Aesthetics Commons^™

Book Review On New Essays In Japanese Aesthetics (Edited By A. Minh Nguyen), Mary Wiseman

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Making Sense Of ‘Tropical’ Kitsch, Max Ryynänen, Anna-Sofia Sysser

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The ‘tropical’ has not just been “imported” to Northern spas and travel agency advertisements. Plastic palm trees and inflatable pineapples echo tourism experiences, have roots in “feel-good” Americana, and belong to colonial imagery. The tropical is often portrayed in simplified ways, even though there is a huge diversity of cultures, inhabitants and landscapes within the tropical zone. Could the concept of kitsch help us to understand the construct of the tropical? Could the ‘tropical’ help us to understand kitsch? If one takes away the nearly deceased modern conception of kitsch as pretentious pseudo-art and concentrates on sentimental and/or sugared knickknacks …

The “Body In Motion” As The Substance Of Dance Improvisation? Based On Motifs From Maurice Merleau-Ponty’S Phenomenology Of Perception, Lilianna Bieszczad

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In the beginning of my academic career, it was my personal experience of dance practice that provided a direct impulse for studying the phenomenon of dance as art from a philosophical perspective. It was that same experience that drew my attention to the concept of aesthetic engagement proposed by Arnold Berleant. His theory, in my view, captures the fundamental aspects of dance in a unique way.[1] That early study led me to develop and promote the aesthetics of sensitivity, which in turn created a basis for the appreciation of dance as a practice that is inseparable from life.[2] Many problems …

Disinterestedness, Disdain And The Reception Of Berleant’S Major Idea, Cheryl Foster

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Arnold Berleant’s philosophical theories have proven to be prescient in their identification of an aesthetic interface between human beings and the natural world – the interface he calls “engagement,” a form of participatory aesthetics. This essay presents the context out of which Berleant’s theory of engagement has evolved and then touches upon the application of engagement first to cases of aesthetic appreciation and then to a very recent case in coastal ecology and management. It is suggested that Berleant’s elaboration of a “participatory aesthetics” both mirrors and informs the scientific model of “participatory research,” which in turn has implications for …

Negative Aesthetics In Art, Environment, And Everyday Life: Arnold Berleant’S Theory And The Novels Of Kirino Natsuo, Mara Miller

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Arnold Berleant’s valuable analysis of ‘negative aesthetics’ in his 2010 book Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World provides an analytic framework not only for general investigation of negative aesthetics but for understanding their extension into daily life and literature. It illuminates the work of Japanese novelist Natsuo Kirino (1951- , 夏生桐野), just as her novels illustrate Berleant’s negative aesthetics. In Kirino’s narratives, negatively aesthetic landscapes determine characters’ mindsets, even as they mirror the moral and aesthetic bleakness of society at large, revealing characters’ internal dynamics and the larger social world with the same destructive efficacy Berleant …

Editorial Introduction To Special Volume 9: Aesthetics Beyond Philosophy: Exploring Berleant’S Concept Of Engagement Editorial Introduction, Bogna J. Gladden-Obidzińska

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

A Philosophical Retrospective, Arnold Berleant

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Arnold Berleant’S Project Of Post-Kantian Aesthetics, Krystyna Wilkoszewska

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Changes in art and culture toward the end of the twentieth century have become a challenge for aesthetics. Arnold Berleant is one of the forerunners of the revising of modern aesthetics, and has been from the very start of his research. He has especially examined the relationship of aesthetics to philosophy.

His critique resonates with views expressed by Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, James, and Dewey, in addition to ecological and feminist departures from Kantian aesthetics. He has criticized the category of disinterestedness and the aesthetics of separation, isolation, contemplation, and distance. This critical analysis is linked to overcoming the notion of experience …

Arnold Berleant’S Environmental Aesthetics And Chinese Ecological Aesthetics, Cheng Xiangzhan

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Professor Arnold Berleant has visited China academically several times since the early 1990s, becoming more and more popular in Chinese academia. Almost all of his books have been translated into Chinese, which produced a significant impact on Chinese scholars, especially on the development of Chinese ecological aesthetics, or ecoaesthetics. They generated a hot topic on the similarities and differences between Western environmental aesthetics and Chinese ecological aesthetics, in view of which this paper first outlines Berleant’s academic activities in China, then focuses on the impact of his environmental aesthetics on the ecological aesthetics mainly advanced by the Chinese scholars Zeng …

Berleant's Opening, Crispin Sartwell

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Throughout modernity, aesthetics had been marked by a significant narrowing of its subject matter, the early peak of this trend being Kantian aesthetics of disinterestedness and modernist formalism based on distance. Arnold Berleant’s mission in aesthetics has been to re-open its domain towards all elements of every-day life, including consumer products, political systems, and the environment. By defining the aesthetic field as an environment of continuity between the self and the non-self, Berleant has managed to transform the Kantian subject-object relation into one of unity. However, the paper argues that such an environmental aesthetics requires a basically realist or materialist …

The Role Of Aesthetics In World-Making, Yuriko Saito

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Arnold Berleant’s oeuvre spanning five decades is devoted to restoring aesthetics’ connection to the rest of our lives. In this paper, I shall join him by highlighting the crucial role aesthetics plays in shaping our lives and the world by interacting with objects, environments, and people. I show how our seemingly innocuous and trivial aesthetic tastes and preferences regarding everyday objects and activities have a surprisingly significant power to determine our attitudes, judgments, and actions, often with serious political, environmental, and moral implications. In light of this power of the aesthetic to affect the quality of life and the state …

Berleant’S Phenomenology Of Sculptural Space: Brâncuşi, Alicja Kuczyńska

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The distinction between reason and senses, until recently maintained in philosophy, has now grown to cause serious doubts. The situation requires creating new forms of cognitive continuity revealed in various levels of emotional experience. Constantin Brâncuşi’s art is analyzed as an example of transgression of this distinction through building a vinculum between the earthly and the heavenly and between the external and the internal. The author refutes the common attribution of Brâncuşi’s art to the Parisian trends or to primary organic forms. In Brâncuşi’s understanding, art creates its own philosophy whose aim is to attain the essence of being. Thus, …

Visual Interlude I, Mara Miller

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Visual Interlude Ii, Mara Miller

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Reflections, Arnold Berleant

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Sculpture And Its Meaning In The Context Of Berleant’S Aesthetic Engagement, Anna Wolińska

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

It is not my intention to provide a comprehensive analysis of Berleant’s notion of aesthetic engagement. My goal is modest. I hope to account for the key significance of the philosophical problematization of sculpture, in the context of engaged aesthetics. In writing about the philosophical problematization of sculpture, I am thinking most of all about the problem of space, a phenomenon that emerges in the relationship of the solid form to its surroundings. It is a relationship that is usually perceived as directly connected with the sculpture. I want to emphasize that Alicja Kuczyńska was well aware of the …

Depicting Absence: Thematic And Stylistic Paradoxes Of Representation In Visual And Literary Imagery, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

The article draws up an inventory of, and compares strategies for, the theoretical and critical treatment of the absence–presence interplay at stake in the literary and visual representations of absence. This brings to our attention a multiplicity of heterogeneous and, to a greater or lesser degree, marginal signify-ing phenomena that have in common patterns of disrupting and deviating from the standard conventions of creating and conveying meaning through figures of absence. Lacking a name for these disparate yet similar instances where meaning is created from empty signifiers, we have chosen to call them figural voids. This attempt to produce a …

What Moves You?: Georges Didi-Huberman’S Arts Of Passage And Pittsburgh Stories Of Migration, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Contemporary art historian, critic, and theorist Georges Didi-Huberman thinks of images not as static objects, but as movements, passages, and gestures of memory and/or desire. For the French “historian of passing images,” as he has been called, “all images are migrants. Images are migrations. They are never simply local” (D2017). His book, Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte ("To Pass at Any Price"), co-written with the Greek poet and director Niki Giannari, takes on precisely the visual dynamics of passages, passengers, and passageways in the context of contemporary migration flows. In April 2018, only several months after the launching of the …

It's Funny 'Cause It's True: The Lighthearted Philosophers’ Society’S Introduction To Philosophy Through Humor, Jennifer Marra Henrigillis, Steven Gimbel

Open Educational Resources

It's Funny 'Cause It's True is an introductory text in philosophy exploring logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics through questions in the philosophy of humor. Subfields receive a substantive introduction with interactive essays written to be accessible to undergraduates.

Thinking On Animation:The Problem Of Specificity Thesis, Wandi Liang

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.