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Articles 1 - 23 of 23
Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
Brain And Aesthetic Attitude: How To Integrate "Old" And "New" Aesthetics, Gianluca Consoli
Brain And Aesthetic Attitude: How To Integrate "Old" And "New" Aesthetics, Gianluca Consoli
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
At present, various efforts are being put forward to naturalize aesthetics. One of the most controversial disciplines of aesthetics is neuroaesthetics. The first applications of neuroimaging of the aesthetic experience of paintings occurred ten years ago. Over this decade, neuroscientific findings have determined three common centers of visual aesthetic experience: top-down processing; reward and evaluation; and cortical sensory processing. Undoubtedly, these common centers require better identification and further investigation. However, the experimental data currently available make it possible to falsify or corroborate traditional philosophical theories of aesthetic perception and evaluation. Within an integrated approach to aesthetics, this selective function might …
An Interview With Gernot Böhme, Zhuofei Wang
An Interview With Gernot Böhme, Zhuofei Wang
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
No abstract provided.
Reflections On Music And Propaganda, Luis Velasco Pufleau
Reflections On Music And Propaganda, Luis Velasco Pufleau
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In general, the concept of propaganda refers to a method as well as the symbolic object mobilized by it. Propaganda equally constitutes a particular type of communication that involves not only the mobilization of objects, but also of discourse, places, acts, and rituals. This essay employs the writings of Max Weber, Paul Ricœur, Jacques Ellul, and Jacques Rancière to analyze propaganda as a particular type of symbolic political dispositif linked to a specific performance and utterance context. I examine humanitarian songs as a propaganda tool in democracy, and show the conditions and the limits of their mobilization through their contextualization. …
Oceanic Feeling In Painterly Creativity, Jussi Antti Saarinen
Oceanic Feeling In Painterly Creativity, Jussi Antti Saarinen
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The oceanic feeling is a frequent topic of discussion in both creativity research and aesthetics. Characterized by a sensation of self-boundary dissolution, the feeling has been reported to involve experiences of fusion with various objects, including works of art. In this article, I discuss the oceanic feeling in the specific context of painterly creativity. I begin by arguing that the oceanic feeling cannot be classified as an emotion, mood, or bodily feeling, in the established definitions of these terms. I then introduce philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe’s theory of existential feelings to help formulate a more accurate view of the oceanic feeling. …
Dewey And Everyday Aesthetics - A New Look, Kalle Puolakka
Dewey And Everyday Aesthetics - A New Look, Kalle Puolakka
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
John Dewey is frequently mentioned as an important forerunner of everyday aesthetics. In this article, I attempt to provide an updated view of Dewey’s place within everyday aesthetics by drawing attention to aspects in Dewey’s own work and in contemporary interpretations of his philosophy that have not been thoroughly discussed in the context of everyday aesthetics. In the first part, I offer a reading of Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience that unties its content through noting the important position Dewey ascribes to imagination in aesthetic experience in the later parts of Art as Experience. The second pillar of the pragmatist …
Numbing The Heart: Racist Jokes And The Aesthetic Affect, Tanya Rodriguez
Numbing The Heart: Racist Jokes And The Aesthetic Affect, Tanya Rodriguez
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
People sometimes resist the idea that racist humor fails on aesthetic grounds because they find it funny. They make the case that we can enjoy its comic aspects by controlling our attention, by focusing on a joke’s rhythm or delivery rather than on its racist content. Ironic intent may reside with the joke teller and/or the audience. I discuss how arguments for the immorality of racist jokes fall short. Ironic racist jokes may be acceptable to an audience that already rejects racism but is comfortable with such ironic racist joking precisely because as individuals they feel confident in their own …
Musical Ontology: Critical, Not Metaphysical, Jonathan A. Neufeld
Musical Ontology: Critical, Not Metaphysical, Jonathan A. Neufeld
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The ontology of musical works often sets the boundaries within which evaluation of musical works and performances takes place. Questions of ontology are therefore often taken to be prior to and apart from the evaluative questions considered by either performers as they present works to audiences or an audience’s critical reflection on a performance. In this paper I argue that, while the ontology of musical works may well set the boundaries of legitimate evaluation, ontological questions should not be considered as prior to or apart from critical evaluation. Rather, ontological claims are a type of critical evaluation made within musical …
Mechanical Reproduction In An Age Of High Art, Chris Barker
Mechanical Reproduction In An Age Of High Art, Chris Barker
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This paper reopens the question of the place of high art in the period identified by Walter Benjamin as the age of mechanical reproduction. Walter Benjamin, Bruno Latour, and Adam Lowe are wrong to think that mechanical reproduction has transformed the concept of art, destroying the aura of art or transmitting that aura from original to copy. The concept of art cannot be redefined by the modern change in the capacity to reproduce art unless art was initially defined primarily by its uniqueness/nonreproducibility. Photographic reproduction has caused major changes in the visual arts and in the way we consume art, …
Historical Formalism In Music: Toward A Philosophical Theory Of Musical Form, Andrea Baldini
Historical Formalism In Music: Toward A Philosophical Theory Of Musical Form, Andrea Baldini
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In this paper I begin to fashion a theory of musical form that I call historical formalism. Historical formalism posits that our perception of the formal properties of a musical work is informed by considerations not only of artistic categories but also of the historical, sociopolitical, and cultural circumstances within which that work was composed.
The Cluster Account Of Art: A Historical Dilemma, Simon Fokt
The Cluster Account Of Art: A Historical Dilemma, Simon Fokt
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The cluster account, one of the best attempts at art classification, is guilty of ahistoricism. While cluster theorists may be happy to limit themselves to accounting for what art is now rather than how the term was understood in the past, they cannot ignore the fact that people seem to apply different clusters when judging art from different times. This paper shows that while allowing for this kind of historical relativity may be necessary to save the account, doing so could result in incorporating an essentially institutional component or making the theory extremely complex and virtually impossible to use.
(Dis)Functions: Marxist Theories Of Architecture And The Avant-Garde, Michael Chapman
(Dis)Functions: Marxist Theories Of Architecture And The Avant-Garde, Michael Chapman
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This paper investigates the relationship between architecture and theories of the avant-garde in the critical projects of the 1970s, with a focus on the theories of Peter Bürger and Manfredo Tafuri. Both Tafuri and Bürger were writing from within the context of a radicalized Marxism and were fueled by an intellectual pessimism towards the totalizing systems of cultural production that questioned the role of resistance in aesthetics and the inability of the historical avant-gardes to engage within the political and economic fields of contemporary society. While there is a common ancestry to these two approaches, and mutual acceptance of the …
Pushing The Limits: Risk And Accomplishment In Musical Performance, David Clowney, Robert Rawlins
Pushing The Limits: Risk And Accomplishment In Musical Performance, David Clowney, Robert Rawlins
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Using examples from musical performance of several kinds, we argue that risk-taking, showing off, virtuosity, and other forms of musical showmanship are in many cases, though not in all, an integral and appropriate part of the music as performed on that occasion. We reflect on the difference between cases where this is so and cases where it is not, using insights from John Dewey’s aesthetics as articulated in Art as Experience.
Schiller Revisited: "Beauty Is Freedom In Appearance" Aesthetics As A Challenge To The Modern Way Of Thinking, Wolfgang Welsch
Schiller Revisited: "Beauty Is Freedom In Appearance" Aesthetics As A Challenge To The Modern Way Of Thinking, Wolfgang Welsch
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This essay re-evaluates Schiller's idea of beauty as “freedom in appearance,” as brought forward in his Kallias or On Beauty(1793), against the backdrop of early modern and modern thinking that based itself on a fundamental split between nature and freedom, world and man. Schiller's claim that natural beauty results from freedom in nature bridges this gap. His suggestion is confirmed by modern science. Schiller's view is recommended and defended as a way of escaping modern bigotry
Smell And Anosmia In The Aesthetic: Appreciation Of Gardens, Marta Tafalla
Smell And Anosmia In The Aesthetic: Appreciation Of Gardens, Marta Tafalla
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant defined the garden as a visual art and considered that smell plays no role in its aesthetic appreciation. If the Kantian thesis were right, then a person who has no sense of smell (who suffers from anosmia) would not be impaired in his or her aesthetic appreciation of gardens. At the same time, a visually impaired person could not appreciate the beauty of gardens, although he or she could perceive them through hearing, smell, taste, and touch. In this paper I discuss the role of smell and anosmia in the aesthetic …
Politics And Aesthetics: Partitions And Partioning In Contemporary Art, Jonathan Owen Clark, Joao Lima Duque
Politics And Aesthetics: Partitions And Partioning In Contemporary Art, Jonathan Owen Clark, Joao Lima Duque
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Jacques Rancière defined the “distribution of the sensible” as the effect of a type of aesthetico-political decision-making that creates a partitioning of the realm of the perceivable in relation to both art and society. The artworld itself constructs its own particular types of curatorial partitioning: between “art” and “non-art,” between “dominant, residual, and emergent,” and between “mainstream” and “periphery.” This essay examines certain “boundary effects” that develop as a result of the act of the partitioning itself and closely examines what arguably are two new categories in contemporary art: “crossover” and “interventionist.” Both categories have a certain relationship to a …
Harnessing The Imagination: The Asymmetry Of Belief And Make-Believe, Elisa Galgut
Harnessing The Imagination: The Asymmetry Of Belief And Make-Believe, Elisa Galgut
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Contemporary philosophical discussion on the nature of the imagination has been influenced by recent empirical work in cognitive science. Our imaginative and emotional engagement with works of fiction has been explained by appealing to the similarities between our ordinary cognitive functioning and the workings of our imagination. Believing and imagining, it is argued, are governed by a “single code.” I argue against this claim, and suggest that our imagination – and in particular our literary imagination – in many respects functions very differently from ordinary cognition.
Nancy And Neruda: Poetry Thinking Love, Joshua M. Hall
Nancy And Neruda: Poetry Thinking Love, Joshua M. Hall
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
My intention in this paper is to respond to Jean-Luc Nancy’s claim that poetry, along with philosophy, is essentially incapable of what Nancy describes as “thinking love.” To do so, I will first try to come to an understanding of Nancy’s thinking regarding love and then of poetry as presented in his essay “Shattered Love.” Having thus prepared the way, I will then respond, via Pablo Neruda’s poem “Oda al Limón,” to Nancy’s understanding of poetry vis-à-vis “Shattered Love.” This response, in acting out Nancy’s thinking regarding love, will suggest a greater plurality within poetry than Nancy acknowledged
Fitness For Function And Dance Aesthetics, Eric C. Mullis
Fitness For Function And Dance Aesthetics, Eric C. Mullis
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This essay discusses the manner in which the appreciation of fitness for function can be applied to dance aesthetics. Drawing on Allen Carlson and Glenn Parsons’ work, the essay considers the problems of indeterminacy, translation, and dysfunction as they pertain to the appreciation of dance movement. It then argues that fitness for function can be used to critically assess post-modern task dances and contemporary dance works that do not rely on the execution of codified dance technique.
Contemporary Aesthetics: Perspectives On Times, Space And Content, Ossi Naukkarinen
Contemporary Aesthetics: Perspectives On Times, Space And Content, Ossi Naukkarinen
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
What is contemporary aesthetics? The answer to this question is often simply stated rather than carefully elaborated, even if the current nature and scope of the discipline is far from self-evident. To examine how both the concept and the field of contemporary aesthetics can be understood, I suggest that it is useful to consider three themes: the time, space, and content of aesthetics, i.e., the questions of when, where, and what contemporary aesthetics is. Through this, it is possible to construe a conceptual space of contemporary aesthetics and to compare different instantiations of it with each other.
The Point Of Everyday Aesthetics, Kevin Melcionne
The Point Of Everyday Aesthetics, Kevin Melcionne
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The point of everyday aesthetic activity is well-being