The Meaning of the Body

The Meaning of the Body
Author: Mark Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2012-06-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 022602699X

In The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic Metaphors We Live By. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning's bodily sources. Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world. “Mark Johnson demonstrates that the aesthetic and emotional aspects of meaning are fundamental—central to conceptual meaning and reason, and that the arts show meaning-making in its fullest realization. If you were raised with the idea that art and emotion were external to ideas and reason, you must read this book. It grounds philosophy in our most visceral experience.”—George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics

Aesthetics of Religion

Aesthetics of Religion
Author: Alexandra K. Grieser
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2017-12-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3110460459

This volume is the first English language presentation of the innovative approaches developed in the aesthetics of religion. The chapters present diverse material and detailed analysis on descriptive, methodological and theoretical concepts that together explore the potential of an aesthetic approach for investigating religion as a sensory and mediated practice. In dialogue with, yet different from, other major movements in the field (material culture, anthropology of the senses, for instance), it is the specific intent of this approach to create a framework for understanding the interplay between sensory, cognitive and socio-cultural aspects of world-construction. The volume demonstrates that aesthetics, as a theory of sensory knowledge, offers an elaborate repertoire of concepts that can help to understand religious traditions. These approaches take into account contemporary developments in scientific theories of perception, neuro-aesthetics and cultural studies, highlighting the socio-cultural and political context informing how humans perceive themselves and the world around them. Developing since the 1990s, the aesthetic approach has responded to debates in the study of religion, in particular striving to overcome biased categories that confined religion either to texts and abstract beliefs, or to an indisputable sui generis mode of experience. This volume documents what has been achieved to date, its significance for the study of religion and for interdisciplinary scholarship.

The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought

The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought
Author: Mark Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2018-04-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 022653913X

All too often, we think of our minds and bodies separately. The reality couldn’t be more different: the fundamental fact about our mind is that it is embodied. We have a deep visceral, emotional, and qualitative relationship to the world—and any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of the mind must take into account the ways that cognition, meaning, language, action, and values are grounded in and shaped by that embodiment. This book gathers the best of philosopher Mark Johnson’s essays addressing questions of our embodiment as they deal with aesthetics—which, he argues, we need to rethink so that it takes into account the central role of body-based meaning. Viewed that way, the arts can give us profound insights into the processes of meaning making that underlie our conceptual systems and cultural practices. Johnson shows how our embodiment shapes our philosophy, science, morality, and art; what emerges is a view of humans as aesthetic, meaning-making creatures who draw on their deepest physical processes to make sense of the world around them.

Visual Thinking Strategies

Visual Thinking Strategies
Author: Philip Yenawine
Publisher: Harvard Education Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1612506119

2014 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice "What’s going on in this picture?" With this one question and a carefully chosen work of art, teachers can start their students down a path toward deeper learning and other skills now encouraged by the Common Core State Standards. The Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) teaching method has been successfully implemented in schools, districts, and cultural institutions nationwide, including bilingual schools in California, West Orange Public Schools in New Jersey, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It provides for open-ended yet highly structured discussions of visual art, and significantly increases students’ critical thinking, language, and literacy skills along the way. Philip Yenawine, former education director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and cocreator of the VTS curriculum, writes engagingly about his years of experience with elementary school students in the classroom. He reveals how VTS was developed and demonstrates how teachers are using art—as well as poems, primary documents, and other visual artifacts—to increase a variety of skills, including writing, listening, and speaking, across a range of subjects. The book shows how VTS can be easily and effectively integrated into elementary classroom lessons in just ten hours of a school year to create learner-centered environments where students at all levels are involved in rich, absorbing discussions.

Aesthetic Intelligence

Aesthetic Intelligence
Author: Pauline Brown
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2019-11-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0062883313

Longtime leader in the luxury goods sector and former Chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton North America reinvents the art and science of brand-building under the rubric of Aesthetic Intelligence. In a world in which people have cheap and easy access to most goods and services, yet crave richer and more meaningful experiences, aesthetics has become a key differentiator for most companies and a critical factor of their success and even their survival. In this groundbreaking book, Pauline Brown, a former leader of the world’s top luxury goods company and a pioneer in identifying the role of aesthetics in business, shows executives, entrepreneurs, and other professionals how to harness the power of the senses to create products, services, and experiences that stand out, resonate with their customers, and create long-term value for their businesses. The power is rooted in Aesthetic Intelligence—or “the other AI,” as Brown refers to it. Aesthetic Intelligence can be learned. Indeed, people are born with far more capacity than they use, but even those that are naturally gifted must continue to refine their skills, lest their aesthetic advantage atrophy. Through a combination of storytelling and practical advice, the author shows how aesthetic intelligence creates business value and how executives, entrepreneurs and others can boost their own AI and successfully apply it to business. Brown offers research, strategies and practical exercises focused on four essential AI skills. Aesthetic Intelligence provides a crucial roadmap to help business leaders build their businesses in their own authentic and distinctive way. Aesthetic Intelligence is about creating delight, lifting the human spirit, and rousing the imagination through sensorial experiences.

Aesthetic Experience in Science Education

Aesthetic Experience in Science Education
Author: Per-Olof Wickman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2006-04-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1135602026

Ths bk examines the role of aesthetic experience in learning science&in science education from the perspective of knowlecge as action&language use,based on the writings of John Dewey&Ludwig Wittgenstein.It offers a novel contribution to the current debat

Aesthetic Disinterestedness

Aesthetic Disinterestedness
Author: Thomas Hilgers
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2016-12-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317444884

The notion of disinterestedness is often conceived of as antiquated or ideological. In spite of this, Hilgers argues that one cannot reject it if one wishes to understand the nature of art. He claims that an artwork typically asks a person to adopt a disinterested attitude towards what it shows, and that the effect of such an adoption is that it makes the person temporarily lose the sense of herself, while enabling her to gain a sense of the other. Due to an artwork’s particular wealth, multiperspectivity, and dialecticity, the engagement with it cannot culminate in the construction of world-views, but must initiate a process of self-critical thinking, which is a precondition of real self-determination. Ultimately, then, the aesthetic experience of art consists of a dynamic process of losing the sense of oneself, while gaining a sense of the other, and of achieving selfhood. In his book, Hilgers spells out the nature of this process by means of rethinking Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theories in light of more recent developments in philosophy–specifically in hermeneutics, critical theory, and analytic philosophy–and within the arts themselves–specifically within film and performance art.

A Place to Know

A Place to Know
Author: Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf
Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2018-06-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9188661407

To engage with the aesthetic is to watch yourself watching – and what you see cannot be reached, for all that exists is the reflection of the vision performed by you. The aesthetic experience offers insights into the consciousness that are both ancient and linked to creative inventions in present-day art culture. In A Place to Know, Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf interprets twelve recent artworks, from Sol LeWitt to Katharina Grosse. She sets out the unique claims and qualities which are inherent in seeing and understanding contemporary art. The book presents four analytical categories of artwork, charting the character of the aesthetic experience and the traditions that determine how we think about visual art. She peels back the layers of consciousness to lay bare the forgotten seams of experience, interwoven with artistic expression. The ancient thus arcs into a deepened awareness of avant-garde art.

The Saturated World

The Saturated World
Author: Beverly Gordon
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2006
Genre: Crafts & Hobbies
ISBN: 9781572335424

Explores the way middle-class American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries added meaning to their lives through their "domestic amusements"--leisure pursuits that took place in and were largely focused on the home. Women elaborated on their everyday tasks and responsibilities with these amusements thus cultivating a heightened, aesthetically charged "saturated" state and created self-contained enchanted worlds.