What is Beauty? A Multidisciplinary Approach to Aesthetic Experience

What is Beauty? A Multidisciplinary Approach to Aesthetic Experience
Author: Martino Rossi Monti
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2020-11-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 152756200X

Does art need to be beautiful? Can humour be beautiful? What is the relationship between beauty and mimetic behaviour? What does literature have to do with beauty? What are the limitations of neuroscientific approaches to beauty? Are the experience of beauty and the production of “art” confined to anatomically modern humans? Is the experience of beauty confined to humans at all? These are just some of the questions discussed in this volume. It gathers together authors from different areas of research, including philosophy, history of philosophy, history of ideas, cognitive biology, neuroscience, anthropology and paleoanthropology, in order to investigate some of the most debated aspects of the problem of beauty and aesthetic experience. The volume will appeal to both the general reader and the specialist in the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences.

The Outward Mind

The Outward Mind
Author: Benjamin Morgan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2017-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 022646220X

Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined.

Aesthetic Experience

Aesthetic Experience
Author: Richard Shusterman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2008
Genre: Art
ISBN: 041537832X

Examines the notion of aesthetic experience as well as its value. This title brings together major voices that have directly theorised the concept of aesthetic experience or indirectly worked on topics connected to it.

Beautiful Bodies

Beautiful Bodies
Author: Uroš Matić
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2022-02-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789257727

This book explores the role of material culture in the formation of corporeal aesthetics and beauty ideals in different past societies and thus contributes to the cultural relativization of bodily aesthetics and related gender norms. The volume does not explore beauty for the sake of beauty, but extensively explores how it serves to form and keep gender norms in place. The concept of beauty has been a topic of interest for some time, yet it is only in recent times that archaeologists have begun to approach beauty as a culturally contingent and socially constructed phenomenon. Although archaeologists and ancient historians extensively dealt with gender, they dealt less with it in relation to beauty. The contributions in this volume deal with different intersections of gender and corporeal aesthetics by turning to rich archaeological, textual and iconographic data from ancient Sumer, Aegean Bronze Age, ancient Egypt, ancient Athens, Roman provinces, the Viking world and the Qajar Iran. Beauty thus moves away from a curiosity and surface of the body to an analytic concept for a better understanding of past and present societies.

Aesthetic Science

Aesthetic Science
Author: Arthur P. Shimamura
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2012-01-02
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0199732140

What do we do when we view a work of art? What does it mean to have an 'aesthetic' experience? Are such experiences purely in the eye of the beholder? This book addresses the nature of aesthetic experience from the perspectives of philosophy psychology and neuroscience.

Theatre Sciences

Theatre Sciences
Author:
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2015-06-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1836241313

Traditional theatre semiotics promoted a scientific approach to theatre studies, albeit viewing semiotics as the unique discipline of research. Theatre Sciences: A Plea for a Multidisciplinary Approach to Theatre Studies suggests instead a multi-disciplinary approach, including the following theoretical disciplines: narratology, mythology, pragmatics, ethics, theatre irony, theory of genres, aesthetics, semiotics, theory of non-verbal figures of speech, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, reception theory, history, and sociology -- with semiotics being only one among equals. These disciplines are presented from the perspective of their possible contributions to a sound methodology of theatre-texts analysis. Traditional theatre semiotics, moreover, holds the view that the actual performance on stage is the genuine text of theatre, instead of the play-script. Despite this paradigmatic shift, however, this viewpoint has failed to produce commendable analyses of such texts. The alternative presupposition put forward in this volume entails a series of novel perceptions of the theatre-text and its possible impact on the experiencing spectator, whose role in reading, interpreting and experiencing the theatre-text is not less crucial than that of the text itself. This view presupposes that the theatre-text is a description of a fictional world generated by the theatre medium. The author also contests the age-old view that a theatre/fictional-text reflects a simple narrative structure, and suggests instead a complexity that consists of seven layers: personified, mythical, praxical, naive, ironic, modal and aesthetic -- with each one of them re-structuring the previous layer. Professor Rozik also presents and describes a semiotic layer that lends communicative capacity to the description of a fictional world, and two additional metaphoric and rhetoric layers, which structure the theatre experience. The underlying purpose is to illustrate the application of the aforementioned disciplines to these fictional layers, and eventually their joint application to entire theatre / fictional texts. Organisation of the book reflects the structure of a university course.

Elusive Brain

Elusive Brain
Author: Jason Tougaw
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300235607

Featuring a foreword by renowned neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux, The Elusive Brain is an illuminating, comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. This fascinating book explores how literature interacts with neuroscience to provide a better understanding of the brain’s relationship to the self. Jason Tougaw surveys the work of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, Siri Hustvedt, and Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay—analyzing the way they experiment with literary forms to frame new views of the immaterial experiences that compose a self. He argues that their work offers a necessary counterbalance to a wider cultural neuromania that seeks out purely neural explanations for human behaviors as varied as reading, economics, empathy, and racism. Building on recent scholarship, Tougaw’s evenhanded account will be an original contribution to the growing field of neuroscience and literature.

God is Beautiful

God is Beautiful
Author: Navid Kermani
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015-02-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780745651675

The melodious recitation of the Quran is a fundamental aesthetic experience for Muslims, and the start of a compelling journey of ideas. In this important new book, the prominent German writer and Islamic scholar Navid Kermani considers the manner in which the Quran has been perceived, apprehended and experienced by its recipients from the time of the Prophet to the present day. Drawing on a wide range of Muslim sources, from historians, theologians and philosophers to mystics and literary scholars, Kermani provides a close reading of the nature of this powerful text. He proceeds to analyze ancient and modern testimonies about the impact of Quranic language from a variety of angles. Although people have always reflected on the reception of texts, images and sounds that they find beautiful or moving, Kermani explains that Islam provides a particularly striking example of the close correlation, grounded in a common origin, between art and religion, revelation and poetry, and religious and aesthetic experience. This major new book will enhance the dialogue between Islam and the West and will appeal to students and scholars of Islam and comparative religion, as well as to a wider readership interested in Islam and the Quran.

Reading David Hume’s 'Of the Standard of Taste'

Reading David Hume’s 'Of the Standard of Taste'
Author: Babette Babich
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2019-05-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3110585502

This collection on the Standard of Taste offers a much needed resource for students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, political reflection, value and judgments, economics, and art. The authors include experts in the philosophy of art, aesthetics, history of philosophy as well as the history of science. This much needed volume on David Hume will enrich scholars across all levels of university study and research.

Aesthetic Surgery of the Facial Skeleton - E-Book

Aesthetic Surgery of the Facial Skeleton - E-Book
Author: Stephen B Baker
Publisher: Elsevier Health Sciences
Total Pages: 531
Release: 2021-03-10
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0323680526

Achieve optimal results and high patient satisfaction with Aesthetic Surgery of the Facial Skeleton. Encompassing the entire field of facial skeletal contouring, this one-stop resource uses a problem-based, multidisciplinary approach to skeletal contouring of the face and adjunctive procedures that enhance results. With well-illustrated, focused coverage of all recent advances in this fast-changing area, it's an ideal reference for trainee and practicing cosmetic surgeons, maxillofacial surgeons, craniofacial surgeons, plastic surgeons, otolaryngologists, and oral surgeons. - Takes a multidisciplinary, problem-based approach to aesthetic techniques for the face, highlighted by numerous clinical cases and high-quality photos. - Covers every area of the field: general principles, orthognathic surgery, alloplastic implants, genioplasty, malar and mandibular recontouring, autologous fat grafting, orbital rejuvenation, forehead and upper face, and many other related topics. - Provides expert guidance on diagnosis, treatment planning, technical aspects, alternative approaches, and treatment of complications. - Features state-of-the-art coverage of aesthetic contouring for the transgender patient and the Asian/ethnic patient, and the use of 3D imaging in facial surgery. - Includes a section on special case considerations such as facial asymmetry, post-traumatic facial restoration, face transplantation, and nonsurgical enhancement of facial shape.