Guide To Aesthetics

Explaining what art is and what’s not art. What is art? Why do we find some things beautiful but not others? Is it wrong to share MP3s? These are just some of the questions explored by aesthetics, the philosophy of art. In this sweeping introduction, Charles Taliaferro skilfully guides us through different theories of art and beauty, tackling issues such as who owns art and what happens when art and morality collide. From Plato on poetry to Ringo Starr on the drums, this is a perfect introductory text for anyone interested in the fascinating questions art can raise.

Aesthetics is much more than just being physically appealing. It is a lifestyle, a way of life. One does not attain aesthetic perfection over night. It takes years of consistency to shape your physique into a masterpiece, but more, it takes you to change your entire outlook on life.

The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics is the most authoritativesurvey of the central issues in contemporary aesthetics available.The volume features eighteen newly commissioned papers on theevaluation of art, the interpretation of art, and many other formsof art such as literature, movies, and music. Provides a guide to the central traditional and cutting edgeissues in aesthetics today. Written by a distinguished cast of contributors, includingPeter Kivy, George Dickie, Noël Carroll, Paul Guyer, TedCohen, Marcia Eaton, Joseph Margolis, Berys Gaut, NicholasWolterstrorff, Susan Feagin, Peter Lamarque, Stein Olsen, FrancisSparshott, Alan Goldman, Jenefer Robinson, Mary Mothersill, DonaldCrawford, Philip Alperson, Laurent Stern and Amie Thomasson. Functions as the ideal text for undergraduate and graduatecourses in aesthetics, art theory, and philosophy of art.

What is beauty, and what is truth? These are some of the questions which aesthetics tries to answer. In our everyday life, we talk about the 'aesthetics' of an artwork or a piece of design. But aesthetics goes beyond the simple experience of art. It is also a branch of philosophy concerned with the whole nature of experience itself, explored through our perceptions, feelings and emotions.

A reprint of the Library of Liberal Arts edition of 1965. Croce's Guide presents one of the clearest and strongest defenses of the intuitive nature of art in Western philosophical thought.

Aesthetics 101 is a step-by-step guide teaching readers how to achieve an 'aesthetic' physique through weight training, tailored diets, and supplementation. Aesthetics 101 is very detailed and explains every aspect so that the reader will know the exact path to achieve the aesthetic physique he has always been dreaming of, guaranteed.

First published in 1991. The arts can only thrive in a culture where there is conversation about them. This is particularly true of the arts in an education context. Yet often the discussion is poor because we do not have the necessary concepts for the elaboration of our aesthetic responses, or sufficient familiarity with the contending schools of interpretation. The aim of Key Concepts is to engender a broad and informed conversation about the arts. By means of over sixty alphabetically ordered essays, the author offers a map of aesthetics, critical theory and the arts in education. The essays are both informative and argumentative, with cross-references, a supporting bibliography and suggestions for further reading.

'The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics' has assembled 48 brand-new essays, making this a comprehensive guide available to the theory, application, history, and future of the field.

Make small changes to your surroundings and create extraordinary happiness in your life with groundbreaking research from designer and TED star Ingrid Fetell Lee. Next Big Idea Club selection—chosen by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Dan Pink, and Adam Grant as one of the "two most groundbreaking new nonfiction reads of the season!" "This book has the power to change everything! Writing with depth, wit, and insight, Ingrid Fetell Lee shares all you need to know in order to create external environments that give rise to inner joy." —Susan Cain, author of Quiet and founder of Quiet Revolution Have you ever wondered why we stop to watch the orange glow that arrives before sunset, or why we flock to see cherry blossoms bloom in spring? Is there a reason that people—regardless of gender, age, culture, or ethnicity—are mesmerized by baby animals, and can't help but smile when they see a burst of confetti or a cluster of colorful balloons? We are often made to feel that the physical world has little or no impact on our inner joy. Increasingly, experts urge us to find balance and calm by looking inward—through mindfulness or meditation—and muting the outside world. But what if the natural vibrancy of our surroundings is actually our most renewable and easily accessible source of joy? In Joyful, designer Ingrid Fetell Lee explores how the seemingly mundane spaces and objects we interact with every day have surprising and powerful effects on our mood. Drawing on insights from neuroscience and psychology, she explains why one setting makes us feel anxious or competitive, while another fosters acceptance and delight—and, most importantly, she reveals how we can harness the power of our surroundings to live fuller, healthier, and truly joyful lives.

While Alfred North Whitehead did not dedicate any books or articles to aesthetics specifically, aesthetic motifs permeate his entire philosophical opus. Despite this, aestheticians have devoted little attention to Whitehead; most attempts to reconstruct Whitehead’s aesthetics have come from process philosophers, and even in that context aesthetics has never occupied a central position. In this book, four scholars of aesthetics provide another angle from which Whiteheadian aesthetics might be reconstructed. Paying special attention to the notion of aesthetic experience, the authors analyze abstraction versus concreteness, immediacy vs. mediation, and aesthetic contextualism vs. aesthetic isolationism. For their interpretation of Whiteheadian aesthetics, the concepts of creativity and rhythm are crucial. Using these concepts, the book interprets the motif of the processes by which experience is harmonized, the sensation of the quality of the whole, and directedness towards novelty. The first chapter introduces Whitehead’s philosophical method of descriptive generalization. This method assumes that every philosophical system is based on a particular entry point. We show that for Whitehead this entry point was aesthetics. Chapter Two compares Whitehead and Dewey’s philosophies to show that both viewed aesthetic experience in terms of complex rhythms; this helps us better understand the differences and the continuities between everyday experience and art. Chapter Three compares Whitehead’s ideas with those of Henri Bergson, showing the way art reveals the form of immediate experience and how the aesthetic experience of art relates to truth. The final chapter details the processes that constitute aesthetic experience in a narrower sense, analyzing aesthetic experience from the perspective of the types of abstractive processes it involves and the complex types of experience it produces.