Georg Simmel is one of the most original German thinkers of the twentieth century and is considered a founding architect of the modern discipline of sociology.
Does it make sense to refer to bird song-a complex vocalization, full of repetitive and transformative patterns that are carefully calculated to woo a mate-as art?
Over the past two centuries Western culture has largely valorized a particular kind of "e;good"e; music-highly serious, wondrously deep, stylistically authentic, heroically created, and strikingly original-and, at the same time, has marginalized music that does not live up to those ideals.
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, Thierry de Duve argues in the first volume of Aesthetics at Large, is as relevant to the appreciation of art today as it was to the enjoyment of beautiful nature in 1790.
Even though it's frequently asserted that we are living in a golden age of scripted television, television as a medium is still not taken seriously as an artistic art form, nor has the stigma of television as "e;chewing gum for the mind"e; really disappeared.
There is an ever-increasing number of books on improvisation, ones that richly recount experiences in the heat of the creative moment, theorize on the essence of improvisation, and offer convincing arguments for improvisation's impact across a wide range of human activity.
The Western musical tradition has produced not only music, but also countless writings about music that remain in continuous-and enormously influential-dialogue with their subject.
For the Enlightenment mind, from Moses Mendelssohn's focus on the moment of surprise at the heart of the work of art to Herder's imagining of the seismic moment at which language was discovered, it is the flash of recognition that nails the essence of the work, the blink of an eye in which one's world changes.
Leo Bersani's career spans more than fifty years and extends across a wide spectrum of fields-including French studies, modernism, realist fiction, psychoanalytic criticism, film studies, and queer theory.
The Decision Between Us combines an inventive reading of Jean-Luc Nancy with queer theoretical concerns to argue that while scenes of intimacy are spaces of sharing, they are also spaces of separation.
What if Immanuel Kant floated down from his transcendental heights, straight through Alice's rabbit hole, and into the fabulous world of Lewis Carroll?
Despite its foundational role in the history of philosophy, Plato's famous argument that art does not have access to truth or knowledge is now rarely examined, in part because recent philosophers have assumed that Plato's challenge was resolved long ago.
Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance-so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought.
Emotion Theory: The Routledge Comprehensive Guide is the first interdisciplinary reference resource which authoritatively takes stock of the progress made both in the philosophy of emotions and in affective science from Ancient Greece to today.
This collection draws on cutting-edge work that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries to offer new perspectives on the importance of visuality and the imagination in the work of Luigi Pirandello, the great Italian modernist.
A tale of forbidden love and inevitable death, the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde recounts the story of two lovers unknowingly drinking a magic potion and ultimately dying in one another's arms.
Adrian Bardon's A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time is a short introduction to the history, philosophy, and science of the study of time-from the pre-Socratic philosophers through Einstein and beyond.
Adrian Bardon's A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time is a short introduction to the history, philosophy, and science of the study of time-from the pre-Socratic philosophers through Einstein and beyond.
Speculation about Shakespeare's own religious beliefs and responses to the Reformation have dominated discussions of faith in the playwright's work for decades.
Japanese philosophy is now a flourishing field with thriving societies, journals, and conferences dedicated to it around the world, made possible by an ever-increasing library of translations, books, and articles.
Simulation and Similarity is an account of modeling and idealization in modern scientific practice, focusing on concrete, mathematical, and computational models.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, virtue ethics has enriched the range of philosophical approaches to normative ethics, often drawing on the work of the ancient Greeks, who offered accounts of the virtues that have become part of contemporary philosophical ethics.
Improvisation informs a vast array of human activity, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us.
Contemporary electronic music has splintered into numerous genres and subgenres, all of which share a concern with whether sound, in itself, bears meaning.
This critical study locates musical monumentality, a central property of the nineteenth-century German repertoire, at the intersections of aesthetics and memory.
Unfinished Music draws its inspiration from the riddling aphorism by Walter Benjamin that serves as its epigraph: "e;the work is the death mask of its conception.
The complex notion of "e;rasa,"e; as understood by Javanese musicians, refers to a combination of various qualities, including: taste, feeling, affect, mood, sense, inner meaning, a faculty of knowing intuitively, and deep understanding.
This collection of original essays, written by scholars from disciplines across the humanities, addresses a wide range of questions about love through a focus on individual films, novels, plays, and works of philosophy.
