Aesthetics Commons^™

Emotions As Work Material: On Dancers' Refined Use Of Affectivity, Camille S. Buttingsrud

Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology

As part of their professional practice, dancers allow their affectivity to enhance their kinesthetic work. Their intentional and disciplined use of personal, emotional resources ensures both creativity, interpretation, absorption, and connections in ways that extend beyond the traditional phenomenological understanding of affectivity as pre-reflectively based. The affective regulations dancers employ can be seen as an “artistic epoché,” and their layered performance awareness corresponds with Edmund Husserl’s descriptions of “image-consciousness.” Through qualitative interviews with three professional dancers, phenomenological theory, and additional supportive literature, this article shows how affectivity can be experienced through high-order levels of Leib, constituting states of “bodily …

Participatory Presence In Aesthetic Experiences Of Performance, Sophie Morrissey, Shaun Gallagher

Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology

In the context of the performing arts, presence can generally be thought of as an experienced connection between performer and audience that heightens the affective impact of the performance. Explorations of how presence is experienced during live performance contribute to our understanding of the relation of presence to participants’ overall aesthetic experience and participation in the performance. However, they also reveal the complex phenomenology of presence and the challenge of offering a unified framework that can account for its various phenomenal manifestations. In this article, we conceive of presence as a recursive dynamical feedback loop that emerges through and modulates …

Atmospheres Create Interest: Experiencing And Utilizing Shared Situations, Andreas Rauh

Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology

Even though atmospheres are usually only subtly perceived in the manner of a felt body in everyday life, they possess a specific efficacy. They hold the potential to address people in their felt-bodily constitution and to arouse interest in the shared situation. In the following, the phenomenon of atmosphere is explored through case analyses from an art education project and defined as a shared situation in contrast to affect and mood. This is followed by an examination of the fundamental importance of atmosphere for learning environments. With a focus on pedagogical relationships, the role of atmospheres in educational contexts and …

Artworks As Affective Atmospheres: Dufrenne's View Of Their Aesthetic And Philosophical Significance, Dimitris Apostolopoulos

Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology

This article reconstructs and critically evaluates Mikel Dufrenne’s arguments for the claim that our embodied engagement with art is the most fundamental variety of affective experience. I show how, on his account, aesthetic affectivity, or feeling, emerges in aesthetic experience, and identify the central role that aesthetic atmosphere plays in its constitution. I propose an interpretation on which aesthetic feeling, for Dufrenne, is a founded and skilled form of intentional activity that has epistemic (evidence-responsive) and metaphysical (world-disclosive) import. An aesthetic atmosphere, I contend, is an affective and perceptual context that is tied to an artwork and exercises a regulative …

With Images In Time. Atmosphere And Art: Mediation And Dialogue, Pauline Von Bonsdorff

Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology

The article challenges the idea that atmospheres are always sensed immediately. Instead, atmospheres in art are mediated and arise in a dialogue between work and audience. To understand how, we should pay attention to temporal structures in and around the work, such as the dynamics and duration of aesthetic experience and the historicity of both work and perceiver, including pasts and present. Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenological aesthetics, complemented with insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of perception, offer resources for this. Writing on expression, Dufrenne distinguishes “presence,” in which sense is felt immediately and firmly connected to embodiment, and “sentiment,” which arises …

Rapture "At A Distance": Searching For Pathic-Atmospheric Aesthetics, Tonino Griffero

Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology

The paper proposes a rethinking of the role of aesthetics as a theory of sensory experience as it is encountered in the lifeworld (and only secondarily in relation to art). Accordingly, pathic and atmospheric (bottom-up) aesthetics, which centers on the ability to expose oneself to intense experiences without attempting to control them and conceives feelings as atmospheric powers that permeate a particular space without being reduced to projections of the perceiver’s moods, should replace the idealistic (top-down) approach.

Human Evil (In The Weird), Lucas Ethridge

University Honors Theses

This paper examines a trending doom in speculative fiction: the post-human age. Many modern works have started to look past human civilization as humans surrender all hope and faith in a climate-doomed world. Honing in on core concepts in Weird fiction, this paper explores human merit through Old and New Weird. A good part spends time establishing the canon, looking at similar patterns across age, philosophy, war and genre. The chief question asks if humankind was ever worth saving.

Cool As An Aesthetic Quality, James Kirwan

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

To find a thing cool is to see it as the expression (directly, analogically, or by association) of a certain kind of character. It is primarily attributed to human beings perceived as autonomous to an enviable degree: indifferent to emotions that the perceiver experiences as oppressive. This grounding of cool in the attribution of an intrinsic quality to a person is revealed by the way the attribution may be checked by a perception of effort, vulnerability, or insensibility in their behavior. Objects other than human beings appear cool either by analogy or association with this primary attribution. In finding someone …

Early Conceptual Sketches Of Blended Reality And The Precursor To The Bbs Quad (2022), David Smith

Publications and Research

This document contains two original hand-drawn conceptual sketches created in early 2022, representing the earliest visual formulations of what would later evolve into the Balanced Blended Space (BBS) framework. The drawings predate my first conversations with ChatGPT and were produced as part of my independent sabbatical research into blended environments, mediated performance, and human–machine interaction.

The first drawing examines human–computational mediation, perception, and internal mapping. The second sketch—later referred to informally as the “BBS Quad”—extends this idea by reconciling cognition–computation symmetry with physical–virtual spatial relationships. Published together, these images document the conceptual foundations of the BBS framework prior to its …

Relational Perception, Ecological Transition, And Artisanal Intelligence: Towards An Aesthetics For The Future, Nicola Perullo

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this essay, I address the issue of future generations according to relational aesthetics. Specifically, I propose a way of feeling and thinking about the future based on a particular mode of perception that stems from relational aesthetics: relational perception. Within this broad context, I propose a perspective that challenges assumptions in expressions such as ‘digital innovation’ and ‘ecological transition.’ Since I believe that relational perception needs to focus on the continuity of becoming, I emphasize the importance of the analogical dimension of thinking, which is currently overshadowed by the digital mindset. Finally, I suggest qualifying the potential of such …

In Defense Of Racebending, Cathleen Muller

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In an effort to diversify fictions, many creators use racebending, changing the race of a character from an original fictional work or person from history and incorporating the altered character into a new fictional work. While racebending has been used across many forms of popular media, from comics to musicals, there has been little philosophical attention devoted to it. In what follows, I attempt to fill that gap by discussing the aesthetic value of racebending, its moral value, and how it can be understood on several prominent metaphysical views.

The Symposium On Arnold Berleant's Works, Editorial Office

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This symposium publishes all the contributions presented at the XVIth Summer Conference of the international Institute of Applied Aesthetics held in Lahti, Finland, June 2025. We thank the contributors for preparing their presentation for publication.

Arnold Berleant And The International Institute Of Applied Aesthetics: Introduction To The Panel Discussion, Arto Haapala

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Berleant’S Critique Of Aesthetic Disinterestedness Revisited, Again, Harri Mäcklin

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Descriptive Aesthetics, Max Ryynänen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Arnold Berleant’S Engagement With The Aesthetics Of Engagement, Fotini Vassiliou, Katerina Bantinaki

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Aesthetic Engagement, Descriptive Aesthetics, And The Reformation Of Aesthetics: Responses To Mäcklin, Ryynänen, And Vassiliou, Arnold Berleant

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Pedagogical Escapism And Western Performativity: A Psycho-Aesthetic Critique Of Belly-Dance Adaption Symbolics, Maryam Farahani

Comparative Woman

This paper addresses positionality misreading in Western pedagogical adaptions of belly dancing. Raqs Sharqi, known in the West as belly dancing, is a predominantly West Asian and North African discipline and performance art with multimodal varieties, globally taught and practiced while crossing sport, narratology, and story-telling boundaries. As a unique performance activity, it portrays a dynamic entertainment space to connect one’s multiple identities. I argue that Raqs Sharqi, not only as an aesthetic-educational art form but also, perhaps unwittingly, reiterated as an Orientalist communication trope in belly dancing, has forged East-West performativity models. However, the historical education-literature for Western women …

From Sensibility To Critical Engagement: Sympathy, Animality, And Subjecthood In Wollstonecraft’S Maria And Vindication, Yingnan Shang

Comparative Woman

This paper examines Mary Wollstonecraft’s strategic use of sentimental animal tropes alongside rationalist critique in Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), arguing that she mobilizes sensibility not as an end in itself, but as a pedagogical instrument within a broader project of aesthetic education—one intended to move readers from affective sympathy toward political and philosophical judgment. Focusing in particular on animal metaphors—especially in the character of Jemima, who repeatedly figures herself as a domesticated and brutalized creature—I trace how Wollstonecraft employs tropes of animality to illuminate the processes by which …

Accessibility And Conformity: English Prose And Indian Poetry, Saralyn A. Clark

Scholars Week

Raja Rao Kanthapura stirs rhetorical discourse among scholars on effectivity through his infused Kannada/English writing style that both Indian and English readers can engage with and acknowledge the British-colonialist violence set within the novel. This essay criticizes existing scholarship that analyses through European rhetorical analysis such as reader-response lenses; and argues for research on Dhvani, Rasa Sutra and Puranic theories that support Rao’s aesthetic language and his rhetorical purpose. Kanthapura’s language hybridizes English prose with Indian poetics and invites both Indian and Western readers to engage with resistance against colonialization in a narrative that refuses Indian identity erasure. The novel’s …