Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series, and the seminars on which they are based, brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another's work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and "unpredictable conversation" on knotty and provocative issues about art. This ......
In Always More Than One, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of individuation, she extends the concepts of movement and relation developed in her earlier work ......
`The aestheticization of everyday life' has become a commonplace term, one which often merely scratches the surface of contemporary culture. This study illuminates the deeper dynamics of aesthetic reality from a philosophical perspective. Wolfgang Welsch, author of the influential Aesthetic Thinking, develops an important analysis of ......
Twentieth-century French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain is arguably one of the most significant contemporary disciples of St. Thomas Aquinas. Maritain's philosophy is rooted in and logically consistent with the thought of his mentor, yet his philosophy is profoundly original. Taken together, his comprehensive metaphysical principles, his ......
A reappraisal of Jean Baudrillard's thoughts on the image, radical illusion and media culture. Through a number of interviews and recent essays, Baudrillard introduces what he calls the "stunning clarity" of the photographic image, and outlines his present thoughts on urban reality and new media technologies, in light of his practice as a ......
In this exploration of the aesthetics of modernity, Christine Buck-Glucksmann argues that in periods of perceived crisis a new form of rationality emerges to replace reasoned ways of thinking. She examines a number of key themes for modern social theory: the critique of instrumental rationality, the political crisis of loss of community and of innocence with the development of industrialization, as well as the impact of relativism on realist theories of knowledge. After examining the condition of modernity - alienation, melancholy and nostalgia - the author goes on to explore the place of the feminine in discussions of modernity: how woman is used as one of the main sources of allegorical interpretations of modernity; and how the feminine comes to stand for and represent the miraculous, the utopian, the dangerous and the androgynous. In the final part, she identifies Nietzsche, Adorno, Musil, Baudelaire, Barthes and Lacan as constituting a baroque paradigm, and lays the foundation for a baroque reason. In her explanation of themes fundamental to our contemporary condition, she invites the reader beyond post-modernism to a realm of the Other.
Once gods walked among humans, but, friends, we have come too late! The Gods are...up there in another world. Thus the poet Holderlin evoked the godlessness in modern life, which, ruled by reason and science, has chased transcendence out of our understanding. Yet is it true that we moderns walk without gods? ""The Religion of Reality"" takes to ......
Didacticism, romanticism, and classicism are the possible schemata for the knotting of art and philosophy, the third term in this knot being the education of subjects, youth in particular. What characterizes the century that has just come to a close is that, while it underwent the saturation of these three schemata, it failed to introduce a new ......
In this book, one of Italy s most important and original contemporary philosophers considers the status of art in the modern era. He takes seriously Hegel s claim that art has exhausted its spiritual vocation, that it is no longer through art that Spirit principally comes to knowledge of itself. He argues, however, that Hegel by no means ......
