This book focuses on the question of aesthetic value, using many practical examples from painting, music, and literature. Alan Goldman argues for a non-realist view of aesthetic value, showing that the personal element can never be factored out of evaluative aesthetic judgments.
In The Aesthetic Value of the World, Tom Cochrane defends Aestheticism, the claim that everything is aesthetically valuable and that a life lived in pursuit of aesthetic value can be a particularly good one. Furthermore, in distilling aesthetic qualities, artists have a special role to play in teaching us to recognize values; a critical component of virtue. Cochrane grounds his account upon an analysis of aesthetic value as 'objectified final value', which is underwritten by an original psychological claim that all aesthetic values are distal versions of practical values. This is followed by systematic accounts of beauty, sublimity, comedy, drama, and tragedy, as well as appendix entries on the cute, the cool, the kitsch, the uncanny, the horrific, the erotic, and the furious.
No values figure as pervasively and intimately in our lives as beauty and other aesthetic values. They animate the arts, as well as design, fashion, food, and entertainment. They orient us upon the natural world. And we even find them in the deepest insights of science and mathematics. For centuries, however, philosophers and other thinkers have identified beauty with what brings pleasure. Concerned that aesthetic hedonism has led us to question beauty's significance, Dominic McIver Lopes offers an entirely new theory of beauty in this volume. Beauty engages us in action, in concert with others, in the context of social networks. Lopes's 'network theory' explains the social dimension of aesthetic agency, the tie between beauty and pleasure, the importance of disagreement in matters of taste, and the reality of aesthetic values as denizens of the natural world. The two closing chapters shed light on why aesthetic engagement is so important to quality of life, and why it deserves (and gets) lavish public support. Being for Beauty offers a fresh contribution to aesthetics but also to thinking about metanormativity, the metaphysics of value, and virtue theory.
How do people respond to and evaluate their sensory experiences of the natural and man-made world? What does it mean to speak of the ‘value’ of aesthetic phenomena? And in evaluating human arts and artifacts, what are the criteria for success or failure? The sixth in a series exploring ‘ancient values’, this book investigates from a variety of perspectives aesthetic value in classical antiquity. The essays explore not only the evaluative concepts and terms applied to the arts, but also the social and cultural ideologies of aesthetic value itself. Seventeen chapters range from the ‘life without the Muses’ to ‘the Sublime’, and from philosophical views to middle-brow and popular aesthetics. Aesthetic value in classical antiquity should be of interest to classicists, cultural and art historians, and philosophers.
Whether it's sleek leather pants, a shiny new Apple computer, or a designer toaster, we make important decisions as consumers every day based on our sensory experience. Sensory appeals are everywhere, and they are intensifying, radically changing how Americans live and work. The twenty-first century has become the age of aesthetics, and whether we realize it or not, this influence has taken over the marketplace, and much more. In this penetrating, keenly observed book, Virginia Postrel makes the argument that appearance counts, that aesthetic value is real. Drawing from fields as diverse as fashion, real estate, politics, design, and economics, Postrel deftly chronicles our culture's aesthetic imperative and argues persuasively that it is a vital component of a healthy, forward-looking society. Intelligent, incisive, and thought-provoking, The Substance of Style is a groundbreaking portrait of the democratization of taste and a brilliant examination of the way we live now.
In The Aesthetic Value of the World, Tom Cochrane defends Aestheticism, the claim that everything is aesthetically valuable and that a life lived in pursuit of aesthetic value can be a particularly good one. Furthermore, in distilling aesthetic qualities, artists have a special role to play in teaching us to recognize values; a critical component of virtue. Cochrane grounds his account upon an analysis of aesthetic value as 'objectified final value', which is underwritten by an original psychological claim that all aesthetic values are distal versions of practical values. This is followed by systematic accounts of beauty, sublimity, comedy, drama, and tragedy, as well as appendix entries on the cute, the cool, the kitsch, the uncanny, the horrific, the erotic, and the furious.
Within a landscape, such as the contemporary one, in which studies on the notion of the image proliferate through multiple disciplinary fields, the book Aesthetics of Values. Contemporary Perspectives proposes a path dedicated to the analysis of the status of the image, taking its relationship with the notion of value as a starting point. The project stems from the collaboration between the "Art, Critique and Aesthetic Experience" group of the Nova Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA) of the University of Lisbon and the European Aesthetic Seminar on "images, emotions, values" (http: // sites.unimi.it/eu_aesthetics/). In particular, the proposed chapters intend to develop the contributions made during the international seminar "Aesthetics of Values" held in Lisbon in February 2017, during which some of the most authoritative voices of Aesthetic studies on the subject intervened. The volume should also fill a gap in the field of studies on value aesthetics, at a time when, in spite of the proliferation of works dedicated to this topic in the analytical field, the need is felt, as recently underlined by an author of the calibre of Peter Lamarque, for research that returns to investigate the theme of aesthetic value starting from the analysis of experience.
This book provides the first recent philosophical account of how ruins acquire aesthetic value. It draws on a variety of sources to explore modern ruins, the ruin tradition, and the phenomenon of “ruin porn.” It features an unusual and original combination of philosophical analysis, the author’s photography, and reviews of both new and historically influential case studies, including Richard Haag’s Gas Works Park, the ruins of Detroit, and remnants of the steel industry of Pennsylvania. Tanya Whitehouse shows how the users of ruins can become architects of a new order, transforming derelict sites into aesthetically significant places we should preserve.