Aesthetics Commons^™

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 …

Arts-Based Sustainability: From New York To Malawi, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Recognizing that libraries serve multiple constituencies and subject areas, this chapter documents and advocates for development of transdisciplinary arts-based research (ABR) and culture-related projects linked to environmental challenges. Libraries contribute collections and spaces, as well as the research of library and information scientists. Libraries are currently among invisible contributors to sustainability planning and services. The chapter will link this invisibility to the value of what visual arts refer to as negative space elements in subjects ranging from traditional ecological knowledge to environmental science. Library collections, projects, and research contribute to education for sustainable development (ESD) as required to achieve the …

Querying The Ecological Sublime: Colonial Aesthetics, Anticolonial Thought, And The ‘Double Fracture’, Tacuma Peters

Publications and Research

This article examines the ecological sublime in its relationship to the history of colonial aesthetics, anticolonial thought, and contemporary colonialism. It argues that, while Edmund Burke utilized the sublime in support of colonialism (including settler colonialism) in North America and colonial slavery, Samson Occom and Ottobah Cugoano developed versions of the sublime to contest British colonialism in the Americas. The history of this aesthetic contestation has not been represented in scholarship on the ecological sublime, which, this article shows, has a vexed relationship with historical and contemporary colonialism. The article argues that the ecological sublime exhibits the “double fracture” of …

On The Sublime And Beautiful: Edmund Burke, Ottobah Cugoano, And Reverberations Of Eighteenth-Century Racial Aesthetics, Tacuma Peters

Publications and Research

This article examines Edmund Burke and Ottobah Cugoano’s aesthetic thought in relation to eighteenth-century racial slavery. It interrogates their ideas of the sublime and beautiful which contribute to their different political positions on the abolition of slavery: whereas the former advocated the gradual abolition of the slave trade and distant emancipation, the latter sought the immediate abolition of the trade and rapid emancipation. It contends that Burke’s discussions of the sublime and beautiful were racialized, his advocacy of white authority on plantation slavery was rooted in his aesthetics, and his evocation of the Black sublime throughout his long career fit …

Seeing Through The Aesthetic Worldview, Andrew Lambert

Publications and Research

Examines the various ways in which the Chinese intellectual tradition has been characterized as an 'aesthetic tradition'. In particular, this paper explores Roger Ames’ and David Hall’s claim that the classical Confucian tradition is an aesthetic tradition, comprising an aesthetic order.

Are Postmodernism And #Metoo Incompatible?, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

If postmodernism renders the replicant Rachael legible as a glossy simulacrum, then #MeToo renders her brutally legible as a victim of sexual violence.

The Noble Art Of Lying, James E. Mahon

Publications and Research

In this chapter I examine the writings of Mark Twain on lying, especially his essays "On the decay of the Art of Lying" and "My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It." I show that Twain held that there were two kinds of lies: the spoken lie and the silent lie. The silent lie is the lie of not saying what one is thinking, and is far more common than the spoken lie. The greatest silent lies, according to Twain, were the national silent lies that there was nothing wrong with slavery (the U.S.), that there was nothing …

Philosophy's Rarified Air: On Peden's Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

María Antonia González Valerio, El Arte Develado. Consideraciones Estéticas Sobre La Hermenéutica De Gadamer [Reseña Del Libro], Adriana Renero

Publications and Research

El tema central que nos ofrece María Antonia González Valerio es el estrecho vínculo que existe entre la estética y la hermenéutica de Hans-Georg Gadamer. Mediante una comparación de la estética gadameriana con otras teorías y reflexiones estéticas que la anteceden, tales como la Crítica del juicio de Kant, la Estética de Hegel, El origen de la obra de arte y Hölderlin y la esencia de la poesía de Heidegger, la autora se propone mostrar que Gadamer ofrece nuevas reflexiones sobre el arte y sobre la experiencia del arte.

Identidad Y Entendimiento. Schelling O Una Instancia Intermedia Entre Kant Y Hegel, Adriana Renero

Publications and Research

Resumen:

Existe una tendencia a estudiar los puntos de encuentro o desencuentro entre Kant y Hegel pero se olvida la reflexión de Schelling, crucial para comprender el diálogo entre estos sistemas de pensamiento. Un caso en que se patentiza este olvido se advierte en Sublime Understanding, Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel (2005) de Kirk Pillow, quien desarrolla un modelo estético para ensanchar la noción de entendimiento humano. Partiendo de la Crítica del juicio de Kant y las Lecciones de estética de Hegel, Pillow encuentra una instancia intermedia entre el valor cognoscitivo de la determinación conceptual hegeliana y la indeterminación …