Placing Aesthetics

Examining select high points in the speculative tradition from Plato and Aristotle through the Middle Ages and German tradition to Dewey and Heidegger, Placing Aesthetics seeks to locate the aesthetic concern within the larger framework of each thinker’s philosophy. In Professor Robert Wood’s study, aesthetics is not peripheral but rather central to the speculative tradition and to human existence as such. In Dewey’s terms, aesthetics is “experience in its integrity.” Its personal ground is in “the heart,” which is the dispositional ground formed by genetic, cultural , and personal historical factors by which we are spontaneously moved and, in turn, are inclined to move, both practically and theoretically, in certain directions. Prepared for use by the student as well as the philosopher, Placing Aesthetics aims to recover the fullness of humanness within a sense of the fullness of encompassing Being. It attempts to overcome the splitting of thought, even in philosophy, into exclusive specializations and the fracturing of life itself into theoretical, practical, and emotive dimensions.

"While Washington, D.C. is still often referred to as 'Chocolate City,' it has undergone significant demographic, political, and architectural change in the last decade. No place represents this shift better than H Street, one of the neighborhoods devastated by the April 1968 riots after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Over the last decade and a half, the H Street corridor has changed from a historically low-income, African American neighborhood--featuring black-owned businesses that catered to the local residents--to one of the most sought after commercial and residential areas in the nation, replete with art house theaters, fusion restaurants, and rising property values that have pushed out much of the original population. Brandi T. Summers explores this shift from chocolate city to cosmopolitan metropolis, looking at the role of race in urban environments and how the neighborhood's aesthetics--from fashion and language to foodways and black bodies themselves--have been commodified and branded. Through ethnography, interviews, archival research, and media analysis, Summers sheds new light on the relationship between race, space, and capitalism"

"I suggest that although at any given place and moment the aesthetic expressions of a political system just are that political system, the concepts are separable. Typically, aesthetic aspects of political systems shift in their meaning over time, or even are inverted or redeployed with an entirely transformed effect. You cannot understand politics without understanding the aesthetics of politics, but you cannot understand aesthetics as politics. The point is precisely to show the concrete nodes at which two distinct discourses coincide or connive, come apart or coalesce."—from Political Aesthetics Juxtaposing and connecting the art of states and the art of art historians with vernacular or popular arts such as reggae and hip-hop, Crispin Sartwell examines the reach and claims of political aesthetics. Most analysts focus on politics as discursive systems, privileging text and reducing other forms of expression to the merely illustrative. He suggests that we need to take much more seriously the aesthetic environment of political thought and action.Sartwell argues that graphic style, music, and architecture are more than the propaganda arm of political systems; they are its constituents. A noted cultural critic, Sartwell brings together the disciplines of political science and political philosophy, philosophy of art and art history, in a new way, clarifying basic notions of aesthetics—beauty, sublimity, and representation—and applying them in a political context. A general argument about the fundamental importance of political aesthetics is interspersed with a group of stimulating case studies as disparate as Leni Riefenstahl's films and Black Nationalist aesthetics, the Dead Kennedys and Jeffersonian architecture.

This collection explores the aesthetic qualities of human relationships, sports, taste, smell, food, and natural and built environments.

This book provides a comprehensive view of the aesthetic realm, placing the various major artforms within the setting of nature and the built environment as they arise within the field of experience. Each chapter displays the regional ontology of the form considered: the comprehensive set of eidetic features that limn the space of the art. It draws upon artists' statements, writings of key figures in the history of philosophy--including Plato, Hegel, Dewey, and Heidegger—and writings from various commentators on art. This volume is unique in its systematic and phenomenological approach, and in how it addresses aesthetics writ large.

Rethinking Aesthetics is the first book to bring together prominent voices in the fields of architecture, philosophy, aesthetics, and cognitive sciences to radically rethink the relationship between body and design. These essays argue that aesthetic experiences can be nurtured at any moment in everyday life, thanks to recent discoveries by researchers in neuroscience, phenomenology, somatics, and analytic philosophy of the mind, who have made the correlations between aesthetic cognition, the human body, and everyday life much clearer. The essays, by Yuriko Saito, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Richard Shusterman, among others, range from an integrated mind-body approach to chair design, to Zen Buddhist notions of mindfulness, to theoretical accounts of existential relationships with buildings, to present a full spectrum of possible inquiries. By placing the body in the center of design, Rethinking Aesthetics opens new directions for rethinking the limits of both essentialism and skepticism.