Showing titles in Aesthetics

In the hierarchy of foods, snacks are deemed trivial – perhaps even childish – especially in contrast to meals, which are seen as substantial and necessary. The multiple aisles devoted to sweet and savoury treats in supermarkets, and the availability of snacks even at places like home improvement and department stores, speak to the popularity of snacking. But the ubiquity of snacks is relatively new and not common to all countries.

The Wager We Never Won is a meditation on the human obsession with control—our endless attempts to gamble with chaos, to negotiate with fate, to turn risk into meaning. Through lyrical prose and quiet revelation, the book traces the lineage of ambition from the explorers who defied the sea to the modern dreamers who believe progress will save them. It asks whether courage and arrogance have ever truly been different, and whether survival itself might be the most dangerous illusion of all.

An informative, fun and rather charming essay on the nature and history of one of life’s most desirable assets, Charm, by renowned culture and design critic, Stephen Bayley. Aiming to wound, a schoolmaster wrote on future design-guru Stephen Bayley’s last ever school report “Charm alone...

Was geschieht, wenn wir Kant nicht mehr als marmornes Denkmal, sondern als lebendigen Menschen lesen? Diese Frage bildet den Kern dieses Buches. Immanuel Kants Philosophie war niemals dazu bestimmt, als unverrückbares Dogma verehrt zu werden. Sie war ein kritisches Projekt, ein Versuch, die Grenzen der Vernunft sichtbar zu machen und Werkzeuge für weiteres Denken zu schaffen.

A través de la contemplación silenciosa del mundo que lo rodea, Tanizaki desvela el misterio de la sombra, que no es otro que la esencia misma de la belleza, con un estilo sencillo y ameno pero asombrosamente equilibrado, sereno y sutil.

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. El pensamiento elegante moldea a un sujeto que no lucha por mostrarse distinto entre la multitud sino que se eleva hacia una vida distinguida.

While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, Thought's Wilderness insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made. Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism.

Oscar Wilde wurde am 16.10.1854 in Dublin geboren. Sein Vater war Arzt, seine Mutter Dichterin. Wilde studierte in Dublin und Oxford. Seit 1879 lebte er in London. 1895 wurde er vom Vater seines Freundes Lord Douglas wegen homosexueller Neigungen angezeigt und zu zwei Jahren Zuchthaus verurteilt. Wilde starb am 30.11.1900 verarmt in Paris.

Leo Tolstoy wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. These culminated in What Is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered and rejected the idea that art reveals and reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire, and even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned and iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good; for the improvement of humankind.

Philosopher Nick Riggle explores the beauty of being alive by investigating the things we say to inspire ourselves and each other: seize the day, treat yourself, you only live once. These clichés are at best vague, at worst stupid. They imply that you should do something wild with your life because your life is precious, a little like saying you should go swimming with your grandfather’s watch because it is irreplaceable.

To avoid the hurt from life's failures, we allow in more pain by downsizing our dreams. You know that you can reach that mountain top, yet deny it out of conditioned fear. The only way up is to remove every single layer of faulty programming.

Il tema della bellezza viene qui affrontato da Umberto Galimberti, come nel suo stile, con un ritorno alle sorgenti della nostra cultura. Se quella ebraica era una cultura della parola, quella greca era invece una cultura della visione, dominata dal senso della finitudine e della misura. Così anche la bellezza per l'uomo greco antico è ciò che rispetta delle misure, e cioè ha proporzioni calcolabili. Il cristianesimo porterà poi sulla scena un Dio che si fa corpo visibile, dando in questo modo maggior spazio all'immagine e quindi all'arte figurativa.

La misteriosa natura del bello, a cui faceva riferimento Simone Weil, non è puramente estetica, cioè riconducibile a questioni di gusto. Essa è piuttosto ontologica ed etica, strettamente unita com'è al vero, al giusto e al bene. È questo il senso della bellezza che si ritrova nei testi classici della grecità, da Omero a Saffo ai tragici. Umberto Curi vi si sofferma ampiamente in questo suo saggio, che ha al centro l'analisi del rapporto tra bellezza e tempo.

From his vantage point as a garden designer and writer based in Kyoto, Marc Peter Keane examines the world around him and delivers astonishing insights through an array of narratives. How the names of gardens reveal their essential meaning. A new definition of what art is. What trees are really made of. The true meaning of the enigmatic torii gate found at Shinto shrines. Why we give flowers as gifts. The essential, underlying unity of the world.

Immanuel Kant, seiner Zeit voraus und besonders spannend im Kontext aktueller Geschlechter- und Rassismusdiskussionen zu lesen, positioniert sich in der Rolle des Beobachters und beschreibt seine Erfahrungen gegenüber dem Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen - in vier verschiedenen Kontexten.

Un ensayo breve y al mismo tiempo revelador sobre el pensamiento estético en el arte japonés. En él, Tanizaki Junichiro reflexiona sobre el amor por el detalle, el minimalismo, la disciplina y la sutileza que encarna el arte japonés en oposición a la contundencia de lo occidental. Un texto imprescindible para quien quiera empezar a comprender los preceptos del arte nipón.

The Art of Rhetoric, a guide on the principles behind oratorical skill, is a core text on the art of persuasion. Aristotle contends that rhetoric is one of the key elements of philosophy – along with logic and dialectic. The work consists of three books: the first is a general overview, the second concerns the means of persuasion that an orator must deploy, and the third discusses elements of style and arrangement.

Más que de estética, en el sentido estricto de la palabra, este tratado explora asuntos diversos como la moral, la psicología, la descripción de los caracteres individuales y nacionales. Temas que pueden ocurrirse alrededor del asunto principal. Es una obra sencilla, llena de ingenio y alegría. Kant, ataca por primera vez el problema estético, y aunque sus ideas fundamentales acerca del arte y la belleza se hallan sistemáticamente expuestas en su obra posterior, la "Crítica del Juicio", tienen aquí cierto interés para el conocimiento de los orígenes de la estética Kantiana.

Wer durch irgendetwas auf Hermann Broch stößt, hat es bald mit Kitsch zu tun. Oder umgekehrt: wer das Phänomen Kitsch auf den Begriff bringen will, kommt an ihm nicht vorbei. Broch sagt Wesentliches zum Thema. Und er ist nicht zimperlich dabei. Seine sehr anspruchsvolle Aufklärung ist fundamental und rigoros. Wer sich darauf einlässt, hat viel gewonnen.

"Ueber das Erhabene" wurde erstmals 1801 als Essay veröffentlicht und war Bestandteil des Bandes "Kleinere prosaische Schriften". Im Gegensatz zu Kant sind bei Schiller die Begriffe Schönheit und Erhabenes gleichwertig und bilden zusammen die Basis eines vollwertigen moralischen Menschen. Zur vollendeten Menschlichkeit gehört laut Schiller zudem die Kunst, die bei Kant ebenfalls autark auftritt.