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The attribution of perceptually based aesthetic properties to a garden should be indexed to whether that attribution is (1) to the ever-changing dynamic garden or (2) to some phenomenal capture of the garden in one's experience, frozen like a photograph. Perceptually based aesthetic properties are used to identify objects, to compare them to others, to evaluate them, and to describe them as we seek to interpret or find meaning in them. This set of activities requires aesthetic properties that do not change, or at least not much, if any degree of normativity is to be maintained. But those aesthetic properties that are derived from our immediate sensations of a garden only describe a garden at a certain time, under certain conditions, in certain states—all of which change constantly. Both descriptions are useful, and perhaps necessary, for appreciating gardens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a sketch of a new theory of wisdom based on the tree of philosophy (TOP) model. It is argued that philosophy—love of wisdom—has developed branches over the millennia that reflect the different aspects of thought and action that need to be considered in a comprehensive theory of wisdom. Although there is not a full consensus on what these branches are, the TOP usually has as branches, at minimum, metaphysics—including epistemology and ontology—and ethics, logic, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and axiology. Each of these branches is considered, and its implications for a philosophically based theory of wisdom are considered. Whereas some other theories of wisdom attempt to synthesize recent psychological attempts to understand wisdom, the TOP theory attempts to synthesize the contribution of millennia of philosophical inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aesthesis, the classical term for sensing and perceiving, is at the heart of innumerable problems that plague global society. The purpose of this article is to open a conversation on aesthesis. We survey the roots and relevance of aesthesis as a direct albeit contested relation and engagement with the world and with Others. From its pre-Socratic origins, aesthesis has been both a pragmatic, somatic concept, prompting a re-evaluation of the distinction between experience and abstraction. We trace its ongoing repression from Plato through 'western' theories of formal Aesthetics. Drawing on a relational interpretation of Protagoras' aesthesis, we argue that modern pragmatists and radical empiricists, as well as more contemporary critics of the 'colonization' of aesthesis (Mignolo and Vasquez) by formal Aesthetics recognize and develop the relational and ethical aspects of aesthesis. We consider the role of the body, affect, and of the intangible or virtual qualities of aesthesis. The ethics of obligations (Weil) in the polis (Arendt) shows how aesthesis informs politics despite its repression in favour of moral and legal norms. We argue this is relevant to contemporary crises such as xenophobia and ecocidal climate warming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the infinitude of nature's various forms, precisely what should we aesthetically appreciate? And supposing we come to achieve such discernment, how should we properly appreciate the aesthetic qualities we thereby find? To address these questions, Carlson has argued that the aesthetic appreciation of nature ought to be guided by scientific insight. In response, non-cognitivists have levelled criticism and suggested alternatives, yet Carlson's (2009) scientific cognitivism remains the best-argued approach to nature appreciation in the field. One non-cognitivist position that Carlson rejects—although much too quickly—is Berleant's (1985) engagement model. The purpose of this paper is to modify and revive that model. Specifically, I will argue that genuine engagement requires a particular form of disinterest. The result is a non-cognitivist approach to the aesthetic appreciation of nature, stronger than the extant alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the relationship between archery and aesthetics, developing two central claims. First, in order to deliver successful results, the archer should attend not only to efficiency, technique and equipment tuning but also to the aesthetic experience; second, archery shooting methods embody and express 'life-issue' statements and desires concerning our relationship with the world. Depending on the archer's shooting style, i.e. depending on the way in which a shot is executed and performed, the archer's 'sportive philosophy' is, so to speak, unfolded and made apparent. Specifically, I will argue that instinctive archery strives for flexibility and versatility toward the environment and with respect to one's own body, whereas non-instinctive approaches sharpen effectuality and results by flattening the surroundings and limiting one's own performative freedom. Exploring this idea, I will discuss the aesthetic underpinnings of archery, also showing in which ways different shooting methods lay the ground for irreducible aesthetic experiences of self-expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Johann Gottfried Herder is primarily known for his writings on the philosophy of history, linguistics, and theology; his ideas about theatre have been largely overlooked. His interest in the history of various human cultures and his significant influence on the birth of anthropology shaped his unique approach to aesthetics and theatre. This article asks how he understood nature in theatre – more precisely, the possibility of producing a natural theatre during the Enlightenment, an age dominated by the celebration of reason. By examining Herder's use of terms related to nature in multiple sources that have almost never been investigated – including some of Herder's manuscripts, fragments, and short texts on theatre – this article shows that there is a link between Herder's reflections on drama and theatre, nourished by his engagement with various disciplines, especially history, and the theatrical issues that would preoccupy his successors in the centuries to come. Herder's conception of a natural theatre resonates in particular with Bertolt Brecht's desire for the stage to represent the human condition as a historical process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many questions have been raised concerning the logical validity of Aquinas's Fourth Way. Some commentators judge the Fourth Way to be problematic while others find it delightful. In this paper, the Fourth Way is understood as a reflection on what it is to attribute to things around us scalar predicates. Does the Fourth Way not resemble what Wittgenstein observes when speaking about 'the standard meter'? If so, is the Fourth Way significantly different from what might be called a 'mystical' line of thinking? If not, it would be this mystical meaning that is used in the Way with respect to 'God exists'. How should we understand this mystical meaning? By noting that beauty appears as a response‐dependent property and by stressing that in order to attribute it to something we must possess certain virtues. Beauty would then be relative to virtues which are linked to the mystical meaning of 'God'. Why could such a use, concerning the predicate 'beautiful' (even if that is not mentioned in the Fourth Way) not constitute an explanation of 'what we call God'? This is a question to which the reading of the Fourth Way might lead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically assesses and argues for the value of first- and second-person phenomenological approaches to researching aesthetic experiences. Against the background of a review of academic debates on the topic of slow cinema, this paper demonstrates the need for more rigorous and grounded research on film experiences. It therefore advocates the implementation of the empirically-informed, second-person research method of micro-phenomenology in the field of film reception studies. It argues for a renewed understanding of phenomenology as experiential translation grounded in a Peircean semiotic framework. From this semiotic angle, it proposes a typology of specific orders, levels, stages, and modes of experiential translation involved in various approaches to phenomenological research. This semiotic perspective also raises awareness of various non-verbal forms of expression, in addition to traditional linguistic forms of description, employed by participants in micro-phenomenological interviews when they intersubjectively transform their film experiences into reflective awareness guided by and through interaction with the interviewer-researcher. This paper promotes expressive phenomenology that includes non-linguistic, gestural, pictorial forms of reporting lived experience as legitimate material as well as non-traditional format of publication of research that meets academic standards of validity and verifiability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which explores the employment of musical notation by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in conveying his philosophical ideas. Topics discussed include the role of aesthetics in the development of his philosophy, the theme of "Leidenschaftlich," one of the five musical fragments composed by Wittgenstein from 1929 to 1936, the graphic representations he utilized in composing these musical fragments, and the philosophical context for the musical experimentation demonstrated by Wittgenstein.

Beethoven's music has often been framed in terms of art religion, immortality, and secular humanism. Building on these studies, this article proposes that certain works by Beethoven enact a fantasy of infinitely postponing death and living forever on earth, something that I call temporal eternity. To develop this concept, it draws on the concept of chronolibido developed by the contemporary philosopher Martin Hägglund, as well as writings by Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. The article's case studies are Beethoven's Piano Sonata in A Major, op. 110 (1821), and String Quartet in A Minor, op. 132 (1825). In both works, the score refers to an increase in strength. Opus 110 concludes with a return of a previously heard fugue, marked "again reviving, gradually returning to life." Similarly, the third movement of op. 132, "Holy Song of Thanks from a Convalescent to the Godhead," revolves around a continually returning B section, titled "feeling new strength." In both ops. 110 and 132, then, the textual references to strength occur in the context of a double variation form that supports cyclic processes of return. Their structural designs allow for the continual regeneration of each section, as though the evocation of new strength could recur eternally. Such formal processes depict strength as a renewable resource capable of sustaining temporal eternity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to climate change and collapse, this essay explores both the necessity of and impossibility to witness disasters that are unending and unrelenting. Such disaster is understood generally as the Anthropocene but, for the purpose of this project, includes a more particular inflection, Late Humanity. This inflection is an attempt to hone in on a confluence of critical discussions found in environmental, economic, cultural, and biological disciplines to better attend to dynamics wherein modes of existence are in flux. In response to this era, the essay proposes that witnesses are positioned as both observer and creator and, as such, turns to aesthetics as a way to understand those dual practices. Building on the aesthetic philosophy of Étienne Souriau, the essay considers witnessing as a multi-modal and multi-temporal practice through what Souriau calls instauration (the process of rendering the work-to-be-made). To demonstrate this practice, the project pursues a sleuth of bears (spotlighting the bears of astral mythology, disaster tourism, animal-cam live streams, interactive documentary, monstrous fiction, and, finally, a fantastical take on micro-organisms) to craft an aesthetic for witnessing amidst climate collapse that establishes realities through a process characterized as both conditional and conditioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of self-cultivation as tool for understanding the practices of collective writing. Topics discussed include academic writing controlled through new digital writing technologies (NDWT), collective writing as a resistance to the mass produced article and moral education as self-cultivation.

This piece of research focuses on the first theoretical study published by Leoš Janáček and the way in which the composer understands to include contemporary and ancient philosophical and aesthetic principles in his thinking. We see how the author subordinates his theoretical musical thinking regarding rhythm and metre, as well as his concept of accents and nuances to those principles. My study sheds light on some unclear expressions, on other downright daring and novel ones, attempts to explain them and references the great Czech musician's subsequent theoretical contributions. Beyond statements and hypotheses, the conclusion that I have reached constitutes an impulse to continue the research and go thoroughly into the theoretical concepts set forth by one of the greatest thinker-musicians of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the writer is a true artist, when his entire practice breaks the limits of a supposed specificity of genres, his life and his work constitute a singular reality. From this perspective, Copi (Raúl Damonte Botana, 1939-1987), far from stagnating in language and resorting to record permanence and acceptance, far from complying with mandates (ethical or aesthetic) that would place him at the heart of the norm, he displaces writing to plastic art and plastic art to acting. But even better: he makes a unique and simultaneous experience of all this, always from the moment of its constitution, from the very moment of the work or production that these unique stories carry out, made to be acted, seen and told. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece of research focuses on the first theoretical study published by Leoš Janáček and the way in which the composer understands to include contemporary and ancient philosophical and aesthetic principles in his thinking. We see how the author subordinates his theoretical musical thinking regarding rhythm and metre, as well as his concept of accents and nuances to those principles. My study sheds light on some unclear expressions, on other downright daring and novel ones, attempts to explain them and references the great Czech musician's subsequent theoretical contributions. Beyond statements and hypotheses, the conclusion that I have reached constitutes an impulse to continue the research and go thoroughly into the theoretical concepts set forth by one of the greatest thinker-musicians of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature finds the best expression when literary aesthetics and philosophy run side by side. The former offers the external charm, while the latter inculcates the more profound implication to provide it with a superior stature and permanence. Jayadeva's Gitagovindam, being a colossal work in the field of Vaishnava literature, does contain the brilliant juxtaposition of both. This article attempts to show how Jayadeva's Gitagovindam, an enormous work in Vaishnava literature, contains the brilliant juxtaposition of both. On the one hand, like a typical lyrical poem, its melodic nature does have a soothing effect. On the other, the use of philosophy instills in it a greater depth and seriousness to uplift itself as a book of devotion and religious inspiration. Moreover, the importance of this Holy Scripture lies in the fact that it not only played a significant role in paving the way to form a new sect in the Vaishnava religion, known as 'Gaudiya Vaishnavism', but also showed the later Vaishnava lyricists the art of portraying in words the amorous love of Lord Krishna and Radha with compassion and tears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on visual work of William Baldwin's book, Beware the Cat. Topics include information on how the author explores the topography of Baldwin's novel through pen-and-ink drawings to capture and animate the cat world; how approach aims to reflect the hybrid nature of the Beware the Cat research; and considers the affective and aesthetic reception of the cat world depicted in Baldwin's work.

My purpose in this paper is to introduce some ideas of Georgian philosopher Niko Chavchavadze to a large audience. In particular, I focus on three issues: the complex structure of culture and the necessity of its definition; different types of values as basic components of culture; and Aesthetic as a specific form of reflecting reality. In relating these concerns to the ideas of Donald R. Kelly regarding the necessity of defining the nature of culture, as well as to the theories of values of Geert Hofstede and Shalom Schwartz, I indicate how Chavchavadze's definitions and characterizations of the above-mentioned concepts anticipate contemporary approaches to these questions. In conclusion, I describe the current significance of Chavchavadze's ideas and their possible role in the formation of civic society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experientialism in aesthetics is the view that the artistic merit or the aesthetic value of something is determined by the final value of certain experiences of it. These are usually specified as experiences of it with understanding and appreciation. Until recently, experientialism was the dominant view. Not anymore. Experientialists are now subject to a barrage of objections, many of which they have not answered. Here I argue that all of these objections fail. I develop a new form of experientialism that is immune to them. It also has an independent rationale. It incorporates an account of the value of art appreciation that is plausible in its own right. And it endorses many of the core insights of anti‐experientialists, especially concerning the final value of good art. Those of us unconvinced by experientialism need to take this form of it seriously. I conclude by identifying some genuine problems it faces. Even these aren't clearly insoluble. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, I am interested in the relationship between one's moral beliefs and attitudes, on the one hand, and what one finds funny, on the other. There are some philosophers who hold that one cannot find a joke funny if one morally disagrees with it - so one's sense of humour reveals one's moral beliefs. I think this is wrong - and yet, contra others, I do think there is an important relationship between sense of humour and character. I start by noting what existing views cannot capture about the sense of humour: the phenomenon of unwilling complicity in unethical comedy. To remedy this, I propose a more developed account of sense of humour that pays attention to its emotional, perceptual and motivational aspects. This involves taking seriously the notion of a sense of humour, understood as a sensibility or taste, and I develop this account by building on Anne Eaton's work on the related phenomenon of erotic taste. Finally, I go on to argue that this comic taste develops by habituation, and that a central way in which we are habituated to find things funny is through representations (for example, sitcoms and stand-up comedy), which foreground certain aspects of something and frame them as funny. This sheds light on how one might change one's sense of humour in a more egalitarian direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What kinds of impacts can visual art have on a viewer? To identify potential art impacts, we recruited five aesthetics experts from different academic disciplines: art history, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology and theology. Together, the group curated a set of terms that corresponded to descriptive features (124 terms) and cognitive‐affective impacts (69 terms) of artworks. Using these terms as prompts, participants (n = 899) were given one minute to generate words for each term related to how an artwork looked (descriptive features) or made them think or feel (cognitive‐affective impacts). Using network psychometric approaches, we identified terms that were semantically similar based on participants' responses and applied hierarchical exploratory graph analysis to map the relationships between the terms. Our analyses identified 17 descriptive dimensions, which could be further reduced to 5, and 11 impact dimensions, which could be further reduced to 4. The resulting taxonomy demonstrated overlap between the descriptive and impact networks as well as consistency with empirical evidence. This taxonomy could serve as the foundation to empirically evaluate art's impacts on viewers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike its moral and intellectual counterparts, the virtue of aesthetic humility has been widely neglected. In order to begin filling in this gap, I argue that Kant's aesthetics is a promising resource for developing a model of aesthetic humility. Initially, however, this may seem like an unpromising starting point as Kant's aesthetics might appear to promote aesthetic arrogance instead. In spite of this prima facie worry, I claim that Kant's aesthetics provides an illuminating model of aesthetic humility that sheds light not only on the self- and other-directed attitudes it involves, but also on how aesthetic humility can serve as a corrective to the vices of aesthetic arrogance and aesthetic servility. In addition to revealing the ways in which Kant's aesthetics prizes humility rather than arrogance, I aim to show that the Kantian model of aesthetic humility can enrich our understanding of humility more generally and contribute to the on-going effort in aesthetics to analyse specific aesthetic virtues and vices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores an alternative figuration in Dryden's thought and writing on the sister arts: face-painting and translation. In this parallel, Dryden conceives of the face as the original text, the face-paint as the translated word, the cosmetician as the translator, and vice versa. To explore the interrelationship of these arts is to reveal the contradictory impulses that shape Dryden's 1697 Aeneis , reconciling opposing critical views of his translation strategies. In this essay, I survey the prevalent satiric and aesthetic functions of face-painting in Dryden's writings. I show that in his essays of the 1690s, Dryden's ambivalent views on cosmetics inform his views on translation: both the original text and the unpainted face are sacred designs that, paradoxically, may still be beautified by the translator's expression or the cosmetician's paint. In translation, Dryden is thus caught between the desire to foreground his own paint and the obligation to preserve Virgil's design. By way of conclusion, I offer a reading of Dryden's three renderings of the Aeneas and Lausus episode (Aeneid X), in which he liberally daubs and delicately paints upon Virgil's original. These diverse strategies are poetic manifestations of the conflicting energies that define Dryden's sister arts, face-painting and translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose is to study the influence of Zhu Xi's neo-Confucianism on the ideological and political education (IPE) of college students. Firstly, the aesthetic connotation of Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism is studied. Secondly, an interview is performed with teachers of the IPE course in a university in Xi'an, and a questionnaire survey is conducted on some students of the IPE course in the school. It aims to investigate the current situation of college students' IPE, and the impact of integrating aesthetic education into IPE of college students on the improvement of students' overall quality and internalized psychology. Finally, the reasons for this situation are analyzed and solutions are given. The survey results reveal that the aesthetic education thoughts based on Zhu Xi's neo-Confucianism are integrated into the construction of college students' internalized psychological mechanism, and most students think that their mental health status has changed a lot. The proportion of boys who choose "improved" is 57.95%, and the proportion of girls is 53.45%. The aesthetic education is integrated into the IPE of college students, and the proportion of students who think "no effect" after integration and before integration has decreased by 2.01%. The proportion of the number of people who chose the three indicators of "increasing the innovation of teaching methods", "advancing aesthetic ability", and "improving the effectiveness of ideological education" increased by 5.88%, 5.5%, and 3.98%, respectively. It demonstrates that the effect of IPE on college students has been greatly improved after integration into aesthetic education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to show that, according to Theodor Adorno, art is knowledge, it has gnoseological relevance, and is linked to truth. While Adorno makes a radical separation and distinction between art and philosophy, at the same time he claims that they have a complementary and collaborative relationship. This relationship can only be grounded on the understanding of art as dialectics and estrangement from the real world. The dialectical link with concrete reality grounds two aesthetic concepts that characterize the peculiar way of thinking in art, namely, "mimesis" and "expression." After dealing with the mimetic-expressive condition of art, the article clarifies the complementary relationship between art and philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Lale Müldür, as a poet deeply feeling the rhetorical pains of her age, does not cut her ties with the contemporary, she does not draw away from the indicator of the tradition. Her poetry has a more postmodern appearance. The sources used in the poetic language of tradition do not concern reaching a conclusion or a poetic judgment. Muldur's main goal is to make the rhetoric in poetic language more dominant and to turn the search for expandable meaning in hermetic context into language-meaning-centered search. Thus, Lale Muldur's poetics, which has a unique voice in Turkish poetry, gives the example of a long-term poetics in the meaning world of this age with the poetic features and the poetic nature it represents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histology and embryology is a science that studies the micro structure and function of the body and embryogenesis, and has insight into the microcosmic world of human body. It is delicate and ingeniousness, which greatly satisfy our thirst for knowledge and visual appreciation. This paper expounds the beauty of Science in histology and Embryology from the perspectives of aesthetics on cell morphology, tissue mode, organogenesis and life birth. Aesthetic education in histology and embryology can possible cultivate medical students' humanistic quality and aesthetic thinking, So that they are able to have an access to the essence of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the introduction to what is often labelled "the first Arabic novel", Khalīl al-Khūrī's Way, idhan lastu bi-Ifranjī (1859), the author not only criticises contemporary Westernisation, but also outlines a new aesthetics that integrates authenticity, logical plausibility, and passion (hawas). This article explains how al-Khūrī's advocacy of the "indigenous way of life", literary authenticity, and an emotionalisation of writing belong together. They spring from the same source, just as does the temporalisation inherent in the nahḍa 's predilection for plot narratives: the modern subject beginning to sense its agency and seeking to assert itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research on sound and education has opened up important pathways, it dominantly approaches sound as meaningful. This paper charts another tendency, exploring sound as educational precisely because it resists our attempts at understanding. The force that guides this trajectory is that of timbre, or the nuance of sounds. I begin with Eidhsheim, who delinks timbre from essence and identity, showing the infinite potential of vocal timbres. While this weakens the link, the pedagogy she articulates remains within the drive to produce knowledge under the order of the beautiful. To experience timbre's pedagogical charge requires a move to the aesthetic of the sublime. To make this move, I link together Lyotard's writings on writing, thinking, aesthetics, and sound, providing an expansive conception of timbre and showing the sonic dimensions of writing and thinking, through which the writer suspends their drive to know and becomes possible to the timbre of words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work tries to find hermeneutical keys of the thought of María Zambrano, of her ideas on painting and poetry from the hypothesis that the philosopher from Malaga establishes a productive and fruitful dialogue with the European thought of the 20th century, which leads her to coin an original philosophy. Zambrano, throughout her writings, moves from the vital reason of Ortega y Gasset to her peculiar meaning of situated poetic reason, which deals with a delimited scope of objects and contributes to laying the foundations for an aesthetic of the poetic and the pictorial as a creative element of human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article constitutes a contribution to the knowledge of art in its connection with philosophy and psychoanalysis, as it approaches to the tension between the representation and the symbolic construction of the artistic image in the contemporary cultural/aesthetic context, through the relationship between the Lacanian Real and Adorno's negative aesthetic. This relationship finds its articulation point in the aesthetic phenomenon of the Beautiful, understood as what confronts the subject with the emptiness of its radical desire, without deceiving it and that allows to integrate the Real's negativity with the formal elements that make up the artistic work, as well as the Adornian proposal concepts of radicality and authenticity. At the end, a psychoanalytic interpretation of colombian artist Doris Salcedo's work is made, in which the negative aesthetics and the aesthetic effect of the Beautiful are integrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines Blanckenburg's theory of the novel in relation to Leibniz's metaphysics. It argues that Blanckenburg theorizes the novel as uniquely suited to respond to the problem in Leibniz's metaphysics of how to bridge the gap between the apparent contingency of first‐person experience and the promise that the world is actually a well‐ordered whole. Whereas Leibniz must appeal to the Principle of Sufficient Reason to bridge this gap, Blanckenburg suggests that the novel can aid philosophical cognition by doing what philosophical thought cannot: create a world depicting the development of a human life in its totality. However, freed from its ontological basis, Blanckenburg's theory provides an important starting point for early Romantic aesthetic theory. Following Blanckenburg, the novel becomes a privileged medium not for copying life, but for offering a model for it, thereby providing an important impulse in Romanticism's reversal of rationalist hierarchies of philosophy and aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an answer to the aesthetic-value question (AVQ), including the genus-differentia definition of AV. Other topics include the reason why AV is perceptual as seen in the perception of objects as having AV, the things that make aesthetic value aesthetic and valuable, how the species aesthetic value is different from other forms of value, the ontological relationship between differentia aesthetic and species aesthetic value, and why the eighteenth-century theory that aesthetic value and aesthetic judgment are a conceptual pair.

The mainstream contemporary art world is suddenly showing interest in AI art. While this has enlivened the practice, there remains significant disagreement over who or what actually deserves to be called an AI artist. This article examines several claimants to the term and grounds these in art history and theory. It addresses the controversial elevation of some artists over others and accounts for these choices, arguing that the art market alienates AI artists from their work. Finally, it proposes that AI art's interactions with art institutions have not promoted new creative possibilities but have instead reinforced conservative forms and aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As regards the how-to-live concern in his practical philosophy of subjectality, Li Zehou takes the full-fledged development of human capacity as an alternative to address the issue. Comprising three dimensions in terms of free intuition, free will, and free enjoyment, human capacity is claimed to escalate mainly through a trifold aesthetic engagement in the acts of illuminating the true, furnishing the good, and making life worth living through the beautiful. It is at this stage that the whole becoming of human as human will be attainable in light of human subjectality as the acme of human capacity and the ultimate outcome of human fulfillment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paradigms of aesthetic value condition the philosophical questions we pose and hope to answer about it. Theories of aesthetic value are typically individualistic, in the sense that the paradigms they are designed to capture, and the questions to which they are offered as answers, center the individual's engagement with aesthetic value. Here I offer some considerations that suggest that such individualism is a mistake and sketch a communitarian way of posing and answering questions about the nature of aesthetic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There was a time when Africa was thought to have no history, no philosophy, no civilizational culture and no artistic creativity or aesthetic sensibilities. This new book, African Art Reframed: Reflections and Dialogues on Museum Cultures by Bennetta Jules-Rosette and J.R. Osborn, re-evaluates this perception and argues that African art has come a long way in the last few decades, taking the reader through the transformational process that African art has undergone in that period, including the role of the museums and the collaborative work of agents across different sectors in the reframing of African art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the idea that essay has a aesthetics, a literary style, but at the same time this aesthetics is a mental style that presupposes a ethics as ground. Therefore, we think the essay as philosophy. More precisely: in modernity, philosophy is essayistic. This essay's philosophy has five main characteristics that are inseparable from each other. Essay is based on lifeworld and in consequence is a experimental philosophy opposed to the rationalist system. This philosophy is a philosophy of finitude, anti-absolutist, that defends the philosophical relevance of the concrete and real subject. Finally, the essay understands critical reflection as a method of freedom. Essayistic philosophy contains a ethics that avoids both rationalist totalitarianism and aestheticist nihilism, and that concludes in a dialogical pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What should we do, aesthetically speaking, and why? Any adequate theory of aesthetic normativity must distinguish reasons internal and external to aesthetic practices. This structural distinction is necessary in order to reconcile our interest in aesthetic correctness with our interest in aesthetic value. I consider three case studies—score compliance in musical performance, the look of a mowed lawn, and literary interpretation—to show that facts about the correct actions to perform and the correct attitudes to have are explained by norms internal to a practice. Practice‐internal norms, however, cannot settle the distinct question of which practices we have reason to opt into. When it comes to the source of aesthetic normativity—in virtue of what aesthetic value is genuinely reason‐giving—I argue that existing accounts, which appeal to pleasure or achievement, are inadequate. The only practice‐external aesthetic requirement is a generic one to opt into at least some aesthetic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An Interview with Donald Meltzer is presented discussing a concept that really grows out of the philosophy of aesthetics and art history, to distinguish between symbols and signs, of course, impact of new ideas and new objects that represent these ideas which creates this catastrophic pressure, and experience equivalent to falling in love.

This article develops an approach for working with vernacular texts in ethnographic archives. It examines Dinka song texts collected in (South) Sudan by the anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt (between 1947 and 1951), now archived at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Songs were central to developing Lienhardt's ethnographic analysis; they are also an exciting and unique record of popular and artistic expression at the time of his research. The songs he transcribed offer perspectives on life under colonial rule that are often occluded in the documentary and ethnographic record (including Lienhardt's own writing). In this article, I examine a selection of songs, showing that to be understood today they must be seen as both a product of Lienhardt's data collecting practices and works of art in their own right. It is possible to usefully recontextualize these songs by triangulating between Lienhardt's published work, his unpublished field notes and other academic studies in South Sudanese history and anthropology. Importantly, these songs must be treated as verbal arts – and read with an appreciation of their aesthetic and stylistic qualities. Their meaning and significance is not always straightforward, in fact they are often deliberately opaque. Any interpretation must embrace these 'difficult' aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the marginalization of women from public and political spaces in Europe and in the indigenous world of Ecuador. This situation of exclusion and marginalization originates in thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, who were responsible for epistemologically justifying the exclusion of women from public affairs in all areas; that is to say, they reduced the act of women to the space of the private, to the domestic, to the affairs of the family. However, it is interesting to note that some philosophers were sensitive to the issue of the feminine, in the case of Condorcet and Stuart Mill, although their great contribution did not change the mentality of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The antropocentric position has been hegemonic in Western philosophical debate, its aesthetics and its arts. This contrasts with the defense of interdependence among the realms of nature expressed in Indian tradition and reflected on their arts and aesthetics. The article relies on text belonging to the Vedic-upanisadic tradition to formulate an anthropomorphic cosmocentrism and supports this view with examples from Indian classical sculpture. The article will finally hold that according to Indian tradition the specificity of the human position is precisely the capacity to abandon any kind of centric position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schiller and Goethe maintained a close friendship that allowed them to deal with anthropological, literary and aesthetic questions. Schiller (reader of Kant) was poured towards the interior and Goethe (natural researcher) towards the exteriority. Another possible difference is in their visions of the inevitable. In Schiller the Antigone model prevailed (the fatal derives from objective political conflicts). In Goethe the Oedipus model would have validity (the fatal is attributable to the designs of destiny). This made actions predominate in Schiller's tragedies and characters in Goethe's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the implied critical stance of dystopian narratives, there is a strand of beautiful, aesthetically pleasant dystopias--inherently ambivalent texts that are--both fascinating and horrifying. Drawing from examples in literature and television, this article argues that "beautified dystopias" generate a surplus (or excess) of aesthetic enjoyment, harboring a mystifying potential in tension with the critical-satirical potential of dystopias. In a rereading of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, this article first examine how D-503's aestheticizing voice--although undeniably constructed for a satirical effect--fosters a degree of fascination toward the dystopian world in excess of Zamyatin's intentions. Second, taking Black Mirror's "Fifteen Million Merits" as an example of contemporary televisual dystopias, this article argues that the supposedly ironic construction of beautified cinematic miseen- scènes deepens and complicates the underlying ambivalence of "beautified dystopias." The author's assumption is that this is not an exceptional case, but rather an integral part of the current dystopian structure of feeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does the aesthetic ask of us? What claims do the aesthetic features of the objects and events in our environment make on us? My answer in this paper is: that depends. Aesthetic reasons can only justify feelings – they cannot demand them. A corollary of this is that there are no aesthetic obligations to feel, only permissions. However, I argue, aesthetic reasons can demand actions – they do not merely justify them. A corollary of this is that there are aesthetic obligations to act, not only permissions. So, I conclude, the aesthetic asks little of us as patients and much of as agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim in this essay is to take seriously the idea that the activity of criticism entails a distinct form of thinking. I develop my argument through an engagement with Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's What is Philosophy?, a text in which the two authors look back on their life's work to interrogate fundamental aspects of their shared discipline. For my purposes, to pose and answer the question "What is criticism?," two components of the book's project seem especially important. The first is that it is not just a book about philosophy but about thinking, and about the specific practices that characterize different forms of thought. Deleuze and Guattari hold up philosophy alongside science and art as three ur-forms of thought. Significantly, these three forms of thought can be seen to serve as the three major coordinates marking contemporary debates about criticism. What happens, I want to ask, when we subtract from criticism its affinities with these other practices of thought? What remains of criticism once we identify its specific differences from science, art, and philosophy? My claim is that the distinctiveness of critical thinking can be found precisely in its difference from these three other major practices. Secondly, What is Philosophy? is a book designed to interrogate the doxa of its authors' discipline. In a similar way, the aim of my own essay is to push against the institutional doxa of "critical thinking" by drawing out the virtues of a genuinely critical thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In moments of cinematic ekphrasis, a painting, often a portrait, allegorizes the experience of uneven development. During the ekphrastic moment, the painting—ostensibly the spatial art par excellence—introduces multiple temporalities into the film. Some of these heterogeneous temporalities are surreal and reversible, while others are nonsecular and nonteleological. Ekphrastic temporalities are features of world cinema more broadly, but this essay develops its account through analyses of Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love, Certified Copy , and Rug. The multiple temporalities found in these films analogize the multiple temporalities of modernity itself. While Benedict Anderson once theorized the nation via Walter Benjamin's notion of homogeneous empty time, this essay suggests restoring the cinema, the nation, and the world to their primordial temporal heterogeneity. By extension, the simultaneity of these temporalities transcends linear accounts of modernization that underwrite the developmentalist conception of history, which severs the modern West from the belated rest. Thus, when a nation is said to have revolted against modernity, as Kiarostami's Iran was said to have done in 1979, precisely nothing of the sort has transpired. Moments of ekphrastic temporality instead allegorize a portrait of global modernity in which any given nation contains any number of temporalities at any given time. The literal and figurative world picture they illuminate explains why even the most progressive of nations can frequently seem to go backward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aesthetic value empiricism claims that the aesthetic value of an object is grounded in the value of a certain kind of experience of it. The most popular version of value empiricism, and a dominant view in contemporary philosophical aesthetics more generally, is aesthetic hedonism. Hedonism restricts the grounds of aesthetic value to the pleasure enjoyed in the right kind of experience. But hedonism does not enjoy any clear advantage over a more permissive alternative version of value empiricism. This alternative is aesthetic liberalism. On this view, an object's aesthetic value is fully grounded in any value—not just the hedonic value—of a correct and complete experience of its sensory features. To demonstrate the advantages of liberalism over hedonism, I apply both views to analyze the aesthetic value of the Spring Temple Buddha and Anselm Kiefer's Seraphim. I detail four advantages of liberalism over hedonism, and I conclude by defending liberalism from two kinds of objection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taken as a whole, Ken Burns's 1994 documentary Baseball and its 2010 follow-up The Tenth Inning stand as some of the most influential documentaries on the history of American sports. Baseball develops the link between the "fun" of the game and philosophical beliefs about American democracy through a "dialectical aesthetic" that operates through Baseball's choice of subjects and historical events as well as through its formal documentary strategies. While many critics dismiss Baseball as overly nostalgic, this essay argues that Baseball engages the reader with the dialectic to encourage self-reflection about the future of the game and its role in civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]