Aesthetics

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....

The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse—a fear of corruption or contamination through color—lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought.

The Eternal Embrace of Beauty presents Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue with an adaptation of his thought-provoking book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace.

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

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

The Architecture of Happiness is a dazzling journey through the philosophy and psychology of architecture and the indelible connection between our identities and our locations....

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....

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.

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....

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

Part treatise, part critique, part call to action, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice is a journey into the uncanny realities revealed to us in the great works of art of the past and present....

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....

The idea that a small group of dedicated aspirants could work together to help dissipate the heavy enshrouding glamours which oppress humanity and deflect the light of truth, was initially quite a startling one....

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....

Step into a thought-provoking expedition that navigates the intricacies of societal norms and power structures through the analytical lens of ...

Ecce homo, "behold the man", are the words Friedrich Nietzsche chose as the title for his literary self-portrait....

Poststructuralism changes the way we understand the relations between human beings, their culture, and the world. This Very Short Introduction traces the key arguments that have led poststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture....

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....

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

In this intimate guide, you'll embark on a transformative journey into the hidden depths of yourself and your partner.

During the decades of his world fame as sage and preacher as well as author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion....

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....

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....

Meditating on the labyrinthine nature of sexual identity and the performance of gender, High Heel moves from film to fairytale, from foot binding to feminism, and from the golden ratio to glam rock....

Edgar Allan Poe’s essay, "The Philosophy of Composition", sets forth a theory on good writing. It first appeared in the April 1846 issue of Graham's Magazine, and Poe illustrates his theory on the composition of his poem, "The Raven"....