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Mimesis is one of the oldest, most fundamental concepts in Western aesthetics. This book offers a new, searching treatment of its long history at the center of theories of representational art: above all, in the highly influential writings of Plato and Aristotle, but also in later Greco-Roman philosophy and criticism, and subsequently in many areas of aesthetic controversy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Combining classical scholarship, philosophical analysis, and the history of ideas--and ranging across discussion of poetry, painting, and music--Stephen Halliwell shows with a wealth of detail how mimesis, at all stages of its evolution, has been a more complex, variable concept than its conventional translation of \"imitation\" can now convey. Far from providing a static model of artistic representation, mimesis has generated many different models of art, encompassing a spectrum of positions from realism to idealism. Under the influence of Platonist and Aristotelian paradigms, mimesis has been a crux of debate between proponents of what Halliwell calls \"world-reflecting\" and \"world-simulating\" theories of representation in both the visual and musico-poetic arts. This debate is about not only the fraught relationship between art and reality but also the psychology and ethics of how we experience and are affected by mimetic art. Moving expertly between ancient and modern traditions, Halliwell contends that the history of mimesis hinges on problems that continue to be of urgent concern for contemporary aesthetics.

Many historical studies tend to underline two central Kantian themes frequently emerging in Georges Canguilhem’s works: (1) a conception of activity, primarily stemming from the Critique of Pure Reason , as a mental and abstract synthesis of judgment; and (2) a notion of organism, inspired by the Critique of Judgment , as an integral totality of parts. Canguilhem was particularly faithful to the first theme from the 1920s to the first half of the 1930s, whereas the second theme became important in the early 1940s. With this article, I will attempt to show that a third important theme of technique arose in the second half of the 30s also in the wake of Kant’s philosophy, especially Sect. 43 of the Critique of Judgment . This section, which states that technical ability is distinguished from a theoretical faculty, led Canguilhem to a more concrete and practical conception of activity. I will then suggest that it was by considering technique that the concept of normativity, which characterizes Georges Canguilhem’s philosophy of life, also took shape.

John Hare argues that Kant, in his Third Critique, offers an aesthetic argument for God’s existence that shares premises with his famous moral argument. Karl Ameriks demurs, expressing skepticism that this is so. In this paper, I stake out an intermediate position, arguing that the resources of Kant provide ingredients for an aesthetic argument, but one distinctly less than a transcendental argument for God or an entailment relation. Whether the argument is best thought of as abductive in nature, a C-inductive argument, or a Pascalian natural sign, prospects for its formulation are strong. And such an argument, for its resonances with the moral argument(s), can work well in tandem with it (them), a fact not surprising at all if Kant was right that beauty—in accordance with an ancient Greek tradition—exists in close organic relation to the good. More generally, along the way, I argue that the sea change in Kant’s studies over the last decade or so should help us see that Kant is an ally, rather than foe, to aesthetic theodicists.

“M’illumino/d’immenso” – “I’m lit/with immensity” is Geoffrey Brock’s translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s poem Mattina. In the poem’s minimalism, Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry’s expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction, and literature’s capacity, according to Kant, even to evoke, with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas, representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually graspable – in case studies about myths of creativity, images of death and the beyond after the ‘death of God’, of the soul, of melancholy as the dark ground of genius, of metamorphoses of both evil and good, of ecstasy, of the economy of self-sacrifice, of the art of resistance, and, among others, about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity, what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality.

Kalevi Kull’s target article importantly rejects the argument from biological aesthetics, that beauty is a product of natural selection. Instead, beauty is a reflection of the ongoing diversity of free semiotic choosing and fitting. From this view, biosemiotic aesthetics could become the semiotic branch par excellence , in its theorization of the origins of what has always been the central interest of general semiotics. The narrow argument about sexual selection is couched inside the broader ambition to establish a biological but nonreductive definition and scope for aesthetics itself. One of the most important services biosemiotics can provide to the larger community is to bestow upon it some really unifying general principles applicable to all branches of semiotics, and the theory of biosemiotic aesthetics promises to do just this. General semiotics may later adopt some of Kull’s present theorization and apply it to the textual concerns which Kull prefers to consign to other specialists.

Critics of Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy argue that Arendt fails to address the most important problem of political judgment, namely, validity. This essay shows that Arendt does indeed have an answer to the problem that preoccupies her critics, with one important caveat: she does not think that validity is the all-important problem of political judgment--the affirmation of human freedom is.

Before the nineteenth century, instrumental music was considered inferior to vocal music. Kant described wordless music as \"more pleasure than culture,\" and Rousseau dismissed it for its inability to convey concepts. But by the early 1800s, a dramatic shift was under way. Purely instrumental music was now being hailed as a means to knowledge and embraced precisely because of its independence from the limits of language. What had once been perceived as entertainment was heard increasingly as a vehicle of thought. Listening had become a way of knowing. Music as Thoughttraces the roots of this fundamental shift in attitudes toward listening in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on responses to the symphony in the age of Beethoven, Mark Evan Bonds draws on contemporary accounts and a range of sources--philosophical, literary, political, and musical--to reveal how this music was experienced by those who heard it first. Music as Thoughtis a fascinating reinterpretation of the causes and effects of a revolution in listening.

Melancholy is not only about sadness, despair, and loss. As Renaissance artists and philosophers acknowledged long ago, it can engender a certain kind of creativity born from a deep awareness of the mutability of life and the inevitable cycle of birth and death. Drawing on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the intellectual history of the history of art,The Melancholy Artexplores the unique connections between melancholy and the art historian's craft. Though the objects art historians study are materially present in our world, the worlds from which they come are forever lost to time. In this eloquent and inspiring book, Michael Ann Holly traces how this disjunction courses through the history of art and shows how it can give rise to melancholic sentiments in historians who write about art. She confronts pivotal and vexing questions in her discipline: Why do art historians write in the first place? What kinds of psychic exchanges occur between art objects and those who write about them? What institutional and personal needs does art history serve? What is lost in historical writing about art? The Melancholy Artlooks at how melancholy suffuses the work of some of the twentieth century's most powerful and poetic writers on the history of art, including Alois Riegl, Franz Wickhoff, Adrian Stokes, Michael Baxandall, Meyer Schapiro, and Jacques Derrida. A disarmingly personal meditation by one of our most distinguished art historians, this book explains why to write about art is to share in a kind of intertwined pleasure and loss that is the very essence of melancholy.

Se hace un comentario crítico acerca de la visión de Kant que Arendt esboza en sus Conferencias sobre la filosofía política de Kant. Se sigue el esquema de lo que serían para ella las tres perspectivas kantianas sobre el hombre: en cuanto ser racional, en cuanto especie animal y en cuanto síntesis de lo racional y lo sensible. La investigación se dirige fundamentalmente hacia el aporte que la teoría kantiana sobre el Juicio reflexionante puede brindar a la teoría política siguiendo la distinción entre actor y espectador.

Kant’s notion of common sense (Gemeinsinn) is crucial not only for his account of judgements of beauty, but also for the link he draws between the necessary conditions of such judgements and cognition in general. Contrary to existing interpretations which connect common sense to pleasure, I argue that it should be understood as the capacity to sense the harmony of the cognitive faculties through a sui generis sensation distinct from pleasure. This sensed harmony of the faculties is not only the ground of judgements of beauty and the basis of pleasure in the beautiful, but is also essential, I argue, for the reflecting judgements through which we acquire empirical concepts.