In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Frederick Turner presents a new theory of aesthetics based on the argument that beauty is an objective reality in the universe. He identifies the experience of beauty as a pancultural, neurobiological phenomenon. Drawing on a wide range of fields - ritual and dramatic performance, the oral tradition, paleoanthropology and human evolution, neurobiology, cosmology and theoretic physics, chaos theory and fractal mathematics - the book describes evolution as a self-organizing, emergent process that generates increasingly advanced forms of self-reflection, and proposes that the experience of beauty is the recognition of this evolutionary process and the reward for participating in it.
- ISBN13 9780813930695
- Publish Date 10 May 2015 (first published 20 February 1992)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Virginia Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 156
- Language English