Showing titles in Aesthetics

The Phaedrus by Plato, is a dialogue between Plato's protagonist, Socrates, and Phaedrus, an interlocutor in several dialogues. It was probably written around 370 BC, at about the same time as Plato's Republic and Symposium. Ostensibly about love, the discussion in the dialogue focuses on the art of rhetoric and how it ought to be practiced. The dialogue appears in the direct words of Socrates and Phaedrus, without an introduction.

Arthur Schopenhauer's The Art of Literature is a lively, illuminating and brutally honest collection of essays on literary style and values, writers and critics, and the nature of genius. Schopenhauer advises seclusion and independent thought, criticizes Pliny's reading habits, and explains the pitfalls of certain schools of thought and even virtues like modesty. His thought-provoking arguments, caustic wit, and accessible style make this a must for any aspiring writer.

“You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich”, writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.” Nonconformity is about 20th-century America: “Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder.” In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer’s relation to society....

Az ember a természetnek vagy apja, vagy megrablója. Ezt az ősi iráni tudást Darwin nem ismerte. A létért folytatott mészárlás tanában azonban nem jelenik meg egyetlen Mozart-akkord, Giotto tájkép, vagy Pascal-aforizma sem. A világ újkori kirablásával szemben a vallás, a tudomány, a filozófia készületlenül állt. Egyedül a mûvészet tudta megôrizni a humánum "alapállását". Művésznek lenni azt jelenti: túlemelkedni a téridőbe szorított életen. A művészet egyetemes távlatot nyit, és a létünket átható homályba bevilágít.

Unlike their biblical precursors, Kahlil Gibran's parables espouse the importance of personal spiritual insight rather than moral rectitude. In Gibran's view, sin and virtue, mercy and justice, and sanity and madness are all sides of the one coin - one cannot exist without its opposite.

Cuteness has taken the planet by storm. Global sensations Hello Kitty and Pokémon, the works of artists Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons, Heidi the cross-eyed opossum and E.T. - all reflect its gathering power. But what does “cute” mean, as a sensibility and style? Why is it so pervasive? Is it all infantile fluff, or is there something more uncanny and even menacing going on - in a lighthearted way? In The Power of Cute, Simon May provides nuanced and surprising answers.

Everyone deplores narcissism, especially in others. The vain are by turns annoying or absurd, offending us whether they are blissfully oblivious or proudly aware of their behavior. But are narcissism and vanity really as bad as they seem? Can we avoid them even if we try? In Mirror, Mirror, Simon Blackburn, the author of such best-selling philosophy books as Think, Being Good, and Lust, says that narcissism, vanity, pride, and self-esteem are more complex than they first appear and have innumerable good and bad forms.

Art is the creative manifestation of essences. In order to understand the relation between art and reality, we need a philosophical guide. The best way to comprehend how the creative act of imagining enables the mind to seek reality is to employ the kind of dialectical thinking that Plato used in his dialogues. Beginning with the shadows on the wall of the cave in which each person dwells, that process gradually enables us to grasp the essences that are manifested in individual works of art.

How we eat, farm and shop for food is not only a matter of taste. Our choices regarding what we eat involve every essential aspect of our human nature: the animal, the sensuous, the social, the cultural, the creative, the emotional and the intellectual. Thinking seriously about food requires us to consider our relationship to nature, to our fellow animals, to each other and to ourselves. So can thinking about food teach us about being virtuous, and can what we eat help us to decide how to live?

Qu'est-ce que l'art ? Comment s'est-il constitué et défini à travers l'histoire ? Quels rapports entretient-il avec la philosophie ? Pour la première fois, l'éditeur des savoirs les Presses Universitaires de France et la maison de disques culturels de référence Frémeaux & Associés s'associent pour proposer des cours particuliers sur l'histoire philosophique des arts et des discours sur l'art, conçus et présentés par Carole Talon-Hugon, spécialiste française de l'approche philosophique de l'histoire de l'art.

Le dernier opus de "Cosmos" explore les arts, la poésie et la musique : ces créations humaines qui s'allient à la nature pour permettre à chacun d'expérimenter le sublime. Des origines préhistoriques à la prédominance chrétienne, de l'art bourgeois de la Renaissance jusqu'aux créations contemporaines, Michel Onfray ébauche une contre-histoire des arts, citant Mallarmé, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Bachelard, Georges Rouquier ou Pierre Soulages. L'art change de paradigme, et si la notion cardinale du beau disparaît, elle laisse la place au sublime, ce sentiment d'étonnement radical et subjugué qui peut réunir en un instant l'homme et le cosmos.

Le dernier opus de "Cosmos" explore les arts, la poésie et la musique : ces créations humaines qui s'allient à la nature pour permettre à chacun d'expérimenter le sublime. Des origines préhistoriques à la prédominance chrétienne, de l'art bourgeois de la Renaissance jusqu'aux créations contemporaines, Michel Onfray ébauche une contre-histoire des arts, citant Mallarmé, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Bachelard, Georges Rouquier ou Pierre Soulages. L'art change de paradigme, et si la notion cardinale du beau disparaît, elle laisse la place au sublime, ce sentiment d'étonnement radical et subjugué qui peut réunir en un instant l'homme et le cosmos.

Conférence de Patrick Frémeaux, galeriste, marchand d'art, éditeur de philosophie et d'archives sonores, en présence d'Olivier Le Bihan, directeur du Musée d'Art moderne de Troyes, et de Jean Luc Rio, directeur de la librairie Les Passeurs de textes. A l'occasion de l'exposition "Collections croisées" (Collections nationales Pierre et Denise Levy et Collection Sargos).

Qu'est-ce que l'art ? Comment s'est-il constitué et défini à travers l'histoire ? Quels rapports entretient-il avec la philosophie ?

Qu'est-ce que l'art ? Comment s'est-il constitué et défini à travers l'histoire ? Quels rapports entretient-il avec la philosophie...

Walter Benjamin beschreibt in seinem berühmtesten Aufsatz Ursprung und Technik der Reproduktion von Kunstwerken und bietet damit die theoretische Basis für die Diskussion über die Vervielfältigung von Kunst in der Neuzeit.

Counsels and Maxims is a classic work by noted German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. His work has influenced some of the modern world's greatest thinkers, including Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Erwin Schrödinger. This piece was originally translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders.

Survival of the Beautiful is a revolutionary new examination of the interplay of beauty, art, and culture in evolution. Taking inspiration from Darwin's observation that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg probes why animals, humans included, have innate appreciation for beauty - and why nature is, indeed, beautiful.

The book draws on history and sociology, and more personally on the author's early career as a professional cellist, as well as on his later work as a city planner and social thinker. It traces the evolution of performing spaces in the city; the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists; the inequality between performer and spectator; the uneasy relations between artistic creation and social and religious ritual; the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The Janus-faced art of performing is both destructive and civilizing.

Philosopher Nick Riggle explores the beauty of being alive by investigating the things we say to inspire ourselves and each other: seize the day, treat yourself, you only live once. These clichés are at best vague, at worst stupid. They imply that you should do something wild with your life because your life is precious, a little like saying you should go swimming with your grandfather’s watch because it is irreplaceable.