Questions tagged [aesthetics]
Aesthetics is the study of the beautiful. It is one of the classical sub-disciplines of philosophy.
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Would sublime landscapes give Coleridge "humble feelings" or "sublime feelings"?
Lately I've been reading and rereading The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis. He opens by discussing "the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall" and the way that an English textbook ...
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Is the value of art always contextual, or can it ever be inherent?
A few years back, I was in a modern art museum and saw this painting by Russian Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich:
It seems to me that the value of this painting lies completely in the identity of ...
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Isn't "modern art" kind of discriminating?
Let's say we have a person who likes to draw. He does it for some time and considers himself "doing art". But all people can draw, everyone has been drawing something in childhood or later ...
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Does all art have a sentiment?
It occurred to me that when e.g. reading poetry, I attach a lot of significance to a kind of sentiment. It seems independent of how genteel the work is.
I am interested in finding a way of thinking ...
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Can the product of creativity always be classified as analogy?
Without concepts there can be no thought, and without
analogies there can be no concepts.
—Hofstadter and Sander
Part of the creative process of a sculpter is to visualize a shape within a stone and ...
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Identification of light with existence and darkness with non-existence [closed]
Is it true that in ancient times many thinkers identified light with existence (essence), and darkness with non-existence?
Examples include Pythagoreanism, Neoplatonism, the ontology of light as-...
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Does Endgame make sense?
I believe that Beckett's Endgame is meant to be the epitome of meaningless literature. Some seem to think that the critical theorist Adorno thinks that art is a meaningless brand that shows itself to ...
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Authenticity in art
I know the question some how tricky if not even boring, but the other day during a conference about Guido Reni and Caravaggio’s Saint Peter a group of scholars were discussing if a philological ...
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Why did not former epochs distinguish between 'art' and 'craft'?
Source: p. 18 Middle, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (2011) by Roger Scruton.
That said, we should recognize that the distinction between
aesthetic and utilitarian interests is no more clear ...
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Why does Schopenhauer think aesthetic experience is the suspension of pain and desire?
In an discussion about Schopenhauer , the French philosophy teacher Christophe Salaün says:
"L'expérience esthétique est la suspension momentanée de la douleur, du désir. En supprimant provisoirement ...
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Philosophy of storytelling from non-western cultures
In the west, most of our thoughts on storytelling seem to originate and be influenced by Aristotle's Poetics, in one form or another.
However, it seems that in other cultures storytelling is often ...
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Are artworks created or discovered?
I am trying to deny Joseph Margolis' argument that pieces of art are not 'universals'. Particularly, I want to say that types (in the tokens-of-a-type sense) are essentially the same thing as ...
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Is beauty a basic human need?
Did any philosopher argue that beauty is a basic human need?
By "beauty" (pulchritudo) I mean, as St. Thomas Aquinas defines it ([II-II q. 145 a. 2][4] co.), that which
results from the ...
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Why is literature a problem for aesthetic formalism?
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy claims literature is a problem for aesthetic formalism (which says aesthetic value comprises perceptual properties):
Suppose you praise a short story for the ...
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Why does Nietzsche affirm excellence so much?
A recurring theme in Nietzsche's writings seems to be that humans should strive for excellence “the highest power and splendor possible to the type man”.
Im just wondering what it is about excellence ...
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What were the moral and aesthetic ideas that Camus was interested in?
I have read most of the books by Albert Camus thoroughly. I know that Camus' theory is absurdity but I want to know his take on morality. I mean, what were the moral and aesthetic ideas that Camus was ...
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What does Heidegger mean "the closedness of earth"?
What does Heidegger mean "the closedness of earth" in 'the origin of the work of art' aka 'Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes'?
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Philosophy and stand-up comedy
Stand-up comedians - such as Doug Stanhope, Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Sarah Silverman, Ricky Gervais, Amy Schumer and Bill Burr - frequently work in a philosophical realm, in that they reflect upon ...
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How does aesthetic relate to structure?
If we are to take a subject say mathematics, then often mathematicians may attribute to the well defined structure and precision in describing its theories. I believe there are also other things like ...
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Is it the content or the source of an obligation that determines whether it is moral or aesthetic?
Is it the content or the source of an obligation that determines whether it is moral or aesthetic?
Consider the following statement reflecting a perceived obligation: "I must save the beautiful ...
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Does Kant implicitly (or maybe even explicitly?) hold to a propositional-operator gloss of aesthetics?
Now sometimes it is said that knowledge is primarily knowledge-that, i.e. some elementary epistemic operator is a propositional operator/"attitude report". Or at least there is an invoked ...
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Is Architecture a Language?
I am puzzling over this question awhile, and I can’t find any good, clear reference on the topic without going way to deep into linguistics and getting too abstract. Can anybody explain to me if ...
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Are "aesthetic experiences" limited to art and music?
I was wondering whether philosophers consider aesthetic experiences to be something that permeate through a range of day to day experiences or if they're limited to art.
For example, can learning/...
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Are aesthetic judgments rational?
I was reading this article: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/#1.4
I was thinking that aesthetic judgments are responses that derive from our emotions. So they can be considered ...
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What does "Normative" Mean?
I was reading the SEP articles on aesthetic judgment and had a really hard time understanding some parts. What it came down to is that they were using a definition of 'normative' I did not know. The ...
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What in mathematics has the property of beauty?
I might or might not be at an impasse in my writing... I have around 200 pages of notes, and I finally sat down and tried to compile some of the material, but I feel like the presentation is off ...
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What is an "aesthetic experience"?
So, we're doing a project in philosophy class, discussing what exactly an "aesthetic experience" is. I understand, that it is a very personal definition that everybody has, but I'm sure there are some ...
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Why in the academic fields of art and design, the philosophy taught or mentioned is often Continental philosophy?
Is there any rationale to prefer, in academic fields of art, Continental philosophy over Analytic philosophy? I guess there might be a historical reason why philosophy evolved into two approaches but ...
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Can one author be proved to be better than another?
Can we objectively say that one author is better than another? For example, could we say William Shakespeare is objectively a better author than E.L. James? If it is possible, how would we decide? ...
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Where does Nietzsche state that destruction is necessary to creation?
I've read somewhere that Nietzsche argues that destruction is always necessary in order to create, I think that the reference was to "thus spoke Zarathustra" but I couldn't find it myself.
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Defending the Unpopular: Aesthetic Realism
Aesthetic realism is the belief that there are things that are objectively more beautiful than other things. This implies beauty is not subjective, and if one believes an actually beautiful thing is ...
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What does Danto mean when he writes that artworks are "embodied meanings"?
In his paper "The Art World Revisited" Arthur Danto writes:
The thesis which emerged from my book The Transfiguration of the
Commonplace is that works of art are symbolic expressions, and ...
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What does the philosopher Bruno Latour mean when he claims that we have never been modern?
I am trying to read Bruno Latour's paper "A cautious Prometheus? A few steps towards philosophy of design" but have no background in philosophy and so would be happy if someone could help me ...
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What is the enigma of art?
I've always been fascinated by the following constellated section of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, probably because phenomenology is intuitively easier to get to grips with than a drawn out critical ...
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Can morally good actions be considered beautiful/aesthetic?
Ive been trying to find resources on whether morality can be considered aesthetic.
I found philosophers who suggest ideas can be aesthetic, so I was wondering whether something as abstract could be ...
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Does postmodernism in art criticism collapse into relativism? What's its merit?
Postmodernism rejects the idea of a universal truth and in context of literary art criticism it shifts the focus from the writer or the author to the audience and from constant meaning to unstable one ...
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What is the relationship between appraising art and philosophy?
I'm not quite sure of the relationship between philosophical systems and the appraisal of art. I know philosophy encompasses aesthetics, but I don't know if a system telling you how to appraise art is ...
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heteropathic and idiopathic identification
Reading the book "Art and Psychoanalysis" by Maria Walsh on modern art criticism and philosophy, I encountered the words "heteropathic identification" and "idiopathic identification". Do they mean ...
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How do philosophers differentiate between change and progress at the intersection of art, design, and business management?
I do Theory of Knowledge (IBDP) at school and in regards to the subject areas, I was thinking of linking the arts and design (humanities? design of products?) to reason, sense perception, intuition, ...
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How do ethical values shape one's aesthetics?
I have been struggling through an idea for the past several months regarding the order of values and its influence upon art. It started with a quick tour of an online art gallery showcasing Rafael, ...
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Are there objective criteria for aesthetic judgment?
Are there objective criteria for judging whether or not artworks are good art? Should we at times appeal to moral values in assessing the quality of artwork? What major approaches are there for the ...
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Where should I start reading about aesthetics philosophy?
I am totally new to philosophy (actually studying engineering) but the philosophy of aesthetics fascinates me.
Which books should I start reading to study about the way socio-economic factors ...
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What does this quote mean about Plato's Cave?
Simon Blackburn is describing the Poetic Interpretation of ascending from Plato's Cave:
Part of the charm of Plato is the sense of being in a world in which these fractures did not exist. Ours may ...
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Is Deleuze saying that the "virtual" generates beauty and lies outside affect?
This article says
All this is most fully worked out in Difference and
Repetition(1994). What Deleuze calls the virtual is the there posed as
the transcendental condition of all ...
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Is art a form of communication?
I recently got into a discussion where the other person claimed that art is a form of communication. Bearing in mind that the definition of art is disputed, did any philosophers argue that a work ...
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What is the Schillerian concept for sublime that at the same time means attraction and repulsion?
There is German word that Schiller uses to explain beauty, a word that at the same time means attraction and repulse.
He uses that word instead of the Kantian "awe" for The Sublime.
Does anyone ...
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In what sense does philosophy, especially aesthetics, live on, for Adorno?
The introduction to Negative Dialectics begins
Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the
moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgement that it
had merely ...
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the threatened return of the look
The following text is from Art and Psychoanalysis by Maria Walsh. Does anybody know what threatens the return of the look in the bold section?
Context:
The other, as black man, acts as both a ...
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Does contemporary art embody the desacralisation of western culture?
It's noticeable that all the great artistic traditions embody their religious worldviews: Hindu temples, Christian churches, Greek statues of gods and heroes, Egyptian sarcophagi, etc.
However, ...
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Julia Kristeva's idea about abjection and aesthetics
Can any body explain what Julia Kristeva means in the text below? Can anybody write it in more understandable plain English?
Text:
In a world in which the Other has collapsed, the aesthetic task -a ...
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