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Although beauty, in the pre-modern Arab world, was enjoyed and promoted almost everywhere, Islam does not possess a general theory on aesthetics or a systematic theory of the arts. This is a study of the Arabic discourse on beauty. The author had to search for her evidence in written statements from a wide variety of sources, such as the Qur'an, legal, religious and Sufi texts, chronicles, biographies, belle-lettres, literary criticism, and scientific, geographic and philosophical literature. Th...

Making tangible connections between theory and practice, ideas and form, this book encourages debate about the artistic, conceptual, and cultural significance of the way things look. What are the metaphysical concepts at the heart of design education, theory, and philosophy? Why do we assume that design is impossible to teach? This book challenges the traditional foundations of perception and takes an imaginative, radical approach, setting itself apart from the traditions of analytical philosoph...

The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art provides an extensive research resource to the burgeoning field of Asian aesthetics. Featuring leading international scholars and teachers whose work defines the field, this unique volume reflects the very best scholarship in creative, analytic, and comparative philosophy. Beginning with a philosophical reconstruction of the classical rasa aesthetics, chapters range from the nature of art-emotions, tones of thinking...

There are as many meanings to drawing and painting as there are cultural contexts for them to exist in. But this is not the end of the story. Drawings and paintings are made, and in their making embody unique meanings that transform our perception of space-time and sense of finitude. These meanings have not been addressed by art history or visual studies hitherto, and have only been considered indirectly by philosophers (mainly in the phenomenological tradition). If these intrinsic meanings are...

Originally published in 1962, the experimental study of aesthetics was a field particularly associated with the name of C.W. Valentine, who in this book provided a critical review of research carried out since the end of the nineteenth century principally by British and American psychologists. The investigations described, many of them conducted by the author, are concerned with individual responses to what is commonly regarded as beautiful in painting, music, and poetry, an important distinctio...

Theodor Adorno (1903-69) was undoubtedly the foremost thinker of the Frankfurt School, the influential group of German thinkers that fled to the US in the 1930s, including such thinkers as Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer. His work has proved enormously influential in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory. Aesthetic Theory is Adorno's posthumous magnum opus and the culmination of a lifetime's investigation. Analysing the sublime, the ugly and the beautiful, Adorno shows how such concepts f...

This book engages with the question of making sense of seeing in today's technologically dominated world. It does so by exploring the notion of the 'hypermodern', a term which is used to capture the drive in contemporary culture to achieve ever greater speed and efficiency. The volume draws principally on the thought of Paul Virilio and Friedrich Nietzsche. The text's key argument is that destabilizing tendencies, which become increasingly evident in hypermodern culture, spring from its having a...

Conventionally, the Philistine is assumed to have no value for art and culture, but in this re-evaluation of its excluded identity, the authors address the philistine not as an empirical phenomenon, but as a relational category that operates between art and anti-art, aesthetics and anti-aesthetics, arguing that the Philistine cuts to the core of the predicament of art in a divided culture. The authors develop what they call a "counter-intuitive" notion of the Philistine, claiming that what the P...

Interpreting Visual Culture brings together original writings from leading experts in art history, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies. Ranging from an analysis of the role of vision in current critical discourse to discussion of specific examples taken from the visual arts, ethics and sociology, it presents the latest material on the interpretation of the visual in modern culture. Among topics covered are: * the visual rhetoric of modernity * the drawings of Bonnard * recent feminist art...

The present volume encapsulates the contemporary scholarship on John Dewey and shows the place of Dewey's thought on the philosophical arena. The authors are among the leading specialists in the philosophy of John Dewey from universities across the US and in Europe.

An Unnatural Attitude traces a style of musical thought that coalesced in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic-a phenomenological style that sought to renew contact with music as a worldly circumstance. Deeply critical of the influence of naturalism in aesthetics and ethics, proponents of this new style argued for the description of music as something accessible neither through introspection nor through experimental research, but rather in an attitude of outward, open orientation towar...

From William Blake through to Iain Sinclair, literature has sought to engage with and transform urban space. Architects now seek the input of poets, and storytelling is employed in urban regeneration. Writing Urban Space investigates this relationship between imaginative writing and the built environment.

This volume assembles some of the most distinguished scholars in the field of Deleuze studies in order to provide both an accessible introduction to key concepts in Deleuze's thought and to test them in view of the issue of normativity. This includes not only the law, but also the question of norms and values in the broader ethical, political and methodological sense. The volume argues that Deleuze's philosophy rejects the unitary vision of the subject as a self-regulating rationalist entity and...

Transfigured Stages: Major Practitioners and Theatre Aesthetics in Australia captures the excitement of a key period in the emergence of postdramatic theatre in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. It is the first book to discuss work by The Sydney Front (1986 - 1993) and Open City (1987 - ), and engages contemporary cultural and aesthetic theory to analyse performances by these artists, as well as theatre productions by Jenny Kemp and others. These performance practitioners are considered as part...

Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines offers a compelling reflection on what the notion of legibility entails in a machinic world in which any form of cultural expression - from literary texts, films, artworks and museum exhibits to archives, laws, computer programs and algorithms - necessarily partakes in ever-more complex processes of (mass) mediation. Divided over four clusters focusing on desire, justice, machine and heritage, the chapters in the volume explore what makes something leg...

This text presents an exploration of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Dorothea Olkowski says Deleuze accomplished the "ruin of representation", the complete overthrow of hierarchic organic thought in philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and ethics, as well as society at large. In Deleuze's philosophy of difference, she discovers the source of a different ontology of change, which in turn opens up the creation of new modes of life and thought, not only in philosophy and feminism but wherever creati...