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....

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....

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....

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.

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

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 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....

100 years after Proust's death, In Search of Lost Time remains one of the greatest works in World Literature. At 3,000 pages, it can be intimidating to some. This short volume invites first-time listeners and veterans alike to view the novel in a new way.

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.

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.

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....

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....

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....

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