, each of which, by confusion with art proper, generates a false aesthetic theory. In the course of attacking these theories the author criticizes various psychological theories of art, offers a new theory of magic, and reinterprets Plato's so-called "attack on art," (...) showing that it has been entirely misunderstood. Finally, he draws important inferences concerning the position of art in human society. (shrink)

In The Abuse of Beauty, art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto explains how the notion of beauty as anathema to art arose and flourished and offers a new way of looking at art and beauty. He draws on the thought of artists, critics, and philosophers such as Rimbaud, Fry, Matisse, and Greenberg, to reposition beauty as one of many modes -- along with sexuality, sublimity, disgust, and horror -- through which the human sensibility expresses itself. 20 black-and-white illustrations are included.

"Developed from the author's Philosophy is a new key." Bibliography: p. 417-428.

Rather than focusing on German philosophy or the French avant-gardes, as many books on the history of aesthetics do, Teukolsky takes up British responses to modern art controversies, thus providing a unique view on the development of artistic forms and art history. She considers the plentiful archive of Victorian "art writing"-essays addressed to the visual arts- to reveal the key role played by nineteenth-century writers in the rise of modernist Anglo-American aesthetics. Though Victorians are most often associated with realism, certain (...) art writers promoted a formalism that would come to dominate canons of twentieth-century art. Teukolsky analyzes the canonical writing of authors like John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde alongside texts belonging to the rich field of Victorian print culture--gallery reviews, scientific treatises, satirical cartoons, advertisements, and early photography monographs among them. Spanning the years 1840 to 1910, her argument also adds substance to our understanding of the transition from Victorianism to modernism, a period of especially lively exchange between artists and intellectuals, here narrated with careful attention given to the historical particularities and real events that stamped their imprint on such interactions. (shrink)

Ecologically responsible policies are concerned only in part with pollution and resource depletion. There are deeper concerns which touch upon principles of diversity, complexity, autonomy, decentralization, symbiosis, egalitarianism, and classlessness.

The book also includes a chronological table of significant events, select bibliography, succinct explanatory notes, and an index--all of which supply ...

Mitchell S. Green presents a systematic philosophical study of self-expression - a pervasive phenomenon of the everyday life of humans and other species, which has received scant attention in its own right. He explores the ways in which self-expression reveals our states of thought, feeling, and experience, and he defends striking new theses concerning a wide range of fascinating topics: our ability to perceive emotion in others, artistic expression, empathy, expressive language, meaning, facial expression, and speech acts. He draws on (...) insights from evolutionary game theory, ethology, the philosophy of language, social psychology, pragmatics, aesthetics, and neuroscience to present a stimulating and accessible interdisciplinary work. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most influential thinkers of the past 150 years and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is his most important work on ethics and politics. A polemical contribution to moral and political theory, it offers a critique of moral values and traces the historical evolution of concepts such as guilt, conscience, responsibility, law and justice. This is a revised and updated edition of one of the most successful volumes to appear in Cambridge Texts in the (...) History of Political Thought. Keith Ansell-Pearson has modified his introduction to Nietzsche's classic text, and Carol Diethe has incorporated a number of changes to the translation itself, reflecting the considerable advances in our understanding of Nietzsche in the twelve years since this edition first appeared. In this new guise the Cambridge Texts edition of Nietzsche's Genealogy should continue to enjoy widespread adoption, at both undergraduate and graduate level. (shrink)

The Critique of the Power of Judgment (a more accurate rendition of what has hitherto been translated as the Critique of Judgment) is the third of Kant's great critiques following the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. This entirely new translation of Kant's masterpiece follows the principles and high standards of all other volumes in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. This volume includes: for the first time the indispensable first draft of Kant's (...) introduction to the work; the only English edition notes to the many differences between the first (1790) and second (1793) editions of the work; and relevant passages in Kant's anthropology lectures where he elaborated on his aesthetic views. All in all this new edition offers the serious student of Kant a dramatically richer, more complete and more accurate translation. (shrink)

Matravers examines how emotions form the bridge between our experience of art and of life. We often find that a particular poem, painting, or piece of music carries an emotional charge; and we may experience emotions toward, or on behalf of, a particular fictional character. Matravers shows that what these experiences have in common, and what links them to the expression of emotion in non-artistic cases, is the role played by feeling. He carries out a critical survey of various accounts (...) of the nature of fiction, attacks contemporary cognitivist accounts of expression, and offers an uncompromising defense of a controversial view about musical expression: that music works by expressing the emotions it causes its listeners to feel. (shrink)

What Is Aesthetic Pleasure? When is pleasure in an object properly denominated aesthetic? The characterization of aesthetic pleasure is something that ...

Schiller's 1795 essay on the educative function of art is one of the most important contributions to the history of ideas in modern times. This English-German parallel text edition includes a long analytical introduction and extensive notes.

Incorporating the complete, corrected text of The Corded Shell, Kivy brings his earlier arguments up to date in light of recent work in the field, and discusses ...

Ame Naess, John Rodman, George Sessions, and others, designated herein as ecosophers, propose an egalitarian anti-anthropocentric biocentrism as a basis for a new environmental ethic. I outline their “hands-off-nature” position and show it to be based on setting man apart. The ecosophic position is thus neither egalitarian nor fully biocentric. A fully egalitarian biocentric ethic would place no more restrictions on the behavior of human beings than on the behavior of any other animals. Uncontrolled human behavior might lead to the (...) destruction ofthe environment and thus to the extinction of human beings. I thus conclude that human interest in survival is the best ground on which to argue for an ecological balance which is good both for human beings and for the whole biological community. (shrink)

There is an international deep ecology social movement with key terms, slogans, and rhetorical use of language comparable to what we find in other activist “alternative” movements today. Some supporters of the movement partake in academic philosophy and have developed or at least suggested philosophies, “ecosophies,” inspired by the movement. R. A. Watson does not distinguish sufficiently between the movement and the philosophical expressions with academic pretensions. As a result, he falsely concludes that deep ecology implies setting man apart from (...) nature-a kind of “anthropocentrism” in his terminology: humans and only humans have no right to interfere with natural processes. What the deep ecology movement insists on is rather that life on Earth has intrinsic value and that human behavior should and must change drastically-and soon. (shrink)

This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy.

Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way: We can think about the world in terms that transcend our own experience or interest, and consider the world from a vantage point that is, in Nagel's words, "nowhere in particular". At the same time, each of us is a particular person in a particular place, each with his own "personal" view of the world, a view that we can recognize as just one aspect of the (...) whole. How do we reconcile these two standpoints--intellectually, morally, and practically? To what extent are they irreconcilable and to what extent can they be integrated? Thomas Nagel's ambitious and lively book tackles this fundamental issue, arguing that our divided nature is the root of a whole range of philosophical problems, touching, as it does, every aspect of human life. He deals with its manifestations in such fields of philosophy as: the mind-body problem, personal identity, knowledge and skepticism, thought and reality, free will, ethics, the relation between moral and other values, the meaning of life, and death. Excessive objectification has been a malady of recent analytic philosophy, claims Nagel, it has led to implausible forms of reductionism in the philosophy of mind and elsewhere. The solution is not to inhibit the objectifying impulse, but to insist that it learn to live alongside the internal perspectives that cannot be either discarded or objectified. Reconciliation between the two standpoints, in the end, is not always possible. (shrink)

'To be taught to write or to speak - but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think - nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.' Ruskin was the most powerful and influential critic of the nineteenth century. He wrote about nature, art, architecture, politics, (...) history, myth, and much besides; all his work is characterized by a clarity of vision as unsettling and intense now as it was for his first readers. This new selection draws on the whole range of his astonishingly varied output, from the passionate celebration of J. M. W. Turner's painting in the first volume of Modern Painters to Praeterita, the elegiac autobiography of his later years. The introduction outlines Ruskin's life and thought, and shows why he remains such a rewarding writer today. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

During his decades of world fame as a novelist, Tolstoy also wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. These works culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Impassioned and iconoclastic, this powerfully influential work both criticizes the elitist nature of art in nineteenth-century Western society, and rejects the idea that its sole purpose should be the creation of beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire and Wagner are (...) all vigorously condemned, as Tolstoy explores what he believes to be the spiritual role of the artist - arguing that true art must work with religion and science as a force for the advancement of mankind. (shrink)

Recent work examining and expanding traditional accounts of a virtue has been used as the foundation for a virtue-based approach to epistemology. A similar approach to aesthetics yields some striking features, which coincide with contemporary philosophical concerns about the nature and definition of art. Those writing on virtue-based epistemology have offered epistemic theories based on intellectual virtues, defining knowledge from the nature of such virtues. This basic program can be applied to aesthetics so that art is defined using a virtue (...) theory of aesthetics. I will propose and examine the nature and structure of one such theory. I argue here that an approach to aesthetics, which defines art according to aesthetic virtues, would have characteristics that fit well with the value and interests we have about art. (shrink)

Philosophy and painting: Hegel and Manet -- Politics and ontology: Clark and Fried -- Art and truth: Heidegger and Hegel.

Jenefer Robinson takes the insights of modern scientific research on the emotions and uses them to illuminate questions about our emotional involvement with the arts. Laying out a theory of emotion supported by the best evidence from current empirical work, she examines some of the ways in which the emotions function in the arts. Written in a clear and engaging style, her book will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the emotions and how they work, as well as anyone (...) engaged with the arts and aesthetics. (shrink)

This treatise on aesthetics criticizes various psychological theories of art, offers new theories and interpretations, and draws important inferences concerning ...

In Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience Jessica Feldman sheds a pragmatist light on the relation between the Victorian age and Modernism by dislodging truistic notions of Modernism as an art of crisis, rupture, elitism and loss. She examines aesthetic sites of Victorian Modernism - including workrooms, parlours, friendships, and family relations as well as printed texts and paintings - as they develop through interminglings and continuities as well as gaps and breaks. Examining the works of John (...) Ruskin (art critic and social thinker), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (poet and painter), Augusta Evans (best-selling domestic novelist,) and William James (philosopher and psychologist), Feldman relates them to selected twentieth-century creations. She reveals these sentimental, domestic and sublime works to be pragmatist explorations of aesthetic realms. This study, which leads Modernism back into the Victorian age, will be of interest to scholars of literature, art history, and philosophy. (shrink)

Natural beauty has often been viewed as a somewhat vague and subjective matter. Even theorists who view disputes concerning the aesthetic value of artworks as involving correct and incorrect judgements have argued that, in many disputes concerning natural beauty, there are no correct or incorrect judgements. In this essay, I consider recent attempts to develop a more objectivist view of nature appreciation based on the role of scientific knowledge in such appreciation. In response to recent criticisms of this approach, I (...) argue that, when developed, it does provide a viable conception of objectivity for nature aesthetics. (shrink)

According to Dominic Lopes, expressiveness in pictures should be analyzed solely in terms of “expression looks” of various sorts, namely the look of a figure, a scene and/or a design. But, according to this view, it seems puzzling that expressive pictures should have any emotional effect on their audiences. Yet Lopes explicitly ties his “contour theory” of expression in pictures to empathic responses in spectators. Thus, despite his deflationary account of pictorial expression, he claims that pictures can give us practice (...) in various “empathic skills.” I argue that Lopes’s account of empathic responses to pictures, while interesting and enlightening, nevertheless ignores the most important way in which pictures exercise and enhance our empathic skills, namely, by giving us practice in taking the emotional perspective of another person. (shrink)

R. G. Collingwood thought that to express emotion is to come to understand it and that this is something art can enable us to do. The understanding in question is distinct from that offered by emotion concepts. I attempt to defend a broadly similar position by drawing, as Collingwood does, on a broader philosophy of mind. Emotions and other affective states have a profile analogous to the sensory profiles exhibited by the things we perceive. Grasping that one's feeling exhibits such (...) a profile is to understand it. That understanding differs from any involved in conceptualizing the affect in question. And, I argue, engagement with the expressive character of works of art is one way to gain it. (shrink)