Contributions by Benjamin Arditi, Nico Baumbach, Pheng Cheah, Tom Conley, Sudeep Dasgupta, Jason Frank, Eleanor Kaufman, Gluseppina Mecchia, Codruta Morari and Joseph J. Tanke
Afterword by Jacques Rancière
Distributions of the Sensible is a collection original essays by leading scholars on the relation of Jacques Rancière’s thought to political theory, critical theory, philosophical aesthetics, and film.
Contributions by Joakim Garff, Peder Jothen and James Rovira
Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts contains fourteen essays about the famed Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s relationship to the visual arts, performing arts, and letters. It will interest Kierkegaard readers as well as artists and teachers in the wide variety of art forms discussed.
The principal motif that runs throughout The Virtual Point of Freedom is a confrontation with the discourse of freedom, or, more specifically, the falsely transgressive ideal of a total emancipation that would know no constraints.
Edited by David Jones, Jason M. Wirth and Michael Schwartz
On the True Sense of Art
collects essays by philosophers responding to John Sallis’s Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art as well as his other works on the philosophy of art, including Force of Imagination and Logic of Imagination.
Beginning with the assertion that earth is the elemental place that grants an abode to humans and to other living things, in Senses of Landscape the philosopher John Sallis turns to landscapes, and in particular to their representation in painting, to present a powerful synthetic work.
Spencer Golub builds on a recent trend in theater and performance studies in which scholars bring philosophy to bear on our understanding of performance. In Golub’s case, however, he also adds to the mix a meditation on the nature of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, from which he has long suffered. Golub sees Wittgenstein’s work as having both descriptive power in relation to OCD and, as such, offering some relief from this condition. Golub analyzes a broad range of dramatists, novelists, and filmmakers, among them Richard Foreman, Mac Wellman, Peter Handke, David Mamet, and Alfred Hitchcock. In their work, Golub finds an overriding interest in the relationship between the linguistic and the visual. Like Wittgenstein, the work of these artists is concerned with the limits of language’s representational capacity. For Golub, it is these limits that give Wittgenstein’s thought its therapeutic quality with respect to OCD. And it is Wittgenstein’s notion of “pain...
Merleau-Ponty's essays on aesthetics are some of the major accomplishments of his philosophical career, and rank even today among the most sophisticated reflections on art in all of twentieth-century philosophy. His essays on painting, "Cezanne's Doubt" (1945), "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" (1952), and "Eye and Mind" (1960), have inspired new approaches to epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of history. Galen A. Johnson has gathered these essays for the first time into a single volume and augmented them with essays by distinguished scholars and artists, including M.C. Dillon, Mikel Dufrenne, and René Magritte. Together the essays demonstrate the continuing significance of Merleau-Ponty's ideas about art for contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Fr. Phénoménologie de l'expérience esthétique) was first published in 1953. In the first of four parts, Dufrenne distinguishes the "aesthetic object" from the "work of art." In the second, he elucidates types of works of art, especially music and painting. He devotes his third section to aesthetic perception. In the fourth, he describes a Kantian critique of aesthetic experience.
That modern art is different from earlier art is so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning. Yet there is little agreement as to the meaning or the importance of this difference. Indeed, contemporary aestheticians, especially, seem to feel that modern art does not depart in any essential way from the art of the past. One reason for this view is that, with the exception of Marxism, the leading philosophical schools today are ahistorical in orientation. This is as true of phenomenology and existentialism as it is of contemporary analytic philosophy. As a result there have been few attempts by philosophers to understand the meaning of the history of art—an understanding fundamental to any grasp of the difference between modern art and its predecessors.
