Showing titles in Aesthetics

One of the great, but often unmentioned, causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kind of walls, chairs, buildings, and streets we’re surrounded by. And yet a concern for architecture and design is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. The Architecture of Happiness starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be - and argues that it is architecture’s task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.

Bloomsbury presents The Politics of Aesthetics by Jacques Ranciere, read by Charles Armstrong. The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship between art and politics, reclaiming "aesthetics" from the narrow confines it is often reduced to. Jacques Rancière reveals its intrinsic link to...

Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally means "making" and in this context includes drama—comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play—as well as lyric poetry, epic poetry, and the dithyramb). He examines its "first principles" and identifies its genres and basic elements. His analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion.

What part of your beautiful self were you taught to hate? We spend a lot of time trying to improve our 'defects', according to society's ideals of beauty. But these ideals that are often reductive, tyrannical and commercially entangled, imposed upon us by oppressive systems and further strengthened by our conditioned self-loathing. This book encourages unruliness, exploring the ways in which we can rebel against and subvert the current system.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Concrete has an image problem. Portrayed as boring, cheap, and thoughtless, it is often considered synonymous with bad architecture. For many, concrete is architecture gone wrong –...

Beauty today is a paradox. The cult of beauty is ubiquitous but it has lost its transcendence and become little more than an aspect of consumerism, the aesthetic dimension of capitalism. The sublime and unsettling aspects of beauty have given way to corporeal pleasures and 'likes', resulting in...

In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, Bence Nanay introduces the field of aesthetics, considering both Western and non-Western aesthetic traditions and exploring why it is sometimes misunderstood or considered to be too elitist - by artists, musicians, and even philosophers. As Nanay shows, so-called "high art" has no more claims on aesthetics than sitcoms, tattoos, or punk rock. 

In A Philosophical Enquiry, Edmund Burke sets out to define the nature of beauty and sublimity, and establish an objective criterion for discussing aesthetics. His definition of beauty as rooted in pleasure and sexuality, and the sublime in pain and survival, aligned him with the empiricists John Locke and David Hume, as he replaced the metaphysics of Plato's aesthetics with a psychological and physiological perspective.

Philosopher Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature. Life supplies art with its raw materials, but art, Noë argues, remakes life by giving us resources to live differently. Our lives are permeated with the aesthetic. Indeed, human nature is an aesthetic phenomenon, and art is the truest way of understanding ourselves. All this suggests that human nature is not a natural phenomenon. 

The Art of Rhetoric, a guide on the principles behind oratorical skill, is a core text on the art of persuasion. Aristotle contends that rhetoric is one of the key elements of philosophy – along with logic and dialectic. The work consists of three books: the first is a general overview, the second concerns the means of persuasion that an orator must deploy, and the third discusses elements of style and arrangement.

In Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.

Imagination: A Very Short Introduction explores imagination as a cognitive power and an essential dimension of human flourishing, demonstrating how imagination plays multiple roles in human cognition and shapes humanity in profound ways. Examining philosophical, evolutionary, and literary perspectives on imagination, the author shows how this facility, while potentially distorting, both frees us from immediate reality and enriches our sense of it, making possible our experience of a meaningful world.

Poststructuralism changes the way we understand the relations between human beings, their culture, and the world. Following a brief account of the historical relationship between structuralism and poststructuralism, this Very Short Introduction traces the key arguments that have led poststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture. 

Postmodernism has become the buzzword of contemporary society over the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this highly engaging introduction, the mysteries of this most elusive of concepts are unraveled, casting a critical light upon the way we live now, from the politicizing of museum culture to the cult of the politically correct. The key postmodernist ideas are explored and challenged, as they figure in the theory, philosophy, politics, ethics, and artwork of the period, and it is shown how they have interacted within a postmodernist culture. 

A compelling argument for the necessity for art in life, Nietzsche's first book is fuelled by his enthusiasms for Greek tragedy, for the philosophy of Schopenhauer and for the music of Wagner, to whom this work was dedicated. Nietzsche outlined a distinction between its two central forces: the Apolline, representing beauty and order, and the Dionysiac, a primal or ecstatic reaction to the sublime. He believed the combination of these states produced the highest forms of music and tragic drama, which not only reveal the truth about suffering in life, but also provide a consolation for it.

Using step by step instructions, the author illustrates how to be fully present in the moment without clinging to joy or resisting sorrow. This opens the door to a kind of wellness that goes beyond circumstances. Actively engaging life as it is in this fashion holds the potential for awakening to a peace and well-being that are not dependent on whether a particular experience is joyful or sorrowful.

The concept of disparity has long been a topic of obsession and argument for philosophers but Slavoj Žižek would argue that what disparity and negativity could mean, might mean and should mean for us and our lives has never been more hotly debated. Disparities explores contemporary 'negative'...

Bloomsbury presents Football by Mark Yakich, read by Josh Wichard. Object Lessons is a series of short books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When is the “beautiful game” at its most beautiful? How does football function as a lens through which so many view their daily lives?...

The idea that a small group of dedicated aspirants could work together to help dissipate the heavy enshrouding glamours which oppress humanity and deflect the light of truth, was initially quite a startling one. Spiritual progress has for so long held no meaning for the individual other than his own personal growth, that to consider spiritual experience in direct relation to world conditions is for many a revolutionary idea.

Counsels and Maxims is a classic work by noted German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. His work has influenced some of the modern world's greatest thinkers, including Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Erwin Schrödinger. This piece was originally translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders.