Imaginative Moods

Following modern and postmodern philosophy’s critique of metaphysics, experiences of transcendence are often considered ‘aesthetic’ rather than ‘metaphysical.’ However, aesthetics is mostly identified with the study of art, and aesthetic phenomena are considered particularly sensuous. This book criticizes such an approach to aesthetics, which has led many philosophers and theologians to neglect or reject aesthetics as a philosophical or theological discipline. It demonstrates how contemporary philosophy and theology may benefit from studying the mind-opening and world-transformative nature of our experiences of transcendence. In addition, it presents the significance of such experiences for the understanding of, for example, art, faith, prayer, presence, beauty, sensitivity, imagination, receptivity, and divinity. Imaginative Moods: Aesthetics, Religion, Philosophy is related to the simultaneously published monograph Poetic Inclinations: Ethics, History, Philosophy. Together they constitute a comprehensive presentation in English of the author’s philosophy of experience, which includes new ways of conceiving of and applying aesthetics, hermeneutics, and phenomenology, and of integrating these disciplines, as well as theology.

Articulates an imaginationist solution to the question of how purely instrumental music can be perceived by a listener as having emotional content. Both musicians and laypersons can perceive purely instrumental music without words or an associated story or program as expressing emotions such as happiness and sadness. But how? In this book, Saam Trivedi discusses and critiques the leading philosophical approaches to this question, including formalism, metaphorism, expression theories, arousalism, resemblance theories, and persona theories. Finding these to be inadequate, he advocates an “imaginationist” solution, by which absolute music is not really or literally sad but is only imagined to be so in a variety of ways. In particular, he argues that we as listeners animate the music ourselves, imaginatively projecting life and mental states onto it. Bolstering his argument with empirical data from studies in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science, Trivedi also addresses and explores larger philosophical questions such as the nature of emotions, metaphors, and imagination.

"India retains one of the richest painting traditions in the history of global visual culture, one that both parallels aspects of European traditions and also diverges from it. While European artists venerated the landscape and landscape paintings, it is rare in the Indian tradition to find depictions of landscapes for their sheer beauty and mood, without religious or courtly significance. There is one glorious exception: Painters from the city of Udaipur in Northwestern India specialized in depicting places, including the courtly worlds and cities of rajas, sacred landscapes of many gods, and bazaars bustling with merchants, pilgrims, and craftsmen. Their court paintings and painted invitation scrolls displayed rich geographic information, notions of territory, and the bhāva, or feel, emotion, and mood of a place. This is the first book to use artistic representations of place to trace the major aesthetic, intellectual, and political shifts in South Asia over the long eighteenth century. While James Tod, the first British colonial agent based in Udaipur, established the region's reputation as a principality in a state of political and cultural deterioration, author Dipti Khera uses these paintings to suggest a counter-narrative of a prosperous region with beautiful and bountiful cities, and plentiful rains and lakes. She explores the perspectives of courtly communities, merchants, pilgrims, monks, laypeople, and officers, and the British East India Company's officers, explorers, and artists. Throughout, she draws new conclusions about the region's intellectual and artistic practices, and its shifts in political authority, mobility, and urbanity"--

Offers advice on choosing color combinations for decorating one's home, discusses the psychology of color, and answers decorating questions.