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The Aesthetics Of Meaning And Thought
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Book Synopsis The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought by : Mark Johnson
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought written by Mark Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-04-23 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All too often, we think of our minds and bodies separately. The reality couldn’t be more different: the fundamental fact about our mind is that it is embodied. We have a deep visceral, emotional, and qualitative relationship to the world—and any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of the mind must take into account the ways that cognition, meaning, language, action, and values are grounded in and shaped by that embodiment. This book gathers the best of philosopher Mark Johnson’s essays addressing questions of our embodiment as they deal with aesthetics—which, he argues, we need to rethink so that it takes into account the central role of body-based meaning. Viewed that way, the arts can give us profound insights into the processes of meaning making that underlie our conceptual systems and cultural practices. Johnson shows how our embodiment shapes our philosophy, science, morality, and art; what emerges is a view of humans as aesthetic, meaning-making creatures who draw on their deepest physical processes to make sense of the world around them.
Book Synopsis The Meaning of the Body by : Mark Johnson
Download or read book The Meaning of the Body written by Mark Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic Metaphors We Live By. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning's bodily sources. Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world. “Mark Johnson demonstrates that the aesthetic and emotional aspects of meaning are fundamental—central to conceptual meaning and reason, and that the arts show meaning-making in its fullest realization. If you were raised with the idea that art and emotion were external to ideas and reason, you must read this book. It grounds philosophy in our most visceral experience.”—George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics
Book Synopsis Thinking with Images by : John M. Carvalho
Download or read book Thinking with Images written by John M. Carvalho and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advances an enactivist theory of aesthetics through the study of inscrutable artworks that challenge us to think because we do not know what to think about them. John M. Carvalho presents detailed analyses a four artworks that share this unique characteristic: Francis Bacon’s Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), the photographs of Duane Michals, based on a retrospective of his work, Storyteller, at the Carnegie Museum of Art (2014), Étant donnés (1968) by Marcel Duchamp, and Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris (released in the United States as Contempt). Carvalho argues against the application of theory to derive appreciation or meaning from these artistic works. Rather, each study enacts an embodied cognitive engagement with the specific artworks intended to demonstrate the value of thinking about artworks that might be extended to our engagement with the world in general. This thinking happens, as these studies show, when we trust our embodied skills and their guide to what artworks and the world around us afford for the activation and refinement of those skills. Thinking with Images will be of interest to scholars working in the philosophy of art and philosophical aesthetics, as well as art historians concerned with the meaning and value of contemporary art.
Book Synopsis The Outward Mind by : Benjamin Morgan
Download or read book The Outward Mind written by Benjamin Morgan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined.
Book Synopsis Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason by : Mark Johnson
Download or read book Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason written by Mark Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Johnson is one of the great thinkers of our time on how the body shapes the mind. This book brings together a selection of essays from the past two decades that build a powerful argument that any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of mind and thought must ultimately explain how bodily perception and action give rise to cognition, meaning, language, action, and values. A brief account of Johnson’s own intellectual journey, through which we track some of the most important discoveries in the field over the past forty years, sets the stage. Subsequent chapters set out Johnson’s important role in embodied cognition theory, including his cofounding (with George Lakoff) of conceptual metaphor theory and, later, their theory of bodily structures and processes that underlie all meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning. A detailed account of how meaning arises from our physical engagement with our environments provides the basis for a nondualistic, nonreductive view of mind that he sees as most congruous with the latest cognitive science. A concluding section explores the implications of our embodiment for our understanding of knowledge, reason, and truth. The resulting book will be essential for all philosophers dealing with mind, thought, and language.
Book Synopsis Embodied Meanings by : Arthur Coleman Danto
Download or read book Embodied Meanings written by Arthur Coleman Danto and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 1995-09-30 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Sublime in Modern Philosophy by : Emily Brady
Download or read book The Sublime in Modern Philosophy written by Emily Brady and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world.
Book Synopsis Political Aesthetics by : Crispin Sartwell
Download or read book Political Aesthetics written by Crispin Sartwell and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Book Synopsis The Aesthetics of Design by : Jane Forsey
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Design written by Jane Forsey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Aesthetics of Design offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics. Aesthetic theory has traditionally occupied itself with fine art in all its forms, sometimes with craft, and often with notions of beauty and sublimity in art and nature. In so doing, it has largely ignored the quotidian and familiar objects and experiences that make up our daily lives. Yet how we interact with design involves aesthetic choices and judgements as well as practical, cognitive and moral considerations. This work challenges the discipline to broaden its scope to include design, and illustrates how aesthetics helps define our human concerns. Subjecting design to as rigorous a treatment as any other aesthetic object exposes it to three main challenges that form the core of this book. First, design must be distinguished from art and craft as a unique kind of object meriting separate philosophical attention, and is here defined in part by its functional qualities. Second, the experience of design must be defended as having a particularly aesthetic nature. Here Forsey adapts the Kantian notion of dependent beauty to provide a model for our appreciation of design as different from our judgements of art, craft and natural beauty. Finally, design is important for aesthetics and philosophy as a whole in that it is implicated in broader human concerns. Forsey situates her theory of design as a constructive contribution to the recent movement of Everyday Aesthetics, which seeks to re-enfranchise philosophical aesthetics as an important part of philosophy at large.
Book Synopsis The Aesthetics of Emotion by : Gerald C. Cupchik
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Emotion written by Gerald C. Cupchik and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gerald C. Cupchik builds a bridge between science and the humanities, arguing that interactions between mind and body in everyday life are analogous to relations between subject matter and style in art. According to emotional phase theory, emotional reactions emerge in a 'perfect storm' whereby meaningful situations evoke bodily memories that unconsciously shape and unify the experience. Similarly, in expressionist or impressionist painting, an evocative visual style can spontaneously colour the experience and interpretation of subject matter. Three basic situational themes encompass complementary pairs of primary emotions: attachment (happiness - sadness), assertion (fear - anger), and absorption (interest - disgust). Action episodes, in which a person adapts to challenges or seeks to realize goals, benefit from energizing bodily responses which focus attention on the situation while providing feedback, in the form of pleasure or pain, regarding success or failure. In high representational paintings, style is transparent, making it easier to fluently identify subject matter.
Book Synopsis John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature by : Thomas M. Alexander
Download or read book John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature written by Thomas M. Alexander and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-16 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Alexander shows that the primary, guiding concern of Dewey's philosophy is his theory of aesthetic experience. He directly challenges those critics, most notably Stephen Pepper and Benedetto Croce, who argued that this area is the least consistent part of Dewey's thought. The author demonstrates that the fundamental concept in Dewey's system is that of "experience" and that paradigmatic treatment of experience is to be found in Dewey's analysis of aesthetics and art. The confusions resulting from the neglect of this orientation have led to prolonged misunderstandings, eventual neglect, and unwarranted popularity for ideas at odds with the genuine thrust of Dewey's philosophical concerns. By exposing the underlying aesthetic foundations of Dewey's philosophy, Alexander aims to rectify many of these errors, generating a fruitful new interest in Dewey.
Book Synopsis Conversations on Art and Aesthetics by : Hans Maes
Download or read book Conversations on Art and Aesthetics written by Hans Maes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is art? What counts as an aesthetic experience? Does art have to beautiful? Can one reasonably dispute about taste? What is the relation between aesthetic and moral evaluations? How to interpret a work of art? Can we learn anything from literature, film or opera? What is sentimentality? What is irony? How to think philosophically about architecture, dance, or sculpture? What makes something a great portrait? Is music representational or abstract? Why do we feel terrified when we watch a horror movie even though we know it to be fictional? In Conversations on Art and Aesthetics, Hans Maes discusses these and other key questions in aesthetics with ten world-leading philosophers of art: Noel Carroll, Gregory Currie, Arthur Danto, Cynthia Freeland, Paul Guyer, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Jerrold Levinson, Jenefer Robinson, Roger Scruton, and Kendall Walton. The exchanges are direct, open, and sharp, and give a clear account of these thinkers' core ideas and intellectual development. They also offer new insights into, and a deeper understanding of, contemporary issues in the philosophy of art.
Book Synopsis Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy by : Alfonsina Scarinzi
Download or read book Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy written by Alfonsina Scarinzi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-24 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The project of naturalizing human consciousness/experience has made great technical strides (e.g., in mapping areas of brain activity), but has been hampered in many cases by its uncritical reliance on a dualistic “Cartesian” paradigm (though as some of the authors in the collection point out, assumptions drawn from Plato and from Kant also play a role). The present volume proposes a version of naturalism in aesthetics drawn from American pragmatism (above all from Dewey, but also from James and Peirce)—one primed from the start to see human beings not only as embodied, but as inseparable from the environment they interact with—and provides a forum for authors from diverse disciplines to address specific scientific and philosophical issues within the anti-dualistic framework considering aesthetic experience as a process of embodied meaning-making. Cross-disciplinary contributions come from leading researchers including Mark Johnson, Jim Garrison, Daniel D. Hutto, John T. Haworth, Luca F. Ticini, Beatriz Calvo-Merino. The volume covers pragmatist aesthetics, neuroaesthetics, enactive cognitive science, literary studies, psychology of aesthetics, art and design, sociology.
Book Synopsis Reification and the Aesthetics of Music by : Jonathan Lewis
Download or read book Reification and the Aesthetics of Music written by Jonathan Lewis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative study re-evaluates the philosophical significance of aesthetics in the context of contemporary debates on the nature of philosophy. Lewis's main argument is that contemporary conceptions of meaning and truth have been reified, and that aesthetics is able to articulate why this is the case, with important consequences for understanding the horizons and nature of philosophical inquiry. Reification and the Aesthetics of Music challenges the most emphatic and problematic conceptions of meaning and truth in both analytic philosophy and postmodern thought by acknowledging the ontological and logical primacy of our concrete, practice-based experiences with aesthetic phenomena. By engaging with a variety of aesthetic practices, including Beethoven's symphonies and string quartets, Wagner's music dramas, Richard Strauss's Elektra, the twentieth-century avant-garde, Jamaican soundsystem culture, and punk and contemporary noise, this book demonstrates the aesthetic relevance of reification as well as the concept's applicability to contemporary debates within philosophy.
Download or read book Art and Identity written by Tone Roald and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art has the capacity to shape and alter our identities. It can influence who and what we are. Those who have had aesthetic experiences know this intimately, and yet the study of art’s impact on the mind struggles to be recognized as a centrally important field within the discipline of psychology. The main thesis of Art and Identity is that aesthetic experience represents a prototype for meaningful experience, warranting intense philosophical and psychological investigation. Currently psychology remains too closed-off from the rich reflection of philosophical aesthetics, while philosophy continues to be sceptical of the psychological reduction of art to its potential for Subjective experience. At the same time, philosophical aesthetics cannot escape making certain assumptions about the psyche and benefits from entering into a dialogue with psychology. Art and Identity brings together philosophical and psychological perspectives on aesthetics in order to explore how art creates minds.
Book Synopsis John Dewey and the Artful Life by : Scott R. Stroud
Download or read book John Dewey and the Artful Life written by Scott R. Stroud and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetic experience has had a long and contentious history in the Western intellectual tradition. Following Kant and Hegel, a human’s interaction with nature or art frequently has been conceptualized as separate from issues of practical activity or moral value. This book examines how art can be seen as a way of moral cultivation. Scott Stroud uses the thought of the American pragmatist John Dewey to argue that art and the aesthetic have a close connection to morality. Dewey gives us a way to reconceptualize our ideas of ends, means, and experience so as to locate the moral value of aesthetic experience in the experience of absorption itself, as well as in the experience of reflective attention evoked by an art object.
Book Synopsis A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning by : Ray Jackendoff
Download or read book A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning written by Ray Jackendoff and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-02-23 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning presents a profound and arresting integration of the faculties of the mind - of how we think, speak, and see the world. Ray Jackendoff starts out by looking at languages and what the meanings of words and sentences actually do. He shows that meanings are more adaptive and complicated than they're commonly given credit for, and he is led to some basic questions: How do we perceive and act in the world? How do we talk about it? And how can the collection of neurons in the brain give rise to conscious experience? As it turns out, the organization of language, thought, and perception does not look much like the way we experience things, and only a small part of what the brain does is conscious. Jackendoff concludes that thought and meaning must be almost completely unconscious. What we experience as rational conscious thought - which we prize as setting us apart from the animals - in fact rides on a foundation of unconscious intuition. Rationality amounts to intuition enhanced by language. Written with an informality that belies both the originality of its insights and the radical nature of its conclusions, A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning is the author's most important book since the groundbreaking Foundations of Language in 2002.
