Essays In The Philosophy Of Art

Published posthumously in 1964, this volume contains a fantastic collection of essays by R. G. Collingwood on the subject of art and it's relationship with philosophy. Robin George Collingwood, FBA (1889 – 1943) was an English historian, philosopher, and archaeologist most famous for his philosophical works including “The Principles of Art” (1938) and the posthumously-published “The Idea of History” (1946). This fascinating volume will appeal to those with an interest in Collingwood's seminal work, and is not to be missed by students of philosophy and art. Contents include: “Ruskin not a Philosophical Writer”, “Ruskin's Attitude towards Philosophy”, “On the Philosophy of Non-Philosophers”, “Logicism and Historicism”, “Ruskin as Historicist”, “The Anti-Historicism of Ruskin's Contemporaries”, “The Unity of the Spirit: Corollaries and Illustrations”, “Ruskin and Browning”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume today in an affordable, modern edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

Jerrold Levinson, one of the most prominent philosophers of art today, presents a new collection of essays, following on from his four previous collections, Music, Art and Metaphysics (1990), The Pleasures of Aesthetics (1996), Contemplating Art (2006), and Musical Concerns (2015). Aesthetic Pursuits specifically complements Levinson's last volume, Musical Concerns, by collecting recent essays not concerned with music, but instead focusing on literature, film, and visual art, while addressing issues of humour, beauty, and the emotions. The essays in Aesthetic Pursuits, which are wide-ranging, will appeal strongly to aestheticians, art lovers, and philosophers alike. The volume contains seven previously unpublished essays by Levinson, in which the author critically engages with notable contemporary contributions to aesthetic theory.

This is the first collection of essays focused on the many-faceted work of Kendall L. Walton. Walton has shaped debate about the arts for the last 50 years. He provides a comprehensive framework for understanding arts in terms of the human capacity of make-believe that shows how different arts – visual, photographic, musical, literary, or poetic – can be explained in terms of complex structures of pretense, perception, imagining, empathy, and emotion. His groundbreaking work has been taken beyond aesthetics to address foundational issues concerning linguistic and scientific representations – for example, about the nature of scientific modelling or to explain how much of what we say is quite different from the literal meanings of our words. Contributions from a diverse group of philosophers probe Walton’s detailed proposals and the themes for research they open. The essays provide an overview of important debates that have Walton’s work at their core. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working on aesthetics across the humanities, as well as those interested in the topic of representation and its intersection with perception, language, science, and metaphysics.

From the nineteen-eighties on, Arthur Danto was the most significant art critic and philosopher of art in world. This book provides a comprehensive, systematic view of his philosophy and criticism including his views in relation to not only painting and sculpture but to cinema and dance.

Brings together essays on the philosophy of art in which a philosophical theory of aesthetic judgment is tested and developed through its application to particular examples. Each essay approaches, from its own field of study, what Roger Scruton argues to be the central problems of aesthetics -- what is aesthetic experience, and what is its importance for human conduct? The book is divided into four parts. The first contains a resume of modern analytical aesthetics, which also serves as an introduction to subsequent chapters. It also includes an essay that reviews current theories of literary criticism. The second part is devoted to musical aesthetics and contains the theoretical core of the work. Here Scruton describes the contours of aesthetic understanding, and defends the view that the object of aesthetic experience is inherently significant, even when it has no "content" that can be described in propositional terms. He rebuts the view that music is representational, and in the third part goes on to propose a theory of representation whereby to refute the suggestion that photography is a representational art. This third section also contains a study of film. The final part comprises essays relating aesthetic judgment to the understanding of culture, humor, and design. It covers many subjects, including the prose works of Samuel Beckett and the architecture of Leninism. The essays in this book form parts of a single intellectual enterprise, which is to give analytical foundations to the criticism of literature, visual art, music, and culture.

Previous ed.: Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.