Andean Ontologies is a fascinating interdisciplinary investigation of how ancient Andean people understood their world and the nature of being. Exploring pre-Hispanic ideas of time, space, and the hum
Jacques Rancière’s work is increasingly central to several debates across the humanities. Distributions of the Sensible confronts a question at the heart of his thought: How should we con
In the fields of literature and the visual arts, 'zero degree' represents a neutral aesthetic situated in response to, and outside of, the dominant cultural order. Taking Roland Barthes' 1953 book Wri
Analyses the history of Western conceptions of evil, showing it to be remarkably complex, differentiated and contestedCharting a sweeping history of evil within the Western philosophical tradition, Ga
The metaphysics of ordinary objects is an increasingly vibrant field of study for philosophers. This volume gathers insights from a number of leading authors, who together tackle the central issues in contemporary debates about the subject. Their essays engage with topics including composition, persistence, perception, categories, images, artifacts, truthmakers, metaontology, and the relationship between the manifest and scientific images. Exploring the nature of everyday things, the contributors situate their arguments and the latest research against the background of the field's development. Moreover, many essays propose new ideas and approaches, looking ahead to the future of the metaphysical study of ordinary objects. Featuring numerous clearly explained examples and with thoughtful links drawn to other, related disciplines such as pragmatism, this wide-ranging volume fills a major gap in the literature and will be important for scholars working in metaphysics.
In this book, Rachel Zuckert provides the first overarching account of Johann Gottfried Herder's complex aesthetic theory. She guides the reader through Herder's texts, showing how they relate to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophy of art, and focusing on two main concepts: aesthetic naturalism, the view that art is natural to and naturally valuable for human beings as organic, embodied beings, and - unusually for Herder's time - aesthetic pluralism, the view that aesthetic value takes many diverse and culturally varying forms. Zuckert argues that Herder's theory plays a pivotal role in the history of philosophical aesthetics, marking the transition from the eighteenth-century focus on aesthetic value as grounded in human nature to the nineteenth-century focus on art as socially significant and historically variable. Her study illuminates Herder's significance as an innovative thinker in aesthetics, and will interest a range of readers in philosophy of art and Europe
Returning to the Greek understanding of art to rethink its capacities, Creation and the Function of Art focuses on the relationship between techné and phusis (nature). Moving away from the theoretical
Re-enchanting Art argues that we have lost touch with the true nature of art as a universal human practice, and that a critical realist aesthetics can play a vital role in enabling us to re-discover i
Drawing upon a range of insights from Plato and Aristotle to Gadamer and Ingarden, this phenomenological study examines the nature of artistic creation. Mitscherling and Fairfield also draw heavily up
A compelling guide to the fundamental place of humour and comedy within Western culture—by one of its greatest exponents Written by an acknowledged master of comedy, this study reflects on the n
