This authoritative and accessible book explains the argument and strategy of Kant's analysis of beauty. A number of issues are discussed - amongst them the distinction and relation between natural beauty and fine art, pure and dependent beauty, disinterestedness and universality, form and expression, beauty and morality, transcendental and empirical necessity, individual and community. Links are also forged between Kant's theory and contemporary commentaries - including those by Donald Crawford, Jacques Derrida, Paul Guyer, Rudolph Makkreel, Mary McCloskey, Kenneth Rogerson and John Zammito.

Explanation and Value in the Arts offers penetrating studies by art historians, literary theorists, and philosophers, of issues central to explaining works of literature and painting. The first chapters look at the sources of interest in the fine arts and point to the intimate relation between aesthetic and other values. The next contributions develop the interaction between value and explanation in the study of the arts, including considerations of the nature of creativity and the principles for the explanations of works. A final section takes up questions of the role of ideology and the...

The first volume in the series offers a range of responses by distinguished philosophers and art historians to some crucial issues generated by the relationship between the art object and language in art history. Each of the chapters in this volume is a searching response to theoretical and practical questions, in terms accessible to readers of all human science disciplines. The issues they discuss challenge the boundaries to thought that some contemporary theorizing sustains.

This collection brings together thirteen new essays by some of the most respected contemporary scholars of Schopenhauer's aesthetics from a wide spectrum of philosophical perspectives. It examines the unique theory Schopenhauer developed to explain the life and work of the artist, and the influence his aesthetic philosophy has had on subsequent artistic traditions in such diverse areas as music, painting, poetry, literature, and architecture. The authors present Schopenhauer's thought as a vital and enduring contribution to aesthetic theory, and to the idealist vision that continues to guide...

The essays in this volume explore the ways in which traditional philosophical problems about self-knowledge, self-identity, and value have migrated into literature since the Romantic and Idealist periods. In a wide-ranging critical and philosophical discussion, the contributors offer a philosophical understanding of the roots and nature of contemporary literary and philosophical practice, and elaborate powerful and influential, but rarely decisively articulated, conceptions of the human subject and of value.

Nietzsche's writings have shaped much contemporary reflection on the relation between philosophy and art. This book brings together a number of distinguished contributors to examine his aesthetic account of the origins and ends of philosophy. They discuss the transformative power which Nietzsche ascribes to aesthetic activity, including his aesthetic justification of existence and its fusion of social and personal existence, and they investigate his experiments with an 'aesthetic politics' and a politicisation of aesthetics. Together their essays set out the ground for future debate about the...

Now available for the first time in paperback, Landscape, natural beauty and the arts offers probing studies of the complex structure of aesthetic responses to nature. Each chapter refines and expands the terms of discussion, and together they enrich the debate with insights from art history, literary criticism, geography and philosophy.

To explore the interrelation between our conceptions of nature, beauty and art, the contributors consider the social construction of nature, the determination of our appreciation by artistic media, and the duality of nature's determining in gardening....

This major collection of essays stands at the border of aesthetics and ethics and deals with charged issues of practical import: art and morality, the ethics of taste, and censorship. As such its potential interest is by no means confined to professional philosophers; it should also appeal to art historians and critics, literary theorists, and students of film. Prominent philosophers in both aesthetics and ethics tackle a wide array of issues. Some of the questions explored in the volume include: Can art be morally enlightening and, if so, how? If a work of art is morally better does that...

An examination of the studies of Aristotle's Poetics and its related texts in which three mediaeval philosophers - Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes - proposed a conception of poetic validity (beauty) and a just relation between subjects in a community (goodness).

This book is an important and original study of medieval Arabic theories of poetics. It examines the commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics by Alfarabi and Avicenna, placing them fully in the context of the Arabic development of Aristotle's logical theory. In this the author breaks new ground, showing how the philosophers justified the logical and moral power of poetics discourse. Its concern for philosophical issues in the Classical Arabic tradition distinguishes this book from other studies of literary theory.