Showing titles in Aesthetics

In Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.

Cuteness has taken the planet by storm. Global sensations Hello Kitty and Pokémon, the works of artists Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons, Heidi the cross-eyed opossum and E.T. - all reflect its gathering power. But what does “cute” mean, as a sensibility and style? Why is it so pervasive? Is it all infantile fluff, or is there something more uncanny and even menacing going on - in a lighthearted way? In The Power of Cute, Simon May provides nuanced and surprising answers.

Philosopher Nick Riggle explores the beauty of being alive by investigating the things we say to inspire ourselves and each other: seize the day, treat yourself, you only live once. These clichés are at best vague, at worst stupid. They imply that you should do something wild with your life because your life is precious, a little like saying you should go swimming with your grandfather’s watch because it is irreplaceable.

Using step by step instructions, the author illustrates how to be fully present in the moment without clinging to joy or resisting sorrow. This opens the door to a kind of wellness that goes beyond circumstances. Actively engaging life as it is in this fashion holds the potential for awakening to a peace and well-being that are not dependent on whether a particular experience is joyful or sorrowful.

Walter Benjamin beschreibt in seinem berühmtesten Aufsatz Ursprung und Technik der Reproduktion von Kunstwerken und bietet damit die theoretische Basis für die Diskussion über die Vervielfältigung von Kunst in der Neuzeit.

The Art of Rhetoric, a guide on the principles behind oratorical skill, is a core text on the art of persuasion. Aristotle contends that rhetoric is one of the key elements of philosophy – along with logic and dialectic. The work consists of three books: the first is a general overview, the second concerns the means of persuasion that an orator must deploy, and the third discusses elements of style and arrangement.

Unlike their biblical precursors, Kahlil Gibran's parables espouse the importance of personal spiritual insight rather than moral rectitude. In Gibran's view, sin and virtue, mercy and justice, and sanity and madness are all sides of the one coin - one cannot exist without its opposite.

If you feel overwhelmed, stressed, and like you constantly have a huge weight on your shoulders, odds are you need to declutter your life. Decluttering is highly necessary in today’s world, but what is not always known is how to recognize the point at which you need to start. You also need to know how to do it and what to look for to know if it’s working. This audiobook has all that and more. We break it down to a level almost anyone can apply to his or her unique circumstances.

Az ember a természetnek vagy apja, vagy megrablója. Ezt az ősi iráni tudást Darwin nem ismerte. A létért folytatott mészárlás tanában azonban nem jelenik meg egyetlen Mozart-akkord, Giotto tájkép, vagy Pascal-aforizma sem. A világ újkori kirablásával szemben a vallás, a tudomány, a filozófia készületlenül állt. Egyedül a mûvészet tudta megôrizni a humánum "alapállását". Művésznek lenni azt jelenti: túlemelkedni a téridőbe szorított életen. A művészet egyetemes távlatot nyit, és a létünket átható homályba bevilágít.

Everyone deplores narcissism, especially in others. The vain are by turns annoying or absurd, offending us whether they are blissfully oblivious or proudly aware of their behavior. But are narcissism and vanity really as bad as they seem? Can we avoid them even if we try? In Mirror, Mirror, Simon Blackburn, the author of such best-selling philosophy books as Think, Being Good, and Lust, says that narcissism, vanity, pride, and self-esteem are more complex than they first appear and have innumerable good and bad forms.

Survival of the Beautiful is a revolutionary new examination of the interplay of beauty, art, and culture in evolution. Taking inspiration from Darwin's observation that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg probes why animals, humans included, have innate appreciation for beauty - and why nature is, indeed, beautiful.

Meditating on the labyrinthine nature of sexual identity and the performance of gender, High Heel moves from film to fairytale, from foot binding to feminism, and from the golden ratio to glam rock. Summer Brennan considers this most provocative of fashion accessories as a nexus of desire and struggle, sex and society, violence and self expression, setting out to understand what it means to be a woman by walking a few hundred years in her shoes.

As an interiors photographer, Penny Wincer found that walking through a stranger’s home, listening to them explaining the history of the space, and the meaning of precious objects, was one of most joyful aspects of her work. And in Home Matters Penny does exactly that, taking us through the houses of 13 artists, designers and writers, inspiring us to reflect on how we want our own homes to feel.

While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, Thought's Wilderness insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made. Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism.

Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true.

Qu'est-ce que l'art ? Comment s'est-il constitué et défini à travers l'histoire ? Quels rapports entretient-il avec la philosophie ?

Tutte le culture hanno un'idea del bello e dell'arte, ma non tutte la elaborano in forma teorica consapevole ed esplicita. Il Medioevo - dopo secoli in cui è stato trattato solo come periodo buio e barbaro - è stato riscoperto come un'epoca ricca di riflessioni sulla bellezza, sul piacere estetico, sul gusto, sul bello naturale e artistico, sui rapporti tra l'arte e le altre attività umane.

Counsels and Maxims is a classic work by noted German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. His work has influenced some of the modern world's greatest thinkers, including Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Erwin Schrödinger. This piece was originally translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders.

Il tema della bellezza viene qui affrontato da Umberto Galimberti, come nel suo stile, con un ritorno alle sorgenti della nostra cultura. Se quella ebraica era una cultura della parola, quella greca era invece una cultura della visione, dominata dal senso della finitudine e della misura. Così anche la bellezza per l'uomo greco antico è ciò che rispetta delle misure, e cioè ha proporzioni calcolabili. Il cristianesimo porterà poi sulla scena un Dio che si fa corpo visibile, dando in questo modo maggior spazio all'immagine e quindi all'arte figurativa.

Le dernier opus de "Cosmos" explore les arts, la poésie et la musique : ces créations humaines qui s'allient à la nature pour permettre à chacun d'expérimenter le sublime. Des origines préhistoriques à la prédominance chrétienne, de l'art bourgeois de la Renaissance jusqu'aux créations contemporaines, Michel Onfray ébauche une contre-histoire des arts, citant Mallarmé, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Bachelard, Georges Rouquier ou Pierre Soulages. L'art change de paradigme, et si la notion cardinale du beau disparaît, elle laisse la place au sublime, ce sentiment d'étonnement radical et subjugué qui peut réunir en un instant l'homme et le cosmos.