Why are the visual arts so important and what is it that makes their forms significant? Countering recent interpretations of meaning that understand visual artworks on the model of literary texts, Crowther formulates a theory of the visual arts based on what their creation achieves both cognitively and aesthetically. He develops a phenomenology that emphasizes how visual art gives unique aesthetic expression to factors that are basic to perception. At the same time, he shows how various artistic media embody these factors in distinctive ways. Attentive to both the creation and reception of...
Why are the visual arts so important and what is it that makes their forms significant? Countering recent interpretations of meaning that understand v...
The Kantian Aesthetic explains the kind of perceptual knowledge involved in aesthetic judgments. It does so by linking Kant's aesthetics to a critically upgraded account of his theory of knowledge. This upgraded theory emphasizes those conceptual and imaginative structures which Kant terms, respectively, "categories" and "schemata." By describing examples of aesthetic judgment, it is shown that these judgments must involve categories and fundamental schemata (even though Kant himself, and most commentators after him, have not fully appreciated the fact). It is argued, in turn, that this shows...
The Kantian Aesthetic explains the kind of perceptual knowledge involved in aesthetic judgments. It does so by linking Kant's aesthetics to a critical...
Traditional art is based on conventions of resemblance between the work and that which it is a representation "of". Abstract art, in contrast, either adopts alternative modes of visual representation or reconfigures mimetic convention. This book explores the relation of abstract art to nature (taking nature in the broadest sense-the world of recognisable objects, creatures, organisms, processes, and states of affairs). Abstract art takes many different forms, but there are shared key structural features centered on two basic relations to nature. The first abstracts from nature, to give...
Traditional art is based on conventions of resemblance between the work and that which it is a representation "of". Abstract art, in contrast, either ...
What is art; why should we value it; and what allows us to say that one work is better than another? Traditional answers have emphasized aesthetic form. But this has been challenged by institutional definitions of art and postmodern critique. The idea of distinctively artistic value based on aesthetic criteria is at best doubted, and at worst, rejected. This book, however, champions the traditional notions. It restores the mimetic definition of art on the basis of factors which traditional answers neglect, namely the conceptual link between art's aesthetic value and 'non-exhibited'...
What is art; why should we value it; and what allows us to say that one work is better than another? Traditional answers have emphasized aesthetic...
The Kantian Aesthetic explains the kind of perceptual knowledge involved in aesthetic judgments. It does so by linking Kant's aesthetics to a critically upgraded account of his theory of knowledge. This upgraded theory emphasizes those conceptual and imaginative structures which Kant terms, respectively, "categories" and "schemata." By describing examples of aesthetic judgment, it is shown that these judgments must involve categories and fundamental schemata (even though Kant himself, and most commentators after him, have not fully appreciated the fact). It is argued, in turn, that this shows...
The Kantian Aesthetic explains the kind of perceptual knowledge involved in aesthetic judgments. It does so by linking Kant's aesthetics to a critical...
Formulating a new approach to philosophy which tries to assimilate some of the main features of postmodernism, Crowther identifies conceptual links between value, knowledge, personal identity & civilization understood as a process of cumulative advance.
Formulating a new approach to philosophy which tries to assimilate some of the main features of postmodernism, Crowther identifies conceptual links be...
Contemporary discussions of the image like to emphasize art's societal functions. Few studies come close to answering why pictures and sculptures fascinate and intrigue regardless of any practical functions they might serve. In this original, thought-provoking study, Paul Crowther reveals the intrinsic significance of pictures and sculptures. To address the question of how painting becomes an art, Crowther uses the analytic philosophy of Richard Wollheim as a starting point. But to sufficiently answer the question, he makes an important link to a tradition much...
Contemporary discussions of the image like to emphasize art's societal functions. Few studies come close to answering why pictures and sculpt...
Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic that pictures work on us? This book provides a provocative explanation, arguing that some pictures have special kinds of beauty and sublimity that offer aesthetic transcendence. They take us imaginatively beyond our finite limits and even invoke a sense of the divine. Such aesthetic transcendence forges a relationship with the ultimate and completes us psychologically. Philosophers and theologians sometimes account for this as an effect of art, but...
Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic tha...
Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic that pictures work on us? This book provides a provocative explanation, arguing that some pictures have special kinds of beauty and sublimity that offer aesthetic transcendence. They take us imaginatively beyond our finite limits and even invoke a sense of the divine. Such aesthetic transcendence forges a relationship with the ultimate and completes us psychologically. Philosophers and theologians sometimes account for this as an effect of art, but...
Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic tha...
