Philosophy Commons^™

Spiritual Rituals Of Chinese Ink Painting: The Suggestions Of Shitao, Eva Kit Wah Man

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Ritual has an essential connection with art. This article suggests that the study on Shitao has significance in proposing a ritual theory of art for two reasons. First, textual analysis on his treatise on ink painting, Hua-pu, demonstrates that an artist is/should be involved in the interconnectedness of what he or she depicts. This involvement requires penetration into the primordial intuition towards what he or she perceives and has an ethical imperative to use the artist’s talent conferred by heaven. Second, Shitao’s artistic practice is interpreted as a form of rites that are a reaction to the sociopolitical changes …

The Power Of Horror: Abject Art And Terrorism In Don Delillo’S Falling Man, Kelsie Donnelly

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper argues that Don DeLillo’s 2007 novel, Falling Man, engages with abject art to disrupt the pre-existing systems of signification and dualistic rhetoric that characterized state and media responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The novel engages with one of the most controversial areas of 9/11 discourse: claims that the attacks were an artistic spectacle. Falling Man posits that if art is to continue to grapple with the meanings of 9/11, it must depart from familiar discourses of tragedy and triumph and embrace radical artistic responses. The novel fulfills this through its engagement with abject …

Reflections On The Aesthetics Of Violence, Arnold Berleant

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Violence has long been a factor in human life and has been widely depicted in the arts. This essay explores how the artistic and appreciative responses to violence have been practiced, understood, and valued. It emphasizes the difference between the aesthetics of distant, disinterested appreciation and the engaged appreciative experience of violence in the arts, and insists on the relevance of their behavioral and ethical implications.

Letters On The Aesthetic Deformation Of Man, Katya Mandoki

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Friedrich Schiller wrote Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man hoping to elevate human potential through the arts for the development of free citizens of the Republic, and also in reaction to the decline of the French Revolution into a Reign of Terror. Nowadays, with the prominent role social networks have acquired in human relations, aesthetics is an invaluable tool for capturing attention in marketing and political propaganda, no less than in recruitment and indoctrination by terrorist organizations. Adopting a pragmatics approach, we will examine Schiller’s relevance today regarding uses and abuses of aesthetics related to terrorism, focusing on the …

Isis And Futurist Terrorism Versus Cyberpunk, Thorsten Botz-Bornstei

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The origin of science fiction is twentieth-century Futurism. For the largest part of the twentieth century, science fiction maintained an optimistic attitude towards the future. At the end of the 1970s, the modern, optimistic, and futurist vision of the future, typical for avant-garde movements of the 1930s, took a negative turn and became dark, pessimistic, and cynical, in a postmodern sense; it became what would be called, in a word, ‘cyberpunk.’ In this article, I want to show that the terrorist organization generally known as ISIS (Islamic State) intends, or rather intended, to go back to futurism and modernism by …

The Aesthetics Of Terrorism And The Temporalities Of Representation, Robert Appelbaum

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Representations of terrorism, in fiction and non-fiction, summon their readers and viewers to examine terrorism in any of at least four modes of temporality: the past, the past perfect, the continuous present, and the simple present. This essay explains those modalities and shows how they work with reference to novels, a film documentary, and contemporary American television, including the documentary Black September and the series NCIS. The modalities are ideological as well as narratological functions and are sometimes employed to occlude the historical and pragmatic dimensions of terrorist violence. Terrorism is always already aesthetic and “hyperreal,” in Jean Baudrillard’s …

Introduction, Emmanouil Aretoulakis

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Dismantling Bodies: The War On Terror, And The Wound Aesthetic Of Csi: Crime Scene Investigation (2000-2015), Christopher J. Davies

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper interrogates the aesthetic signature of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000-2015). Utilizing a selection of representative episodes airing during George W. Bush’s first term, I analyze how CSI mobilizes a particular aesthetic of wounding in which wound sites, bodily and geographic, may be understood to serve as vulnerable apertures through which underlying threads of critical engagement with the direction of the 9/11 discourse may be aspirated from within the body of the text. Specifically, I approach the wound sites of CSI as sources of war-on-terror critique that serve political double-duty. On the one hand, CSI’s injury-centric narratives and …

A Role For Empathy In Decolonizing Aesthetics: Unlikely Lessons From Roger Fry, Ivan Gaskell

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Artist and art historian Roger Fry used Paul Gauguin’s 1896 painting, Poèmes barbares, to advertise his 1910 exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists. In Vision and Design (1920), Fry promoted the so-called “primitive” art of Oceania and sub-Saharan Africa as depending on unmediated perception that he associated with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Although Fry’s assumption of an “ultra-primitive directness of vision” on the part of African makers ignores their own mediating conventions, his reliance on the Vischers’ notion of empathetic connection enhances the possibility of regarding the cultural products of peoples foreign to the percipient with what Paul C. …

Ordinary Monsters: Ethical Criticism And The Lives Of Artists, Christopher Bartel

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Should we take into account an artist’s personal moral failings when appreciating or evaluating the work? In this essay, I seek to expand Berys Gaut’s account of ethicism by showing how moral judgment of an artist’s private moral actions can figure in one’s overall evaluation of their work. To expand Gaut’s view, I argue that the artist’s personal morality is relevant to our evaluation of their work because we may only come to understand the point of view of the work, and therefore the work’s prescribed attitude, by examining the values, attitudes, and behaviors of the artist. This view is …

An Alternative To “Rules” In Practice Approaches To Distinguishing Art Kinds, Larry Shiner

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Numerous contemporary philosophers have invoked the idea that art is best understood as a social practice in order to distinguish among art kinds or to distinguish Art from closely related practices such as Design. Many general accounts of social practices and of art practices in particular claim that sets of shared assumptions or norms are a key constituent of practices. But some standard accounts of social practices interpret these shared norms with the concept of “rules” or “agreements.” I argue that the idea of rules or agreements is theoretically inadequate and should be replaced by what the philosopher of science, …

Wangheng Chen’S Chinese Environmental Aesthetics, Arnold Berleant

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Who Are We?, Jale Erzen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Perception And World, Wolfgang Welsch

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

In Defense Of Cities: On Negative Presentation Of Urban Areas In Environmental Preference Studies, Anu Besson

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper critiques a common research method, image-based studies, in assessing environmental references. The method is used, in particular, in the fields of environmental psychology, landscape studies, and health studies, here called empirical environmental preference studies or EEP studies. I argue that the established view in the EEP field that nature is inherently experienced as more aesthetically appealing and restorative than urban environments may be biased because of the image-based method. This paper presents a literature review of EEP studies, discussing them in a framework of environmental and everyday aesthetics. The conclusion is that EEP studies may strip cities of …

Charting New Territory: The Aesthetic Value Of Artistic Visions That Emanate In The Aftermath Of Severe Trauma, Tania Love Abramson, Paul R. Abramson

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Duchamp And The Science Of Art, Miklos Legrady

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Art Addressing The Anthropocene, Wolfgang Welsch

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The current diagnosis that the era we are living in ought to be conceived as anthropocene has two implications: 1. Human activity is changing the superficial as well as the deep structure of our planet to a formerly unknown degree; and 2. The foreseeable catastrophic consequences of our impact on life on this planet command a fundamental change of our technological-consumerist attitude. How can the arts address this situation?

One relatively superficial option is ecological art. But, despite all its good intentions, it often just contributes to the widespread sedation procedures that prevent us from taking the necessary measures. A …

Reconsidering Darkness, Matti Tainio

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

The Cosmography Of Aesthetics, Yrjö Sepänmaa

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Representation And Transparency In Artistic Astronomical Photographs, Stephen Chadwick

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The development of astronomical photography has raised many interesting epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical questions, in addition to questions in aesthetics. One such question concerns the nature of the aesthetic properties possessed by these photographs. In this article I concentrate on one such property, namely representation. That artistic astronomical photographs are representational cannot be disputed, but whether this is an aesthetic property is open to question. In this article, I show that it is an aesthetic property and compare it with the analogous property associated with paintings and traditional artistic photographs. In order to do this, I explain what makes astronomical …

Notices, Editorial Office

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Editorial, Editorial Office

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Recent Publications, Editorial Office

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

That Some Of Sol Lewitt's Later Wall Drawings Aren't Wall Drawings, P. D. Mangus

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Art And Trauma: Yet Another Arthur Danto Zombie, Tania Love Abramson, Paul R. Abramson

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

The Catholic Imagination, Y Bittner Wiseman

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

The Issue Of Newness Viewed Through Korean Aesthetics, Joosik Min

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In Korean traditional aesthetics, discussions on newness are rare. The tendency to value old things and recognize them as standards is deeply rooted in Korean culture, and such customs seem to be no exception in aesthetics. It cannot be denied that Korean arts also has a social tendency towards tradition, which has been dominated by morality, and thus reflects past-centered or past-recalling ways of thinking rather than dynamic or forward-looking ways of thinking. Then, what does artistic creation mean in Korean culture? Is creation possible? In my view, the logic of change and development does not seem to gain much …

Recent Publications, Editorial Office

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Appreciating Nature And Art: Recent Western And Chinese Perspectives, Glenn Parsons, Xin Zhang

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Landscape painting has played a significant role in shaping practices of nature appreciation in Western and Chinese cultures. Both cultures have also seen the recent emergence of philosophical views of nature appreciation that stress the importance of ecological understanding. However, these philosophical views differ in their response to the influence of the landscape painting tradition: whereas Western approaches have largely been critical, Chinese ecoaestheticians have embraced it. In this paper, we explore this difference and argue that it is not explained by differences between Western and Chinese art but by differences in Western and Chinese philosophers’ conceptions of ecology. We …