Bøger i Thinking Art serien

Aesthetic Life and Why It Matters offers three new answers to Socrates's great question about how we should live, which focus on the place of aesthetic engagement in well-being. Three philosophers offer their perspectives on how aesthetic commitments move us through the world and shape our well-being, our sense of self, and our connections to others.

This book is a selection of essays by Noel Carroll at the intersection of the major divisions of philosophy and film and TV including articles on moving images and metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics.

In the last twenty years there has been a marked increase in artists using smells in their works at the same time that scents are being used to accompany plays, films, and music. There is also an increase in ambient scenting in stores and hotels and leading chefs are adding unusual scents to cuisine. The book explores these olfactory activities and the aesthetic and ethical issues they raise as well as answering the traditional disparagement of the sense of smell byleading intellectuals such as Kant, Darwin, and Freud, drawing on current science, social science, and humanities as well as literature.

Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism investigates an idea that underpins the ethical criticism of art but is rarely acknowledged and poorly understood - namely, that the ethical criticism of art involves judgments not only of the attitudes a work endorses or solicits, but of what artists do to create the work. The book pioneers an innovative production-oriented approach to the study of the ethical criticism of art, one that will provide a refinedphilosophical account of this important topic as well as conceptual tools that can guide future philosophizing and criticism.

This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on games' unique value in human life. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part of how we become mature, free people. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. We can pursue goals, not for their own value, but for the sake of the struggle. Playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life, and thefact that we can engage in this motivational inversion lets us use games to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, then, are a special medium for communication.

Apt Imaginings addresses the question of how our emotions and desires for the contents of fictions, fantasies, and other products of the imagination relate to the feelings we have about things in the real world. A contribution to the theory of the emotions, the philosophy of fiction, and the psychology of art, this book argues that the normative criteria that determine the fit, morality, or rationality of our feelings for what we believe are distinct fromthose criteria that apply to what we imagine.

Attentional Engines explores the potential of the growing field of cognitive sciences and aesthetics. Along the way it introduces readers to the philosophy of art and evaluates what psychology and neuroscience can and cannot tell us about the nature and value of artworks. Seeley utilizes a case study approach to explain how research in perceptual psychology and the neuroscience of attention can contribute to our everyday understanding of art.