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

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.

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

An updated version of the seminal 1994 classic volume on the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Nearly every book with "wabi" or "wabi sabi" in the title is based on the concepts first elucidated in this book....

Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought....

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....

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

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

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....

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....

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

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

The Phaedrus by Plato, is a dialogue between Plato's protagonist, Socrates, and Phaedrus, an interlocutor in several dialogues....

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....

The New York Times film critic shows why we need criticism now more than ever....

When Shakespeare has the Three Witches cast Macbeth’s lot, he uses something very weird to do it: not simply “eye of newt and toe of frog,” but the number seven. And when Hamlet claims, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” Shakespeare reaches for eleven.

In The Performer, Richard Sennett explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics, and everyday experience. It focuses on the bodily and physical dimensions of performing, rather than on words.

From one of our most widely admired art critics comes a bold and timely manifesto reaffirming the independence of all the arts - musical, literary, and visual - and their unique and unparalleled power to excite, disturb, and inspire us....

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....

The Art Instinct combines two of the most fascinating and contentious disciplines, art and evolutionary science, in a provocative new work that will revolutionize the way art itself is perceived....

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 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....