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1 Modern philosophy and the emergence of aesthetic theory: Kant Self-consciousness, knowledge and freedom The importance attributed to aesthetic questions in recent philosophy becomes easier to grasp if one considers the reasons for the emergence of modern aesthetic theory. Kant’s main work on aesthetics, the ‘third Critique’, the Critique of Judgement (CJ) (1790), forms part of his response to unresolved questions which emerge from his Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) (1781) and Critique of Practical Reason (1787).1 In order to understand the significance of the CJ
In 1796 a German politico-philosophical manifesto proclaims the 'highest act of reason' as an 'aesthetic act'. The ways in which this transformation relates to the development of some of the major directions in modern philosophy is the focus of this book. The book focuses on the main accounts of the human subject and on the conceptions of art and language which emerge within the Kantian and post-Kantian history of aesthetics. Immanuel Kant's main work on aesthetics, the 'third Critique', the Critique of Judgement, forms part of his response to unresolved questions which emerge from his Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason. The early Romantics, who, after all, themselves established the term, can be characterized in a way which distinguishes them from later German Romanticism. The 'Oldest System Programme of German Idealism', is a manifesto for a new philosophy and exemplifies the spirit of early Idealism, not least with regard to mythology. The crucial question posed by the Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling of the System of Transcendental Idealism (STI) is how art relates to philosophy, a question which has recently reappeared in post-structuralism and in aspects of pragmatism. Despite his undoubted insights, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's insufficiency in relation to music is part of his more general problem with adequately theorising self-consciousness, and thus with his aesthetic theory. Friedrich Schleiermacher argues in the hermeneutics that interpretation of the meaning of Kunst is itself also an 'art'. The book concludes with a discussion on music, language, and Romantic thought.
The challenge of the sublime argues that the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain could be seen as a response to theories of the sublime, more specifically to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). While it is widely accepted that the Enquiry contributed to shaping the thematics of terror that became fashionable in British art from the 1770s, this book contends that its influence was of even greater consequence, paradoxically because of Burke’s conviction that the visual arts were incapable of conveying the sublime. His argument that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting, because of the mimetic nature of visual representation, directly or indirectly incited visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and even new or undeveloped pictorial and graphic media, such as the panorama, book illustrations and capricci. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and the inadequacy of their endeavours, and thus drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork. By revisiting the links between eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and visual practices, The challenge of the sublime establishes new interdisciplinary connections which address researchers in the fields of art history, cultural studies and aesthetics.
In times of national security, scholars and activists who hail from the communities under suspicion attempt to draw readers and listeners to the complexity of the world we inhabit. For those who campaigned against the SUS law in the 1980s, when young Black men were being routinely stopped in the streets, the wave of counter-terrorism legislation and policy that exists today will be very familiar. Similarly, recent discussions about the impact of drill music in the culture of young Black men has drawn questions around the ways in which they should be securitised, with senior police calling for the use of terrorism legislation against them. In this environment, when those who study and have lived alongside the communities who are at the scrutiny of the state raise questions about the government, military and police policy, they are often shut down as terrorist-sympathisers, or apologists for gang culture. In such environments, there is an expectation on scholars and activists to condemn what society at large fears. This volume is about how that expectation has emerged alongside the normalisation of racism, and how these writers choose to subvert the expectations raised on them, as part of their commitment to anti-racism.
This book focuses on the paradoxical character of law and specifically concerns the structural violence of law as the political imposition of normative order onto a "lawless" condition. The paradox of law which grounds and motivates Christoph Menke's intervention is that law is both the opposite of violence and, at the same time, a form of violence. The book develops its engagement with the paradox of law in two stages. The first shows why, and in what precise sense, the law is irreducibly characterized by structural violence. The second explores the possibility of law becoming self-reflectively aware of its own violence and, hence, of the form of a self-critique of law in view of its own violence. The Book's philosophical claims are developed through analyses of works of drama: two classical tragedies in the first part and two modern dramas in the second part. It attempts to illuminate the paradoxical nature of law by way of a philosophical interpretation of literature. There are at least two normative orders within the European ethical horizon that should be called "legal orders" even though they forego the use of coercion and are thus potentially nonviolent. These are international law and Jewish law. Understanding the relationship between law and violence is one of the most urgent challenges a postmodern critical legal theory faces today. Self-reflection, the philosophical concept that plays a key role in the essay, stands opposed to all forms of spontaneity.
This book explores whether early modern people cared about their health, and what did it mean to lead a healthy life in Italy and England. According to the Galenic-Hippocratic tradition, 'preservative' medicine was one of the three central pillars of the physician's art. Through a range of textual evidence, images and material artefacts, the book documents the profound impact which ideas about healthy living had on daily practices as well as on intellectual life and the material world in Italy and England. Staying healthy and health conservation was understood as depending on the careful management of the six 'Non-Naturals': the air one breathed, food and drink, excretions, sleep, exercise and repose, and the 'passions of the soul'. The book provides fresh evidence about the centrality of the Non-Naturals in relation to groups whose health has not yet been investigated in works about prevention: babies, women and convalescents. Pregnancy constituted a frequent physical state for many women of the early modern European aristocracy. The emphasis on motion and rest, cleansing the body, and improving the mental and spiritual states made a difference for the aristocratic woman's success in the trade of frequent pregnancy and childbirth. Preventive advice was not undifferentiated, nor simply articulated by individual complexion. Examining the roles of the Non-Naturals, the book provides a more holistic view of convalescent care. It also deals with the paradoxical nature of perceptions about the Neapolitan environment and the way in which its airs were seen to affect human bodies and health.
see, to vital changes in both the production and reception of music. The ways in which this transformation relates to the development of some of the major directions in modern philosophy will form the focus of my investigation. Modern philosophy begins when the generally accepted basis upon which the world is interpreted ceases to be a deity whose pattern is assumed to have already been imprinted into the universe. The new philosophical task is therefore for human reason to establish its own legitimacy as the ground of truth. This transformation is prepared in the
(1987a), Habermas argues that from Hegel on, modern philosophy has fatally limited itself to individual consciousness, rejecting theological appeals to God or any other metaphysical entity on which human knowledge can be grounded. Knowledge can be established only through the rational self-examination of individual consciousness: reason must ultimately provide its own foundations. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity describes how some of the key figures in Western thought – Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno and Horkheimer, Heidegger, Derrida, Bataille and Foucault
lectures to catch up. ‘I realised I didn't know the most basic things: what is socialism, communism, Marxism, the unconscious, capitalism and liberalism? I sat in the British Library and King's Library reading Harold Laski (who had inspired Uncle Achoo at LSE) and all the Pelican introductions to a history of ideas.’ Across the three years the course was divided into compulsory lectures and tutorials on modern philosophy, Greek philosophy and ethics; he chose special options on philosophy of mind, logic and methods, and political philosophy. He moved from a B minus to B
traditions presented in the present book is in part a result of the perception that both the Heideggerian and the physicalist ways of thinking about the subject are inadequate as interpretations of the subject’s role in accounts of modernity. Ernst Tugendhat has claimed that ‘The right path for modern philosophy between romanticism and positivism is yet to be found’ (Tugendhat 1992 p. 432), and the contrasts just described make this very apparent, even as they reveal the bizarre alliances which can result between the extremes of these differing paths. The seeds of the