Editorial The year 2018 and Volume 16 ushered in a new chapter for this journal with the change of editorship from Arnold Berleant to me, Yuriko Saito. I felt the weight of responsibility for maintaining the legacy built by Arnold. The learning curve was steep but the experience has been both rewarding and educational. With […]
Category: 17 (2019)
Notices
Notices CA welcomes notices of interest to our readers. These include announcements and reviews of conferences, news items, forthcoming events, etc. Please send them using the submission guidelines. Call for Papers Pragmatist Legacies in Aesthetics Contact: Roberta Dreon (robdre@unive.it) Deadline: 1 September 2020 The 2020/2 issue of the open access EJPAP (European Journal […]
Recent Publications
Recent Publications 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 […]
SHORT NOTES
Thresholds, Defaults, and Cosbys: A Response to Bartel
Thresholds, Defaults, and Cosbys: A Response to Bartel Jason Holt & Bernard Wills Our piece, “Art by Jerks,” proved timely in two ways. Soon after its publication several celebrity scandals shook the entertainment industry–those involving Weinstein, Spacey, and C.K.–giving it a veneer of prescience.[1] It also thus served as a suitable foil for Christopher […]
SHORT NOTES
Wangheng Chen’s Chinese Environmental Aesthetics
Wangheng Chen’s Chinese Environmental Aesthetics Arnold Berleant Summary of Chinese Environmental Aesthetics by Wangheng Chen Wangheng Chen, Chinese Environmental Aesthetics, translated by Feng Su, edited by Gerald Cipriani (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 212 pp. ISBN 9780815364276 Environmental aesthetics as a focus of philosophic inquiry first developed in the West in the second […]
SHORT NOTES
Who Are We?
Who Are We? Jale Erzen Summary of Who Are We? by Wolfgang Welsch Wolfgang Welsch, Wer Sind Wir? (Hamburg: Nap New Academic Press, 2018), 166 pp., in German. ISBN: 978-3-7003-2077-7; 9 780826 464637 Wolfgang Welsch’s new book of 166 pages, in German, traces the evolution of mankind and her relation to the earth throughout […]
SHORT NOTES
Perception and World
Perception and World Wolfgang Welsch Summary of Truth and World by Wolfgang Welsch Wolfgang Welsch, Wahrnehmung und Welt (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018), 76 pp., in German. ISBN 978-3-95757-605-7 The author presents the results of decades of his research on perception in summary form. First he clarifies the main point of the Aristotle’s theory […]
SHORT NOTES
Charting New Territory: the Aesthetic Value of Artistic Visions That Emanate in the Aftermath of Severe Trauma
Charting New Territory: the Aesthetic Value of Artistic Visions That Emanate in the Aftermath of Severe Trauma Tania Love Abramson & Paul R. Abramson We live in a world that fluently manufactures catastrophe. Though tragedy is deplorable, artistic imaginations encumbered by the configurations of adversity are nonetheless essential to how art is understood. Some […]
SHORT NOTES
Duchamp and the Science of Art
Duchamp and the Science of Art Miklos Legrady Postmodern art claims an intellectual foundation based on ideas proposed at the start of the 20th century, including a rejection of aesthetics by artist Marcel Duchamp and author Walter Benjamin. Today we can draw on readily available studies in the sciences of anthropology, sociology, and psychology […]
SHORT NOTES
The Cosmography of Aesthetics
The Cosmography of Aesthetics Yrjö Sepänmaa Summary of The Universe of Aesthetics: How to Understand Aesthetics in the 21st Century by Ossi Naukkarinen Ossi Naukkarinen, Estetiikan avaruus: Miten ymmärtää estetiikka 2000-luvulla? (Helsinki: Aalto ARTS Books, Aalto University, 2018), 223 pp., in Finnish. ISBN 978-952-60-7971-4 Ossi Naukkarinen, the first Professor of Aesthetics at Aalto University […]
SHORT NOTES
Reconsidering Darkness
Reconsidering Darkness Matti Tainio While a naturally dark night with starry skies is a paradigmatic example of the sublime, urban darkness has a different character. Generally speaking, true darkness hasn’t been present in most western cities since the 19th century. Contemporary urban night is not pitch-black due to illumination. Its darkness is incomplete because […]
ARTICLES
First-Personal Body Aesthetics as Affirmations of Subjectivity
First-Personal Body Aesthetics as Affirmations of Subjectivity Madeline Martin-Seaver Abstract This paper redirects some of the philosophical discussion of sexual objectification. Rather than contributing further to debates over what constitutes objectification and whether it is harmful, I argue that aesthetic experience is a useful tool for resisting objectification. Attending to our embodied experiences provides […]
ARTICLES
Black Aesthetics and Relative Autonomy
Black Aesthetics and Relative Autonomy Michael Kelly Abstract There has been a recent revival of black aesthetics unprecedented since the 1960s. Some is happening inside academic philosophy, including in this journal (Volume 7, 2009). But there are more examples of black esthetics across other disciplines. A key, controversial concept in transdisciplinary black aesthetics is […]
ARTICLES
The Aesthetics of Financial Markets. Beyond Mere Representing and Supporting
The Aesthetic and Financial Markets. Beyond Mere Representing and Supporting Marcin M. Krawczyk Abstract The aesthetic, according to Wolfgang Welsch, has several semantic variants. One of them is a phenomenalistic one. Referring to this variant, I show that the aesthetic is something more than a secondary component of electronic capital markets, which reflects what […]
ARTICLES
Spiritual Rituals of Chinese Ink Painting: The Suggestions of Shitao
Spiritual Rituals of Chinese Ink Painting: The Suggestions of Shitao Eva Kit Wah Man Abstract Ritual has an essential connection with art. This article suggests that the study on Shitao has significance in proposing a ritual theory of art for two reasons. First, textual analysis on his treatise on ink painting, Hua-pu, demonstrates that […]
ARTICLES
Feet, Lines, Weather, Labyrinth: The Haptic Engagement as a Suggestion for an Ecological Aesthetics
Feet, Lines, Weather, Labyrinth: The Haptic Engagement as a Suggestion for an Ecological Aesthetics Nicola Perullo Interaction is between; correspondence in-between -T. Ingold Abstract In this paper I present a philosophical approach stemming from the general framework of ecological aesthetics, specifically defined here as a perceptual attitude that entails intimacy, engagement, participation, and […]
ARTICLES
A Role for Empathy in Decolonizing Aesthetics: Unlikely Lessons from Roger Fry
A Role for Empathy in Decolonizing Aesthetics: Unlikely Lessons from Roger Fry Ivan Gaskell Abstract Artist and art historian Roger Fry used Paul Gauguin’s 1896 painting, Poèmes barbares, to advertise his 1910 exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists. In Vision and Design (1920), Fry promoted the so-called “primitive” art of Oceania and sub-Saharan Africa as […]
ARTICLES
Ordinary Monsters: Ethical Criticism and the Lives of Artists
Ordinary Monsters: Ethical Criticism and the Lives of Artists Christopher Bartel Abstract Should we take into account an artist’s personal moral failings when appreciating or evaluating the work? In this essay, I seek to expand Berys Gaut’s account of ethicism by showing how moral judgment of an artist’s private moral actions can figure in […]
ARTICLES
An Alternative to “Rules” in Practice Approaches to Distinguishing Art Kinds
An Alternative to “Rules” in Practice Approaches to Distinguishing Art Kinds Larry Shiner Abstract Numerous contemporary philosophers have invoked the idea that art is best understood as a social practice in order to distinguish among art kinds or to distinguish Art from closely related practices such as Design. Many general accounts of social practices […]
ARTICLES
In Defense of Cities: On Negative Presentation of Urban Areas in Environmental Preference Studies
In Defense of Cities: On Negative Presentation of Urban Areas in Environmental Preference Studies Anu Besson Abstract This paper critiques a common research method, image-based studies, in assessing environmental references. The method is used, in particular, in the fields of environmental psychology, landscape studies, and health studies, here called empirical environmental preference studies or […]
ARTICLES
Representation and Transparency in Artistic Astronomical Photographs
Representation and Transparency in Artistic Astronomical Photographs Stephen Chadwick Abstract The development of astronomical photography has raised many interesting epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical questions, in addition to questions in aesthetics. One such question concerns the nature of the aesthetic properties possessed by these photographs. In this article I concentrate on one such property, namely […]