Vladimir S. Soloviev (1853-1900), moral philosopher, social and literary critic, theologian, and poet, is considered one of Russia's greatest philosophers. But Soloviev is relatively unknown in the West, despite his close association with Fyodor Dostoevsky, who modeled one of his most famous literary characters, Alyosha Karamazov, on Soloviev. In ......
Seeking the Beautiful: A Study in Literary Aesthetics comprises essays both theoretical and applied, with a focus on English medieval and Renaissance texts. While the term aesthetics may imply simply sensory perception or expression, this volume considers what makes literary texts beautiful. While of course any such study must involve subjective ......
Not rediscovered until the twentieth century, the works of Georges de La Tour retain an aura of mystery. At first sight, his paintings suggest a veritable celebration of light and the visible world, but this is deceptive. The familiarity of visual experience blinds the beholder to a deeper understanding of the meanings associated with vision and ......
The meeting of Jacques Maritain and the avant-garde artist Jean Cocteauin the summer of 1925 produced two significant results: Cocteaureturned to his Catholic faith, and it led the poet and the philosopherto exchange letters reflecting on the relationship between art and faith.While Cocteau proclaimed that the spiritual nature of art orders man ......
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 ......
`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.
