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Articles 1 - 30 of 577
Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
Cool As An Aesthetic Quality, James Kirwan
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 …
Relational Perception, Ecological Transition, And Artisanal Intelligence: Towards An Aesthetics For The Future, Nicola Perullo
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
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
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
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
Berleant’S Critique Of Aesthetic Disinterestedness Revisited, Again, Harri Mäcklin
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
No abstract provided.
Descriptive Aesthetics, Max Ryynänen
Descriptive Aesthetics, Max Ryynänen
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
No abstract provided.
Arnold Berleant’S Engagement With The Aesthetics Of Engagement, Fotini Vassiliou, Katerina Bantinaki
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
Aesthetic Engagement, Descriptive Aesthetics, And The Reformation Of Aesthetics: Responses To Mäcklin, Ryynänen, And Vassiliou, Arnold Berleant
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
No abstract provided.
Working-Class Aesthetics And The Transgressive Chronotope Of Demolition Derby, Billy Williams
Working-Class Aesthetics And The Transgressive Chronotope Of Demolition Derby, Billy Williams
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In order to understand the deployment of aesthetic experience within a working-class performance, this paper draws on ethnographic field research with participants and fans of demolition derby competitions in two regions of Arkansas. It attempts what Arnold Berleant calls a ‘social aesthetic,’ to discover within semiotic evidence foreclosures of identity that challenge orthodox rationality through an aesthetic parodying of driving and automobility. The paper uses the term ‘material integrity’ to describe how participants and fans of demolition derby understand authorized top-down opinions and the economic dynamics in which they participate. The multiplication of potential vectors of mobility within the frame …
“A Place Of Whites”: The History Of Brazilian Art, Rachel Cecília De Oliveira
“A Place Of Whites”: The History Of Brazilian Art, Rachel Cecília De Oliveira
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This article examines the racial foundations of art system in Brazil, focusing on how whiteness has shaped aesthetics and art history. Drawing on anthropological analysis, it explores two key dimensions: the spatial and symbolic “place of whiteness” and the mechanisms of cultural and institutional racism. Through these categories, the paper investigates how the histories of non-Western peoples and the artistic production of racialized artists have been systematically marginalized. By revealing their near-total absence from canonical narratives, the article highlights the need for an anti-racist rethinking of Brazilian art history.
Digital Color And Aesthetics: A Numerical Performance That Speaks To Presentness, Valeria Federici
Digital Color And Aesthetics: A Numerical Performance That Speaks To Presentness, Valeria Federici
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This article is concerned with digital color’s presentness and ubiquity and the implications of these aspects as reflected in contemporary artistic practices and aesthetics. Taking into consideration the history of color theory, the article explores premises and findings relevant to digital color and its differences with natural color as derived by optical vision. Further, it investigates the relationship between computer and artists, between appearance and experience in the digital realm, and highlights how digital color lies in the very nature of the medium: a numerical language hiding behind a mimetic two-dimensional surface or interface. These aspects are discussed through the …
Reflections On Jianrong Liao’S Recent Book, Arnold Berleant’S Environmental Aesthetics And Everyday Aesthetics, Nie Chunhua
Reflections On Jianrong Liao’S Recent Book, Arnold Berleant’S Environmental Aesthetics And Everyday Aesthetics, Nie Chunhua
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
No abstract provided.
On Conversation, Its Modes, Pleasures, And Perils, Stephanie Ross
On Conversation, Its Modes, Pleasures, And Perils, Stephanie Ross
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
My goal is to explore the pleasures and perils of conversation. After acknowledging some insights from speech act theory and pragmatics, I turn to Paul Grice’s account of conversation as cooperative. I offer some proposals about what makes conversants well-suited and their exchanges pleasant and successful, examine conversational style, contrast in-person with online communication, and close by examining some practices that can undermine conversational exchange. I suggest that imbalances of power and the phenomenon of being talked at are especially destructive.
Time And Atmosphere, Mǎdǎlina Diaconu
Time And Atmosphere, Mǎdǎlina Diaconu
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Phenomenological investigation into atmospheres as spatial feelings has paid little attention thus far to their multifaceted temporality. Ambiances are not only situated but situational; they have an intermittent existence and modify time perception. Certain moods need time to evolve, and prolonged exposure to them may change their character. The passing of time itself generates atmospheres—ages are stereotypically associated with dominant moods, and seasonal rhythms influence well-being. Moreover, ambiances shape epochs and are socially contagious. While the idea that generations can be assigned a prevailing mood is not new, the terms Zeitgeist and Zeitzeichen have been framed by an idealist philosophy …
Poetic Lines And Social Thought, Adam Neikirk
Poetic Lines And Social Thought, Adam Neikirk
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This article draws connections between formal poetry and the capacity to imagine not just the actual world, but any possible world as essentially peopled and peopled with others: both human and nonhuman intelligences. Beginning with an anecdote from the fringes of science, the author goes on to identify the presence of social thought in Romantic literary worlds, citing canonical poems that rely on the recursion of metrical lines such as “Mont Blanc” (Percy Bysshe Shelley) and “Kubla Khan” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge). A theory of poetic lines is then proffered in which poetic invention is related strongly to the idea of …
Context And Form In Garden Classification, David Fenner
Context And Form In Garden Classification, David Fenner
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Correctly classifying a garden is important because it allows us to appreciate a garden for what it is, create maintenance agendas for gardens, compare gardens to others in appropriate ways, and meaningfully evaluate gardens. We may correctly classify a garden by first deciding on an appropriate taxonomic approach and, second, by fitting gardens into their appropriate taxa. The first is achieved through justifying the organizing schema by ensuring that it significantly meets the goals mentioned above, results in meaningful and satisfying garden appreciation, and is comprehensive in scope—the creation of this taxonomic approach necessarily includes reference to a garden’s context. …
Introduction, Gioia Laura Iannilli, Ossi Naukkarinen, Enrico Glerean
Introduction, Gioia Laura Iannilli, Ossi Naukkarinen, Enrico Glerean
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
No abstract provided.
Preserving Meaning In An Age Of Algorithms And Ai, David L. Hildebrand
Preserving Meaning In An Age Of Algorithms And Ai, David L. Hildebrand
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
New technologies not only surveil and collect data about us, they also change and alter the way we make or preserve meaning, including aesthetic meaning. Accordingly, the ways we consider, research, and educate aesthetics will have to adapt, at least insofar as it keeps a new range of technological dimensions in mind. To help imagine such dimensions, this paper examines the opportunities and challenges of technologies offering new ways of creating things while also nudging and “hypernudging” our actions. Such developments may initially seem trivial but they are changing our relationships with one another and with ourselves. After a brief, …
Human And Ai Perspectives On Academic Aesthetics, Gioia Laura Iannilli, Ossi Naukkarinen
Human And Ai Perspectives On Academic Aesthetics, Gioia Laura Iannilli, Ossi Naukkarinen
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The purpose of this article is to examine how current AI tools can be used in aesthetics research and teaching. We focus in particular on one theme: how traditional ways of describing the field of aesthetics as a whole could relate to descriptions made with the help of artificial intelligence. Describing the field and its main questions is unavoidable when we teach and research aesthetics; our question is, how can AI be used for that? Starting from a new meta-aesthetic tripartite model of aesthetics that we introduce, we raise a set of questions to pave the way to a more …
Anticipation And Aesthetics After Automation, Tanya Ravn Ag
Anticipation And Aesthetics After Automation, Tanya Ravn Ag
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This paper explores generative technology’s ongoing aesthetic evolution through the lens of anticipation. It proposes anticipation as an alternative perspective to automation to understand the implications of generative technology in relation to aesthetic production and evolution. By focusing on anticipation, the discussion shifts from merely considering AI’s impact on aesthetics as instrumental to creative production to examining the anticipative behaviors and affective responses these technologies develop, engage, and cultivate through our interactions with them. Understanding generative technology as anticipatory highlights how deeply human and cultural expectations influence the design, recursive adaptation, and future anticipations of AI systems. Viewing our engagements …
Aesthetics In The Age Of Ai: A Methodological Self-Delineation, Anne Virginia Meindl
Aesthetics In The Age Of Ai: A Methodological Self-Delineation, Anne Virginia Meindl
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Current debates on AI entering aesthetic practices often take on a normative stance by evaluating the artistic status of AI art. This article seeks to develop a different perspective by referring back to the original descriptive meaning of ‘aisthesis’ and also to the origins of aesthetics as discourse on the senses and art. Introducing a Hegelian understanding of the artistic medium—as formally modeling a certain structure of consciousness rather than just as a neutral means of representation—this article provides a methodological starting point of an aesthetically engaged critique of AI’s implicit subject model. Rather than operating with abstract definitions of …
An Agent Or A Tool? Artificial Intelligence, Heidegger’S Robot And The Ignorant’S Toaster, David Holtgrave
An Agent Or A Tool? Artificial Intelligence, Heidegger’S Robot And The Ignorant’S Toaster, David Holtgrave
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Be it in art, aesthetics, or anywhere in or beyond academia, artificial intelligence, or AI, often is said to do a lot of stuff formerly done by humans. In this essay, I will argue that this line of thinking is to some extent misleading. On my account, it is still humans that do the same stuff, only by different means. Taking its employment and discussion in the arts as an example, I will set up and discuss what I call the ‘agent view’ of AI and show how, for those cases in which we typically attribute agency to AI, this …
The Mimesis Of Difference: A Deleuzian Study Of Generative Ai In Artistic Production, Jakub Mácha
The Mimesis Of Difference: A Deleuzian Study Of Generative Ai In Artistic Production, Jakub Mácha
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This study uses the traditional concept of mimesis, reframed by Deleuze as a repetition of difference, to investigate art created by large language models (LLMs) or generative pretrained transformers (GPTs). The current rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is intensifying the mimetic repetition of the different. An AI system repeats carefully selected elements from its extensive training dataset. Rearranging these elements introduces differences in the mimetic repetition. Since the training dataset is updated over longer time frames, it is analogous to a static Platonic universe. Once AI can update its static elements with each repetition, it will become the true Dionysian …
Is Generative Ai In Aesthetics Really New?: The Visualist Perspective, Michalle Gal
Is Generative Ai In Aesthetics Really New?: The Visualist Perspective, Michalle Gal
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The concept of AI in aesthetics is encountering interest as new algorithmic machines now generate visual works alongside philosophical discourse, sparking both enthusiasm and concern. Yet, this idea has deep roots, reflected in longstanding debates within the discipline. These discussions, which are similar to the new ones, have examined issues like the illusion of an image or object’s ontological stability; the nature of function and user control; distinctions between the natural and artificial, authenticity and forgery; the divide between handmade and mass-produced items; the challenges of readymade and indiscernibility in art; and the potential of ekphrasis. As a result, skepticism …
On Deepfakes And Dog Whistles: Thinking Aesthetically About Generative Ai, Maja Bak Herrie
On Deepfakes And Dog Whistles: Thinking Aesthetically About Generative Ai, Maja Bak Herrie
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This article focuses on the aesthetic dimensions of contemporary media created with generative AI, challenging traditional dichotomies of truth and falsehood, real and fake. It draws upon diverse examples including Samsung’s “Space Zoom” images of the moon, AI-driven political imagery, and the randomized aesthetics of Google’s Gemini. Additionally, it examines two artistic projects by Elisa Giardina Papa and Trevor Paglen. The article argues for an aesthetic analysis that goes beyond debates over authenticity, highlighting instead the inherent complexity and weirdness of these digital artifacts by exploring how AI reshapes perceptions of reality. By invoking, among other things, theories of agnotology, …
Prompting Aesthetic Ideologies Of Generative Text-To-Image Ai, Lotte Philipsen
Prompting Aesthetic Ideologies Of Generative Text-To-Image Ai, Lotte Philipsen
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In generative AI, text-to-image prompting has gained popularity, which calls for image theoretical attention. This article evokes critical image theory, developed by Norman Bryson and W. J. Thomas Mitchell in the 1980s and 1990s, which offers important, relevant nuances when analyzing contemporary AI image-tools. By investigating specific cases of text-to-image AI through this theoretical filter, the article demonstrates how certain aesthetic ideologies—especially perceptualism, the idea of natural images, and splitting and hierarchization of text and image—govern generative AI.
Beauty And The Bit: Ai-Driven Philosophical Aesthetics, Stefano De Giorgis, Aldo Gangemi
Beauty And The Bit: Ai-Driven Philosophical Aesthetics, Stefano De Giorgis, Aldo Gangemi
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This paper presents a novel computational framework for formalizing and analyzing philosophical aesthetics discourse through the integration of knowledge representation techniques and large language models (LLMs). The framework introduces a structure based on four elements combining source texts, core ontology, knowledge graphs, and interpretative mappings to systematically capture both explicit content and implicit semantic relationships in aesthetics texts. Through a case study analyzing works by Dewey, Danto, and Sibley, we demonstrate how this approach enables the systematic reverse engineering of aesthetic analytical methods while maintaining semantic stability and interpretative clarity. The framework leverages human expert annotation alongside LLM capabilities to …
Appraiset: Discussions On A New Art Dataset, Thomas Şerban Von Davier, Max Van Kleek, Nigel Shadbolt Frs, Freng, Fbcs
Appraiset: Discussions On A New Art Dataset, Thomas Şerban Von Davier, Max Van Kleek, Nigel Shadbolt Frs, Freng, Fbcs
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the arts have gained significant attention, particularly with the advent of generative AI. Researchers have explored AI’s capability to create art autonomously or in collaboration with artists, and AI’s role in curating, classifying, and applying aesthetic metrics to artwork. However, the opaque nature of proprietary algorithms used in these applications presents challenges for understanding AI’s influence on aesthetics. To address this, open-source data and code are essential for investigating how AI can develop its own aesthetic language. This paper introduces AppraiSet, an open art dataset containing evaluative metadata designed to support the field of …
Data Mining And Ai Visualization Of Key Terms From U.S. Supreme Court Cases From 1789 To 2022, Kory Blose, Heidi Biggs, Robbie Fraleigh, Luke Meeken, Eduardo Navas
Data Mining And Ai Visualization Of Key Terms From U.S. Supreme Court Cases From 1789 To 2022, Kory Blose, Heidi Biggs, Robbie Fraleigh, Luke Meeken, Eduardo Navas
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In this paper, we take on the question of the potential risks of AI in aesthetics: What kind of risks does AI pose? To engage with this question, we focus on how generative AI models’ results consist of decontextualized content that does not always correspond with its historical context. From this standpoint, bias and misinterpretation pose major challenges in academic aesthetics because AI can be used both as a tool to make research more specific and precise and also for quick results that avoid in-depth research and on the surface may appear decisive and accurate. We set out to expose …