Socrates and Dionysus
Nietzsche argued Socratic reason destroyed the tragic art of Dionysus, pitting science against art. But are they enemies? This volume challenges that division, exploring how artists and thinkers bridge the gap between the world of fact and the world of fiction.
How can aesthetic enquiry contribute to the study of visual culture? The essays in this volume show a variety of points of intersection between aesthetics and visual studies, considering the future of art, aesthetic experience, and representation versus reality.
The Art of the Real
Art of the Real registers the materialist turn in contemporary visual studies. As scholars move beyond post-structuralist theory, this is the first book to treat the new materialism for its meta-theoretical commitments, ontology, and political implications.
The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Grotesque
This book of essays explores the tension between subjectivity and objectivity from the Enlightenment to the Postmodern world. It focuses on the aesthetic theories of Winkelmann, Hume, and Kant, examining the beautiful, the sublime, and the grotesque.
The Confucian Revival in Taiwan
Xu Fuguan is a central representative of Modern Confucianism. This book focuses on his fundamental contributions to philosophy, particularly his reinterpretations of Confucian and Daoist aesthetics. It highlights the link between ethics and aesthetics in his innovative theories.
Combs focuses on “cinematic knowing” as an expression of ludenic experience, and considers how this way of seeing has expanded our visual acuity and experience, including not only hindsight and foresight, but also insight and indeed even “blindsight”.
The Permanence of the Transient
Precariousness in art may be transient, yet it instigates permanent changes. These interdisciplinary essays examine the traces of precariousness in contemporary art, locating it as an undercurrent and connective tissue across diverse areas of knowledge and life.
The Spaces That Never Were in Early Modern Art
This book explores liminal spaces: worlds on the blurred boundary between reality and imagination. Not found on maps, they are confined in gardens and collections, transforming a mere image into a political manifesto or a dream of absolute power.
Once considered an archaic concept, the Sublime has returned to the critical agenda. This book asks why. Spanning philosophy, politics, popular cinema, and digital cultures, these essays explore the relevance and urgency of the Sublime for today’s world.
Theatres of Thought
Theatre and philosophy both make things appear. These essays articulate the fact that they have never been truly apart, exploring theatre’s fascination with transforming thought into spectacle from wide-ranging perspectives and approaches.
Encompassing papers from the 2014 Lisbon Conference on Philosophy and Film, this compilation discusses new aspects and approaches of how philosophy relates to film. It explores film’s nature philosophically and provides new insights for the film philosopher and the filmmaker.
Thinking Touch in Partnering and Contact Improvisation
What happens when artists take touch as a starting point? This collection of essays offers unique insights into contact in dance, with practitioner and scholarly perspectives on the importance of touch in choreography, philosophy, education, and 21st century performance.
Wit’s End
This book studies the “Great Movies,” the enduring works of cinematic history. It attempts to “make sense” of these films to understand what they express about the universality of human life and the worlds they recreate on screen.