Aesthetics and the Good Life

Aesthetics and the Good Life
Author: Marcia Muelder Eaton
Publisher: Associated University Presse
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1989
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780838633366

This book provides a characterization of the aesthetic that enables the reader to understand what it means to view something aesthetically and how people's lives can be made aesthetically full. Influential philosophical theories of the aesthetic are explored, as well as the profound connection between aesthetic and ethical value.

John Dewey and the Artful Life

John Dewey and the Artful Life
Author: Scott R. Stroud
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2015-09-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0271056878

Aesthetic experience has had a long and contentious history in the Western intellectual tradition. Following Kant and Hegel, a human’s interaction with nature or art frequently has been conceptualized as separate from issues of practical activity or moral value. This book examines how art can be seen as a way of moral cultivation. Scott Stroud uses the thought of the American pragmatist John Dewey to argue that art and the aesthetic have a close connection to morality. Dewey gives us a way to reconceptualize our ideas of ends, means, and experience so as to locate the moral value of aesthetic experience in the experience of absorption itself, as well as in the experience of reflective attention evoked by an art object.

Life Drawing

Life Drawing
Author: Gordon C.F. Bearn
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2013-03-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0823244806

Deleuze's publications have attracted enormous attention, but scant attention has been paid to the existential relevance of Deleuze's writings. In the lineage of Nietzsche, Life Drawing develops a fully affirmative Deleuzean aesthetics of existence.For Foucault and Nehamas, the challenge of an aesthetics of existence is to make your life, in one way or another, a work of art. In contrast, Bearn argues that art is too narrow a concept to guide this kind of existential project. He turns instead to the more generous notion of beauty, but he argues that the philosophical tradition has mostly misconceived beauty in terms of perfection. Heraclitus and Kant are well-known exceptions to this mistake, and Bearn suggests that because Heraclitean becoming is beyond conceptual characterization, it promises a sensualized experience akin to what Kant called free beauty. In this new aesthetics of existence, the challengeis to become beautiful by releasing a Deleuzean becoming: becoming becoming. Bearn's readings of philosophical texts--by Wittgenstein, Derrida, Plato, and others--will be of interest in their own right.

Everyday Aesthetics

Everyday Aesthetics
Author: Yuriko Saito
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2008-01-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 019160853X

Everyday aesthetic experiences and concerns occupy a large part of our aesthetic life. However, because of their prevalence and mundane nature, we tend not to pay much attention to them, let alone examine their significance. Western aesthetic theories of the past few centuries also neglect everyday aesthetics because of their almost exclusive emphasis on art. In a ground-breaking new study, Yuriko Saito provides a detailed investigation into our everyday aesthetic experiences, and reveals how our everyday aesthetic tastes and judgments can exert a powerful influence on the state of the world and our quality of life. By analysing a wide range of examples from our aesthetic interactions with nature, the environment, everyday objects, and Japanese culture, Saito illustrates the complex nature of seemingly simple and innocuous aesthetic responses. She discusses the inadequacy of art-centered aesthetics, the aesthetic appreciation of the distinctive characters of objects or phenomena, responses to various manifestations of transience, and the aesthetic expression of moral values; and she examines the moral, political, existential, and environmental implications of these and other issues.

Joyful

Joyful
Author: Ingrid Fetell Lee
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2018-09-04
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0316399280

Make small changes to your surroundings and create extraordinary happiness in your life with groundbreaking research from designer and TED star Ingrid Fetell Lee. Next Big Idea Club selection—chosen by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Dan Pink, and Adam Grant as one of the "two most groundbreaking new nonfiction reads of the season!" "This book has the power to change everything! Writing with depth, wit, and insight, Ingrid Fetell Lee shares all you need to know in order to create external environments that give rise to inner joy." —Susan Cain, author of Quiet and founder of Quiet Revolution Have you ever wondered why we stop to watch the orange glow that arrives before sunset, or why we flock to see cherry blossoms bloom in spring? Is there a reason that people—regardless of gender, age, culture, or ethnicity—are mesmerized by baby animals, and can't help but smile when they see a burst of confetti or a cluster of colorful balloons? We are often made to feel that the physical world has little or no impact on our inner joy. Increasingly, experts urge us to find balance and calm by looking inward—through mindfulness or meditation—and muting the outside world. But what if the natural vibrancy of our surroundings is actually our most renewable and easily accessible source of joy? In Joyful, designer Ingrid Fetell Lee explores how the seemingly mundane spaces and objects we interact with every day have surprising and powerful effects on our mood. Drawing on insights from neuroscience and psychology, she explains why one setting makes us feel anxious or competitive, while another fosters acceptance and delight—and, most importantly, she reveals how we can harness the power of our surroundings to live fuller, healthier, and truly joyful lives.

Aesthetics of Care

Aesthetics of Care
Author: Yuriko Saito
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2022-07-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 135013418X

Building upon her previous work on everyday aesthetics, Yuriko Saito argues in this book that the aesthetic and ethical concerns are intimately connected in our everyday life. Specifically, she shows how aesthetic experience embodies a care relationship with the world and how the ethical relationship with others, whether humans, non-human creatures, environments, or artifacts, is guided by aesthetic sensibility and manifested through aesthetic means. Weaving together insights gained from philosophy, art, design, and medicine, as well as artistic and cultural practices of Japan, she illuminates the aesthetic dimensions of various forms of care in our management of everyday life. Emphasis is placed on the experience of interacting with others including objects, a departure from the prevailing mode of aesthetic inquiry that is oriented toward judgment-making from a spectator's point of view. Saito shows that when everyday activities, ranging from having a conversation and performing a care act to engaging in self-care and mending an object, are ethically grounded and aesthetically informed and guided, our experiences lead to a good life.

The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life

The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life
Author: Thomas Leddy
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2012-02-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1770483071

This book explores the aesthetics of the objects and environments we encounter in daily life. Thomas Leddy stresses the close relationship between everyday aesthetics and the aesthetics of art, but places special emphasis on neglected aesthetic terms such as ‘neat,’ ‘messy,’ ‘pretty,’ ‘lovely,’ ‘cute,’ and ‘pleasant.’ The author advances a general theory of aesthetic experience that can account for our appreciation of art, nature, and the everyday.

The Aesthetics of Everyday Life

The Aesthetics of Everyday Life
Author: Andrew Light
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2005
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780231135030

This collection explores the aesthetic qualities of human relationships, sports, taste, smell, food, and natural and built environments.

Reinventing the Good Life

Reinventing the Good Life
Author: Jeannette Pols
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2023-12-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1800086024

Ever since Adam Smith’s musings on ‘the invisible hand’ became more famous than his work on moral sentiments, social theorists have paid less attention to everyday ethics and aesthetics. Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand posits that social outcomes emerge by dint of the behaviours of individuals rather than their intentions or virtues. Modernist and scientific approaches to determining the common good or good forms of governance have increasingly relied on techniques of generalisation and rationalisation. This shift has meant that we no longer comprehend why and how people display a deep concern for everyday life values in their social practices. People continue to enact these values and live by them while academics lack the vocabulary and methods to grasp them. By reconstructing the history of ideas about everyday-life values, and by analysing the role of such values in contemporary care practices for patients with chronic disease in the Netherlands, Reinventing the Good Life explores new ways to study the values of everyday life, particularly in situations where the achievement of a clear cut or uniform good is unlikely. The book presents a practice-based epistemology and methodology for studying everyday care practices and supporting their goodness. This analytical approach ultimately aims to generate ideas that will allow us to relate in more