Contemporary Aesthetics does not publish book reviews. However, to inform our readers of new publications of interest, we do publish brief descriptions extracted from information provided by the publishers. These notices do not necessarily represent the views or judgment of this journal. Readers are invited to send us such information about books they think will interest other readers of CA.
Alberto Siani, Landscape Aesthetics: Toward an Engaged Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2024), 256 pp.
ISBN 9780231213677
The notion of landscape typically seems innocuous, associated with leisure and contemplation. Likewise, aesthetics is often seen as apolitical, a matter of subjective tastes and preferences. This book challenges the common understanding of these categories as disengaged and demonstrates how uniting landscape studies and philosophical aesthetics opens new ways of addressing both the environmental crisis and the crisis of the humanities.
Alberto L. Siani argues that the concept of landscape helps us overcome deeply ingrained oppositions, such as nature and culture, spirit and flesh, or the environment and the human. Landscape represents the intersection of these categories and therefore provides a helpful vantage point on contemporary predicaments that cannot be understood within dualistic frameworks. An engaged aesthetics shows that landscapes are not simply ways of seeing the world but ways of being in the world, offering practical guidance for inhabiting places ethically. Landscape Aesthetics sheds new light on issues spanning art and its interpretation, environmentalism, temporality, lived spaces, justice, education, and interdisciplinarity. Bringing together a wide range of sources across philosophy and other disciplines as well as personal experience, Siani reveals the key role of landscape and aesthetics in responding to the pressing crises we face today.
David Fenner, Plain Aestheitcs: A Common-Sense Approach to Philosphical Aesthetics (Broadview Press, 2024), 270 pp.
ISBN 9781554816262
Plain Aesthetics is an introduction to philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of art written for all audiences. While students studying philosophy will find it informative, it is specifically constructed to be accessible to anyone, even those with no background in philosophy. It contains no jargon or technical language, except where such terms are defined at their point of use. Philosophers and theorists are discussed only where appropriate, and their views explained in context. Plain Aesthetics is written as a conversation between the author and the reader, and employs a great many examples of fascinating and influential artworks. Images and other works are presented to the reader both within the text and through an innovative interactive system. This book makes aesthetics accessible to everyone.
Ryan Mitchell Wittingslow, What Art Does. Using Philosophy of Technology to Talk about Art (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) 136 pp.
ISBN 978-1-5381-6732-8
We derive a great deal of cognitive pleasure from asking what artworks mean. And yet, despite the seriousness with which we approach these questions, they all too often rely on theories of art that fail to adequately explain how art conveys meaning.
This book proposes a new theory. In contrast to more conventional definitions of art, What Art Does defends the claim that artworks constitute a class of tool. Like other tools, artworks are objects that have functions and that furnish affordances. However, thanks to the particular social and material facts that underpin the creation of artworks, the functions that artworks have and the affordances they furnish are special.
It is thanks to these special functions and affordances that artworks obtain their privileged character and status. Because artworks do things that other tools cannot, we take artworks to be meaning-making objects with something to say.
David Fenner & Ethan Fenner, The Art and Philosophy of the Garden (Oxford: Oxford Academic, 2024).
ISBN 9780197753590
The Art and Philosophy of the Garden is a comprehensive philosophical treatment of the aesthetics of gardens. The book focuses on five central questions: (1) What is a garden? The ten-point definition offered is derived from a comprehensive inventory of garden types. (2) Are some gardens works of art? Inspired by the recent work of garden philosophers—and after examining the arguments, as well as comparing the garden to other artforms—the book argues in the affirmative. (3) What does it mean to aesthetically appreciate gardens? Given that gardens are always changing in a variety of ways, how is it possible to compare, evaluate, or find meaning in them? To explain this, the book explores how aesthetic properties of gardens can be known, both formal and contextual. (4) How do people interpret gardens? After considering the arguments, pro and con, the book focuses on what it means to “read” the formal aspects of gardens—what the book calls “garden form”—as a basis for interpreting a garden. (5) How do people value gardens and gardening? Finally, the book discusses the intersection of gardens/gardening and value, the sort of value that gardens possess, whether and how ethics are relevant to gardens, how gardens may be evaluated and compared, and the value of the practice of gardening.
Applying Aesthetics to Everyday Life, edited by Lisa Giombini & Adrián Kvokacka (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 240 pp.
ISBN 9781350331761
Applying Aesthetics to Everyday Life surveys current debates in the field of everyday aesthetics, examining its history, methodology and intersections with cognate research areas. Lisa Giombini and Adrián Kvokacka bring together an international team of renowned scholars who are shaping the present and future of the discipline.
They demonstrate how the historical origins of everyday aesthetics emerges across the history of Western aesthetic thought, from Renaissance thinkers to the modern German philosophers Baumgarten, Kant and Heidegger. Chapters shed light on the field’s methodological underpinnings, tracing its theoretical foundations back to epistemology and ethics and assess the potential of everyday aesthetics as a theoretical tool. They reveal its interdisciplinary nature and how it assists various fields of inquiry, including environmental and urban aesthetics, conservation ethics and the philosophy of art.
Through fresh explorations of its origins, background and contemporary developments, this collection advances a new definition of everyday aesthetics and provides a cutting edge reflection on the world we inhabit today.
Elena Mancioppi, Osmospheres: Smell, Atmosphere, Food (Mimesis, 2023) 246 pp.
ISBN 9788869774317
Offering an overview on the relationships between smell and atmospheres as proposed by philosophy and the humanities, this volume interprets the “olfactive” as a cross-sensory, affective and ecological modality of perceiving. Osmospheres — i.e., the olfactory irradiances which provide persons, commodities, situations and places with an aura, a vague but unique flavour — are investigated through the perspective of relational and social aesthetics. Food is the main case-study as it exemplifies the porous boundaries between subject and the environment, identity and alterity, knowing and feeling. In the light of contemporary artistic and marketing practices, where food osmospheres are staged to convey emotions and to drive consumer behaviour, the idea of osmospheric foodification seems to capture the essence of today’s urban and domestic dwelling. This work speculates on its socio-political aesthetic implications.
Aesthetic Theory Across the Disciplines, edited by Max Ryynänen & Zoltán Somhegyi (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2023), 256 pp.
ISBN 978-1-5381-7659-7
What is aesthetics? How is it related to other disciplines? The chapters of this book examine the history, theoretical conditions and connection points between aesthetics and other disciplines. At the same time, the authors are also interested in practical clashes of methodology and agenda, especially when it is not merely about the securing of the position of one or the other discipline, but is used, in a dialogical manner, as the form of understanding better the nature of both as well as the benefits of their collaboration. The authors work on the border of aesthetics and at least one other academic field. Through their regular scholarly activities, the contributors constantly benefit from cross- and interdisciplinary practice, and this makes them ideal interpreters of these methodological questions.
Aesthetic Literacy Series (3 volumes open access), edited by Valery Vinogradovs (published by mongrel matter).
Aesthetic Literacy Volume I: a book for everyone (ISBN: 978-0-6486054-0-9)
Aesthetic Literacy Volume II: out of mind (ISBN:978-0-6486054-1-6)
Aesthetic Literacy Volume III: an endgame (ISBN: 978-0-6486054-2-3)
From Yale to jail: a collective forming in Australia, mongrel matter delivers an eclectic collection in contemporary aesthetic education:
Aesthetic Literacy is an open, cross-genre experiment in philosophy of culture, a book-exercise which has taken four years to realise, turning into a maze wandering through three volumes, free-styled by one hundred and fifty contributors.
The ample cultural potential of aesthetics is inchoate, as things stand, while the sizable body of aesthetic studies enjoys sparse influence on school, tertiary, street, ecological, domestic and other areas of critical education. One is likely to learn about aesthetics at college or university, in a closed room, and not thanks to their parents, siblings, friends and lovers.
Mindful of such barriers and hierarchies, we offer to everyone this demonstrous book of searches for meaning in the most natural, river-like dimension of being, carrying you away to familiar and unknown shallows and depths. As a science and art of perception and experience, aesthetics is the first philosophy!
Aesthetic Literacy recognizes no writing style as superior to another, be it a dialogue beside a comic, or a rhyme by a mural: why would anyone discriminate against an aphorism next to an essay, if the meanings and feelings they shape are like figments of gold?
The three-volume book is authored by professors, near acclaimed and aspiring writers, journalists and storytellers, artists and aliases, and those who will not write and create again.
Arnold Berleant, The Social Aesthetics of Human Environments: Critical Themes (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 216 pp.
ISBN 9781350349322
Across these essays Arnold Berleant demonstrates how aesthetic values and theory can be used to reappraise our social practices. He tackles issues within the built environment, everyday life, and politics, breaking down the dichotomy between the natural and the human. His work represents a fresh approach to traditional philosophical questions in not only ethics, but in metaphysics, truth, meaning, psychology, phenomenology, and social and moral philosophy.
Topics covered include the cultural aesthetics of environment, ecological aesthetics, the aesthetics of terrorism, and the subversion of beauty. The corruption of taste by the forces of commercial interests as well as how aesthetics can advance our understanding of violence are also considered. Berleant’s exploration is supported by his analysis of 19th-century art to the present day, starting with impressionism through to postmodernism and contemporary artistic interventions.
By critically examining the field in this way and casting new light on social understanding and practice, this collection makes a substantive contribution in identifying and clarifying central human issues, guided by an understanding of aesthetic engagement as a powerful tool for social critique.