RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Volume: 24 (2026)

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.

Antony Aumann, How Art Transforms Us: A Philosophical Inquiry (Bloomsbury, November 2026), 248 pp.

ISBN: Paperback: 9781350438231

How Art Transforms Us uncovers the hidden ways in which art can change who we are. Movies, novels, and songs do more than entertain us. They inspire us to quit our jobs, take up hobbies, start careers, rethink parenthood, and join political movements. Aumann argues that art is not always honest or straightforward. It can use beauty, humor, and horror to cast boxing, hiking, motherhood, and activism in a misleading light. Worse, it can lead us to confuse aesthetic appeal with genuine insight. Drawing on examples including Rocky, The Bear, Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, climate-change installations, and activist memes, Aumann shows how art can change us without relying on reasons and arguments alone. The result is troubling. Art can lead us astray and undermine our autonomy. Yet art can also help us discover more meaningful ways to live. How Art Transforms Us concludes that we should not always resist art’s influence. Despite the risks involved, our lives often go better if we open ourselves up to its power.

 

 

Max Ryynänen and Zoltán Somhegyi, Eds., Accompanying Aesthetics. Philosophy of Art’s Role in Other Disciplines (Bloomsbury, November 2026), 268 pp.

ISBN: Hardcover: 9798765161715

How can aesthetics connect with research in other disciplines and fuel them with philosophical ideas and insights? This edited collection explores what kind of companion discipline aesthetics can be, and the benefits of collaboration for other disciplines: not only in the humanities but also those like meteorology, brain research, engineering, or computer science. The contributors investigate the contemporary role of aesthetics in relationship with other disciplines and areas of research in order to enrich understanding of both the nature and the benefit of such intersections. While researchers have explored inter-disciplinarity, cross-disciplinarity, and trans-disciplinarity, the role of distinct disciplines in such crossovers have not been yet profoundly studied. The eleven chapters connect aesthetics with other disciplines and areas of research, and while some of these pairings may look unusual or even surprising in the beginning, they nevertheless strengthen the core claim of the book: aesthetics is not only an active, but also a very helpful companion discipline to describing, understanding, and developing our world.

 

 

Antony Radford, Warwick Fox, and Isis Brook, The Essence of Good Design: Responsive Cohesion (Routledge, September 2026), 214 pp., 77 b/w illus.

ISBN: Paperback: 9781041215332

Written by a designer and two philosophers, this short, highly illustrated book advances the idea that responsive cohesion is the essence of good design. ‘Responsive cohesion’ refers to a state in which things hold together due to the mutual responsiveness of the features that constitute them. This contrasts with fixed cohesion, in which things hold, or are held, together in a more forced, constrained, or non-mutually responsive way, and discohesion, in which things don’t hold together well or at all. The authors argue that responsive cohesion is the best form of organization in general and thus the best guide to creating those deliberate forms of organization we refer to as ‘design.’ Moreover, this claim applies not only to individual examples of design but also, and importantly, to how these items fit with their wider human-constructed, human social, and ecological contexts. The book shows how these ideas illuminate and can be applied to a wide range of design areas, ranging from gardens and domestic objects to architecture, urban design, and cultural landscapes.

 

Mariana Ortega and Helen A. Fielding, Eds., Life in Art: Phenomenology and World Making (Indiana University Press, July 2026), 314 pp.

ISBN: Paperback: 978-02-53-07568-0; Hardcover: 978-02-53-07567-3; E-book: 978-02-53-07570-3

Life in Art showcases how, at the intersection of art and phenomenology, sociopolitical issues can be examined anew. Thirteen diverse, international, established and emerging academics and artists reveal how art opens possibilities for breaking colonial logics, resisting injustice, and addressing climate catastrophe. Through their multilayered and multidisciplinary phenomenological analyses, these original essays reveal how a variety of artworks from diverse fields—dance, sculpture, performance, photography, literature, architecture, film, and virtual reality—can engage perception in ways that transform the self and the world. Some essays focus on specific artworks; others consider theoretical questions that frame the intersection of aesthetics and phenomenology; and still more expand on the ways art can lead to political and social action. Offering a multiplicity of diverse views on the intersections between phenomenology and aesthetics, Life in Art highlights how this entanglement fosters our desires to mend, repair, and make new worlds. Contributions by Martina Ferrari, Stefan Kristensen, Anna Barseghian, Amanda Boetzkes, Nader El-Bizri, Jorella Andrews, Monique Roelofs, Rajiv Kaushik, Sarah Stefana Smith, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning and Mary Bunch.

 

Zoltán Somhegyi and Max Ryynänen, Eds., Trying Out New Paths in Aesthetics (Brill, 2025), 256 pp.

Series: Contemporary Issues in Aesthetics, Volume: 1; Historical and Philosophical Aesthetics, Volume: 1.

ISBN: Print 978-90-04-74738-8; E-book 978-90-04-74739-5

This book focuses on one of the all-time primary interests of all researchers—finding new perspectives and research topics—and expands it. What new routes could aesthetics, philosophy of art and the aesthetic take today and in the future? Thirteen authors open new doors for the discipline to new companion disciplines, new discussions, and new concepts. Heritage studies, Greek aesthetic concepts, found literature, power, safety and mythology, monuments, artificial intelligence, sensibility, hybrid spaces, textiles, aesthetics of AI, aesthetics of literature, aesthetic values, homo ludens and martial arts studies are approached in new ways in this volume, where the spearhead lies in thinking about the next step of the ancient discipline of aesthetics and what potential it could have for the world of research in the future.

 

Wolfgang Welsch, We Have Always Been Transcultural: The Arts as an Example (Brill, 2024), 232 pp.

Series: Transcultural Aesthetics, Volume: 5

ISBN: 978-90-04-69782-9 (PDF); 978-90-04-69781-2 (hardback)

Wolfgang Welsch demonstrates for the first time that transculturality – the mixed constitution of cultures – is by no means only a characteristic of the present, but has de facto determined the composition of cultures since time immemorial. The historical transculturality is demonstrated using examples from the arts. While transculturality was often viewed with reservation where political, social, or psychological levels were at stake, it was rather welcomed and appreciated in the field of art. The book therefore demonstrates the historical prevalence of transculturality via all areas of art and does so with respect to all cultures and continents of our world.
Volume: 24 (2026)