Re-thinking Aesthetics

The essays, collected by Berleant in this volume all express the impulse to reject the received wisdom of modern aesthetics: that art demands a mode of experience sharply different from others and unique to the aesthetic situation, and that the identity of the aesthetic lies in keeping it distinct from other kinds of human experience, such as the moral, the practical, and the social. Berleant shows, on the contrary, that the value, the insight, the force of art and the aesthetic are all enhanced and enlarged by recognizing their social and human role, and that this recognition contributes both to the significance of art and to its humanizing influence on what we like to call civilization.

Arnold Berleant is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Long Island University, USA.

Contents: Preface. Introduction: art and the future of aesthetics. The Focus of Aesthetics: Re-thinking aesthetics; The historicity of aesthetics; Beyond disinterestedness; Aesthetics and the contemporary arts. Iconoclastic Implications: The sensuous and the sensual in aesthetics; Aesthetic embodiment; Intuition in art, or Pygmalion rediscovered; Art without object; The art of the unseen. Re-Thinking The Arts: Death in image, word, and idea; Brancusi and the phenomenology of sculptural space; The verbal presence: an aesthetics of literary performance; The intuitive impulse in literary performance; A phenomenology of musical performance; Index.