Aesthetics

In Praise of Shadows is an eloquent tribute to the austere beauty of traditional Japanese aesthetics....

This is a declaration of war. In the name of our creator, we declare a revolutionary war against both the gods and those titans who were gods before them! In the name of our liberator, we declare a revolutionary war against fatalism and every other form of tyranny....

On both economic and psychological grounds, author Matthew B. Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a "knowledge worker," based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing. Crawford presents an articulated call for self-reliance....

Art has the power to move us, to spark an unexplainable connection, or to leave us cold. We might focus on small details or take in the entire piece of art, searching for something familiar.

La elegancia, en su etimología, está emparentada con la elección (eligĕre), de tal manera que una persona elegante, entre otras cosas, es aquella que sabe elegir...

The Phaedrus by Plato, is a dialogue between Plato's protagonist, Socrates, and Phaedrus, an interlocutor in several dialogues....

One of Nietzsche’s earliest works, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) is a remarkable source of inspiration....

Fiction is an Art in every way, worthy to be called the sister and the equal of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, Music, and Poetry; that is to say, her field is as boundless, her possibilities as vast, her excellences as worthy of admiration, as may be claimed for any of her sister Arts....

Learn where inspiration comes from and how to harness it in your life and work. Carey Wallace meditates on this vital spark and on the ways artists have negotiated with it across genres and throughout history.

For nearly two thousand years, Meditations has been a quiet companion to warriors, philosophers, athletes, and thinkers. But never like this.

Now, for the first time, listeners will be granted access to five decades of Robert M. Pirsig's personal writings in this posthumous collection that illuminates the evolution of his thinking to an unprecedented degree.

In A Philosophical Enquiry, Edmund Burke sets out to define the nature of beauty and sublimity, and establish an objective criterion for discussing aesthetics....

Repulsive and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick is a form that can be found virtually everywhere in capitalism. It comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas....

In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object beautiful and examining how we can compare differing judgments of beauty when it is evident all around us that our tastes vary so widely....

Featuring an enlightening introduction by the book's translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, providing generational and cultural context for Kandinsky and his work, Concerning the Spiritual in Art gives testimony to the mind and creative expression of Kandinsky and other artists of his generation....

How to Wake Up: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide to Navigating Joy and Sorrow, describes the path to peace amid all of life's ups and downs....

What part of your beautiful self were you taught to hate? We spend a lot of time trying to improve our 'defects', according to society's ideals of beauty. But these ideals that are often reductive, tyrannical and commercially entangled....

Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought....

A compelling argument for the necessity for art in life, Nietzsche's first book is fuelled by his enthusiasms for Greek tragedy, for the...

This audiobook is devoted only to the first named, and we will not attempt to describe the others at this time, although we will have something to say upon all of these great branches of yoga, in future writings....

We live in an age of the mobile image. This recent kinetic revolution of the image has enormous consequences not only for the way we think about contemporary art and aesthetics but also for art history as well....

In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, Bence Nanay introduces the field of aesthetics, considering both Western and non-Western aesthetic traditions and exploring why it is sometimes misunderstood or considered to be too elitist - by artists, musicians, and even philosophers....

There is a cause, or a reason, behind everything that happens. This is the fundamental view behind the classical proposition the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which, in 1813, Schopenhauer chose as his subject for further examination in his doctoral dissertation....

Philosopher Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature....

A compelling guide to the fundamental place of humor and comedy within Western culture - by one of its greatest exponents....

For as long as people have traveled to distant lands, they have brought home objects to certify the journey. More than mere merchandise, these travel souvenirs take on a personal and cultural meaning that goes beyond the object itself. Drawing on several millennia of examples—from the relic-driven quests of early Christians, to the mass-produced tchotchkes that line the shelves of a Disney gift shop—travel writer Rolf Potts delves into a complicated history that explores issues of authenticity, cultural obligation, market forces, human suffering, and self-presentation.

What is silence? In a series of short meditations, novelist and playwright John Biguenet considers silence as a servant of power, as a lie, as a punishment, as the voice of God, as a terrorist’s final weapon, as a luxury good, as the reason for torture—in short, as an object we both do and do not recognize. Concluding with the prospects for its future in a world burgeoning with noise, Biguenet asks whether we should desire or fear silence—or if it is even ours to choose.

For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy — until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin’s press; through their boom — enabled by new technologies — as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet.

During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed as alternatives to home. Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy…hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies—the spaces and things that make up these modern sites of gathering and alienation, hotels.

We all wear hoods: the Grim Reaper, Red Riding Hood, torturers, executioners and the executed, athletes, laborers, anarchists, rappers, babies in onesies, and anyone who’s ever grabbed a hoodie on a chilly day. Alison Kinney’s Hood explores the material and symbolic vibrancy of this everyday garment and political semaphore, which often protects the powerful at the expense of the powerless—with deadly results.