Questions tagged [aesthetics]
Aesthetics is the study of the beautiful. It is one of the classical sub-disciplines of philosophy.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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What do contemporay philosophers say about Hegel's aesthetics beyond interpretation?
Hegel's philosophy of art is a wide ranging account of beauty in art,
the historical development of art, and the individual arts of
architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry. It contains
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Does Danto's 'The Disenfranchisement of Art' (1984) imply that if anything can be an art then nothing is?
An ex friend claimed that if anything can be an art then nothing is, and cited the following passage as a proof:
When art internalizes its own history, when it becomes self-conscious
of its ...
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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, according to Adorno, were Schoenberg's innovations progressive?
I think that Zuidervaart, in his book Adorno's aesthetic theory, says that Adorno makes two claims for artworks:
They develop the productive forces of the artform
The artist has a cognition of the ...
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Is Rilke an existentialist?
This isn't really an aesthetics question, but a question of interpreting a poem philosophically; a kind of philosophical hermeneutics of poetry; Rilke is well-known as a metaphysical poet.
Towards the ...
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Is 'analytic' opposed to 'synthesis', as universal rather than traditional?
I'm reading a book on Russian theatre and it mentions
a similarity in intent... [to]
the work of the cubists... intention was both analytic and
synthetic... both the investigation of the universal ...
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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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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 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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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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Harm Principle and the eventual harm of creating needs
A necessity or a need is a necessary condition for something else.
A need in Economics and particularly a consumer need is something needed to be consumed, a necessary condition for achieving higher ...
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Prerequisites to study aesthetics
So, I plan to begin to self study aesthetics, and was wondering whether a working knowledge of art history would be helpful for the same? If so, would Gardner's History of Art be sufficient?
Also, on ...
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Who coined a term in art philosophy refering to the danger of looking at older art through the lens of modern art? And what is it?
For example looking at african art through the lens of picasso, or certain landscape artists as proto-abstract art. Something to do with anachronism, but it was a specific art historian/philosopher ...
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Who are some (relatively) modern "platonists" with respect to aesthetics/philosophy of art?
I'm interested in discovering post-Enlightenment to contemporary thinkers who discuss art in terms of form and beauty, and imitation vs "true forms."
Thanks!
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Nietzsche: Does visual art reaffirm life?
In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche states that life is justified through artistic creativity. He analyses the ancient Greek tragedies to further elaborate on his point. My question is: would his ...
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What is the name (and ideally some further reading) for the Aesthetics theory that a thing is beautiful if it achieves its goal?
I'm listening to a podcast lecture by Michael Grant on Aristotle's poetics. The current topic is interpretations of Aristotle's theory that pleasure is derived from 'pity and fear'. One such ...
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How does feng shui and aestethics work together?
According to Wikipedia
Feng Shui is a is a Chinese philosophical system of harmonizing everyone with the surrounding environment. It is closely linked to Daoism... [and] is one of the Five Arts of ...
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What does poetry enact according to Heidegger?
The following idea is cited approving in a book I just read
Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot, by Timothy Clark
But on an earlier page the same author says
In what way can a poem be "nothing but its own ...
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According to Adorno, does the "truth content" of art refer?
Adorno and the Political, By Espen Hammer
In this negation, by truth content, is it a form of referentiality?
Which may be to ask whether truth content is linguistic, in this action of negation.
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Do questions come before or after art activity?
Do questions generate art activity or only follow art activity?
Most art is a form of assertion not of questioning. In thqt wiew, art is not an
answer to a question, but a statement of experience. ...
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a relationship with the other
Bourriaud somewhere says:
“artistic practice is always a relationship with the other, at the
same time as it represents a relationship with the world”.
Does he by "with the other" mean "with ...
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Defining Kant's idea of the sublime and applying it to a painting?
How would one go about applying Kant's idea of the dynamical sublime to a painting as to Kant the Dynamical sublime is:
The dynamically sublime is similar. In this case, a “‘might' or power is ...
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What would the situationists think of this rule?
Do what one will to maximize ones own sense of overcoming mundane life.
I understand their ideas about the situation were meant to prod people out of their mundane lives. The situation being, IIRC, ...
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Is post-modernity liminal?
Liminality (from the Latin Limen, meaning threshold) is a technical term deployed in Anthropology describing the ambiguity and disorientation which occurs in rites of passage from an 'earlier' life to ...
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Does an aesthetic dichotomy between universalism and relativism occur widely cross-culturally?
Roughly speaking, there appears to be a recurrent attitude some people have about what intrinsically separates “good art” from some intrinsically held reason some art is not good. We can imagine such ...
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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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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 a work of art contain any meaning one can come up with?
I've read in some blog that any piece of art contains any meaning that any reader or spectator may find in it.
Has something similar been explored in philosophical works, or was it an 'original' ...
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How to make philosophically sound argument regarding something being beautiful?
We often hear people speak of something as being beautiful. For example, many believe that mathematics is a beautiful subject. What they mean by being beautiful varies by context, and is often ...
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Is true beauty long lasting (through long periods of time)? Is beauty therefore objective?
When people think of objects that are considered "beautiful," people think of gold, diamonds, and crystals. These objects are resistant to change over time and tend to last in their original forms. ...
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Are there central theories on aesthetics?
Are there central theories on aesthetics? I am looking to see if there were any significant philosophers by significant I mean people who often are discussed among university circles today or in the ...
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Is there a theory about art as a perception(way to "see" things?)
Art as a perception as in looking at an object,environment,experience in a thoughtful and slow way ,"appreciating" it,thus letting an object become art.
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Can world without earth begin an artwork's strife?
In art there is:
an “essential strife” between two interconnected dimensions of
intelligibility (revealing and concealing) which Heidegger calls
“world” and “earth” in his most famous work on ...
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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 ...
user38026
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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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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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