Pain, Pleasure and Æsthetics [electronic Resource]
Pain, Pleasure and Æsthetics [electronic Resource]

Author: Henry Rutgers 1852-1927 Marshall

Publisher: Legare Street Press

Published: 2023-07-18

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781019703281

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Pain, Pleasure, and Æsthetics is a groundbreaking study of human psychology and the relationship between pain, pleasure, and beauty. Written by Henry Rutgers Marshall, a leading British psychologist of his time, this book provides valuable insight into the ways that our emotions impact our subjective experience of the world. With a special focus on the aesthetics of pain and pleasure, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the psychology of human experience. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Aesthetics and the Good Life
Aesthetics and the Good Life

Author: Marcia Muelder Eaton

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780838633366

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This book provides a characterization of the aesthetic that enables the reader to understand what it means to view something aesthetically and how people's lives can be made aesthetically full. Influential philosophical theories of the aesthetic are explored, as well as the profound connection between aesthetic and ethical value.

The Aesthetics of Mimesis
The Aesthetics of Mimesis

Author: Stephen Halliwell

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-01-10

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 140082530X

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Mimesis is one of the oldest, most fundamental concepts in Western aesthetics. This book offers a new, searching treatment of its long history at the center of theories of representational art: above all, in the highly influential writings of Plato and Aristotle, but also in later Greco-Roman philosophy and criticism, and subsequently in many areas of aesthetic controversy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Combining classical scholarship, philosophical analysis, and the history of ideas--and ranging across discussion of poetry, painting, and music--Stephen Halliwell shows with a wealth of detail how mimesis, at all stages of its evolution, has been a more complex, variable concept than its conventional translation of "imitation" can now convey. Far from providing a static model of artistic representation, mimesis has generated many different models of art, encompassing a spectrum of positions from realism to idealism. Under the influence of Platonist and Aristotelian paradigms, mimesis has been a crux of debate between proponents of what Halliwell calls "world-reflecting" and "world-simulating" theories of representation in both the visual and musico-poetic arts. This debate is about not only the fraught relationship between art and reality but also the psychology and ethics of how we experience and are affected by mimetic art. Moving expertly between ancient and modern traditions, Halliwell contends that the history of mimesis hinges on problems that continue to be of urgent concern for contemporary aesthetics.

Music and the Functions of the Brain: Arousal, Emotions, and Pleasure
Music and the Functions of the Brain: Arousal, Emotions, and Pleasure

Author: Mark Reybrouck

Publisher: Frontiers Media SA

Published: 2018-04-12

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 2889454525

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Music impinges upon the body and the brain. As such, it has significant inductive power which relies both on innate dispositions and acquired mechanisms and competencies. The processes are partly autonomous and partly deliberate, and interrelations between several levels of processing are becoming clearer with accumulating new evidence. For instance, recent developments in neuroimaging techniques, have broadened the field by encompassing the study of cortical and subcortical processing of the music. The domain of musical emotions is a typical example with a major focus on the pleasure that can be derived from listening to music. Pleasure, however, is not the only emotion to be induced and the mechanisms behind its elicitation are far from understood. There are also mechanisms related to arousal and activation that are both less differentiated and at the same time more complex than the assumed mechanisms that trigger basic emotions. It is imperative, therefore, to investigate what pleasurable and mood-modifying effects music can have on human beings in real-time listening situations. This e-book is an attempt to answer these questions. Revolving around the specificity of music experience in terms of perception, emotional reactions, and aesthetic assessment, it presents new hypotheses, theoretical claims as well as new empirical data which contribute to a better understanding of the functions of the brain as related to musical experience.

All Things Are Too Small
All Things Are Too Small

Author: Becca Rothfeld

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2024-04-02

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1250849926

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A glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as mindfulness, decluttering, David Cronenberg, and consent. In her debut essay collection, “brilliant and stylish” (The Washington Post) critic Becca Rothfeld takes on one of the most sacred cows of our time: the demand that we apply the virtues of equality and democracy to culture and aesthetics. The result is a culture that is flattened and sanitized, purged of ugliness, excess, and provocation. Our embrace of minimalism has left us spiritually impoverished. We see it in our homes, where we bring in Marie Kondo to rid them of their idiosyncrasies and darknesses. We take up mindfulness to do the same thing to our heads, emptying them of the musings, thoughts, and obsessions that make us who we are. In the bedroom, a new wave of puritanism has drained sex of its unpredictability and therefore true eroticism. In our fictions, the quest for balance has given us protagonists who aspire only to excise their appetites. We have flipped our values, Rothfeld argues: while the gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, we strive to compensate with egalitarianism in art, erotics, and taste, where it does not belong and where it quashes wild experiments and exuberance. Lush, provocative, and bitingly funny, All Things Are Too Small is a subversive soul cry to restore imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment to all domains of our lives.

A Hunger for Aesthetics
A Hunger for Aesthetics

Author: Michael Kelly

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0231152922

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This title examines the motivations for the critiques that have been applied to the idea of aesthetics and argues that theorists and artists now hunger for a new kind of aesthetics, one better calibrated to contemporary art and its moral and political demands. The book shows how, for decades, aesthetic critiques have often concerned art's treatment of beauty or the autonomy of art. Collectively, these critiques have generated an anti-aesthetic stance that is now prevalent in the contemporary art world.

Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism
Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

Author: Cynthia J. Davis

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-01-04

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0198858736

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The postbellum period saw many privileged Americans pursuing a civilized ideal premised on insulation from pain. Medico-scientific advances in anesthetics and analgesics and emergent religious sects like Christian Science made pain avoidance seem newly possible. The upper classes could increasingly afford to distance themselves from the suffering they claimed to feel more exquisitely than did their supposedly less refined contemporaries and antecedents. The five US literary realists examined in this study resisted this contemporary revulsion from pain without going so far as to join those who celebrated suffering for its invigorating effects. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt embraced the concept of a heightened sensitivity to pain as a consequence of the civilizing process but departed from their peers by delineating alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering. Although the treatment of pain in other influential nineteenth century literary modes including sentimentalism and naturalism has attracted ample scholarly attention, this book offers the first sustained analysis of pain's importance to US literary realism as practiced by five of its most influential proponents.

Bentham and the Arts
Bentham and the Arts

Author: Anthony Julius

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2020-05-11

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1787357368

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Bentham and the Arts considers the sceptical challenge presented by Bentham’s hedonistic utilitarianism to the existence of the aesthetic, as represented in the oft-quoted statement that, ‘Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either.’ This statement is one part of a complex set of arguments on culture, taste, and utility that Bentham pursued over his lifetime, in which sensations of pleasure and pain were opposed to aesthetic sensibility. Leading scholars from a variety of disciplines reflect on the implications of Bentham’s radical utilitarian approach for our understanding of the history and contemporary nature of art, literature, and aesthetics more generally.

Aesthetics
Aesthetics

Author: David E. Cooper

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-04-08

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1119116821

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The newly expanded and revised edition of Cooper’s popular anthology featuring classic writings on aesthetics, both historical and contemporary The second edition of this bestselling anthology collects essays of canonical significance in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, featuring a wide range of topics from the nature of beauty and the criteria for aesthetic judgement to the value of art and the appreciation of nature. Includes texts by classical philosophers like Plato and Kant alongside essays from art critics like Clive Bell, with new readings from Leonardo da Vinci, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Ronald W. Hepburn, and Arthur C. Danto among others Intersperses philosophical scholarship with diverse contributions from artists, poets, novelists, and critics Broadens the scope of aesthetics beyond the Western tradition, including important texts by Asian philosophers from Mo Tzu to Tanizaki Includes a fully-updated introduction to the discipline written by the editor, as well as prefaces to each text and chapter-specific lists of further reading