The Best Aesthetics Philosophy Books 2024

1. The Lady Who Was Beautiful Inside (Hardcover)

The lady had seen the power of the beauty inside her. And from then on, everywhere she went, loveliness happened. For she did have a very beautiful beauty indeed." --The Lady Who Was Beautiful Inside * The perfect, any-occasion gift book for every woman in your life. With beauty magazines boasting circulations in the millions and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons recording more than 10 million elective cosmetic procedures within the last calendar year, it's pretty obvious that women across the nation are in need of a little pick-me-up. Edward Monkton delivers an empowering sense of self in The Lady Who Was Beautiful Inside by reminding readers that beauty from deep within "is the most beautiful beauty of all." * Monkton, perhaps better known as the U.K.'s top-selling living poet Giles Andreae, pairs a fresh, lyrical narrative style with simple yet elegant illustrations to create this modern-day fable.

The lady had seen the power of the beauty inside her. And from then on, everywhere she went, loveliness happened. For she did have a very beautiful beauty indeed." --The Lady Who Was Beautiful Inside * The perfect, any-occasion gift book for every woman in your life. With beauty magazines boasting circulations in the millions and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons recording more than 10 million elective cosmetic procedures within the last calendar year, it's pretty obvious that women across the nation are in need of a little pick-me-up. Edward Monkton delivers an empowering sense of self in The Lady Who Was Beautiful Inside by reminding readers that beauty from deep within "is the most beautiful beauty of all." * Monkton, perhaps better known as the U.K.'s top-selling living poet Giles Andreae, pairs a fresh, lyrical narrative style with simple yet elegant illustrations to create this modern-day fable.

2. But is It Art?: An Introduction to Art Theory, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

Pre-Owned - From Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes to provocative dung-splattered madonnas, in today's art world many strange, even shocking, things are put on display. This often leads exasperated viewers to exclaim--is this really art? In this invaluable primer on aesthetics, Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are so highly valued in art, weaving together philosophy and art theory with many engrossing examples. Writing clearly and perceptively, she explores the cultural meanings of art in different contexts, and highlights the continuities of tradition that stretch from modern, often sensational, works back to the ancient halls of the Parthenon, to the medieval cathedral of Chartres, and to African nkisi nkondi fetish statues. She explores the difficulties of interpretation, examines recent scientific research into the ways the brain perceives art, and looks to the still-emerging worlds of art on the web, video art, art museum CD-ROMS, and much more. In addition, Freeland guides us through the various theorists of art, from Aristotle and Kant to Baudrillard. Lastly, throughout this nuanced account of theories, artists, and works, Freeland provides us with a rich understanding of how cultural significance is captured in a physical medium, and why challenging our perceptions is, and always has been, central to the whole endeavor. It is instructive to recall that Henri Matisse himself was originally derided as a wild beast. To horrified critics, his bold colors and distorted forms were outrageous. A century later, what was once shocking is now considered beautiful. And that, writes Freeland, is art.

But is It Art?: An Introduction to Art Theory, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

3. The Anatomy of Disgust, Used [Paperback]

William Miller embarks on an alluring journey into the world of disgust, showing how it brings order and meaning to our lives even as it horrifies and revolts us. Our notion of the self, intimately dependent as it is on our response to the excretions and secretions of our bodies, depends on it. Cultural identities have frequent recourse to its boundary-policing powers. Love depends on overcoming it, while the pleasure of sex comes in large measure from the titillating violation of disgust prohibitions. Imagine aesthetics without disgust for tastelessness and vulgarity; imagine morality without disgust for evil, hypocrisy, stupidity, and cruelty. Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes: eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division. The high's belief that the low actually smell bad, or are sources of pollution, seriously threatens democracy. Miller argues that disgust is deeply grounded in our ambivalence to life: it distresses us that the fair is so fragile, so easily reduced to foulness, and that the foul may seem more than passing fair in certain slants of light. When we are disgusted, we are attempting to set bounds, to keep chaos at bay. Of course we fail. But, as Miller points out, our failure is hardly an occasion for despair, for disgust also helps to animate the world, and to make it a dangerous, magical, and exciting place.

The Anatomy of Disgust, Used [Paperback]

4. On Aesthetics: An Unforgiving Introduction, Used [Paperback]

What is art? Must art be beautiful? Must art be politically or culturally significant? How does art differ from other products of human activity? Joseph Margolis has spent decades thinking through these and related questions. In this book, he introduces his reader to the field of Aesthetics by thinking through the most fundamental philosophical questions about art in a way that is engaging and accessible. This book could be used alongside a textbook of classic readings in Aesthetics, or as a stand-alone text in Aesthetics.THE WADSWORTH PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS SERIES presents readers with concise, timely, and insightful introductions to a variety of traditional and contemporary philosophical subjects. With this series, students of philosophy will be able to discover the richness of philosophical inquiry across a wide array of concepts, including hallmark philosophical themes and themes typically underrepresented in mainstream philosophy publishing. Written by a distinguished list of scholars who have garnered particular recognition for their excellence in teaching, this series presents the vast sweep of today's philosophical exploration in highly accessible and affordable volumes. These books will prove valuable to philosophy teachers and their students as well as to other readers who share a general interest in philosophy.

On Aesthetics, Used [Paperback]

5. Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Art, Used [Hardcover]

Societies around the world have their puppet traditions and puppetry remains a vital theatrical art; yet puppetry has received little attention in the theoretical study of theatre. The present study offers an aesthetic theory and vocabulary for practitioners, critics, and audiences to utilize in creating, evaluating, viewing, and describing the age-old, yet ever-new art of the puppet. Asserting that no satisfactory theory or descriptive vocabulary has yet been advanced for the theatrical puppet, Steve Tillis seeks the underlying principles through observation and analysis of puppetry in all its manifestations. He considers the disparate range of puppet performance and puppet construction to determine what is constant and what is variable and explores such theoretical problems as how a puppet is to be defined; how its appeal is to be explained, and how its performance is to be described. Reviewing standard responses to these problems in a thorough survey of the literature on puppetry, he then offers new solutions. In an interesting coda, Tillis discusses the power of the puppet as a metaphor of humanity and a term applied to particular people. This is an essential text not only for college puppetry courses but also for all serious puppet artists, as well as scholars and researchers in performance theory and practice, and more general audiences.

Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Art, Used [Hardcover]

6. Aesthetics: Issues and Inquiry [Paperback - Used]

CONDITION - USED - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included. Provides information on the integration of aesthetics into art education.

Aesthetics: Issues and Inquiry, Used [Paperback]

7. Color Codes : Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology, Used [Paperback]

"The first thing to realize about the study of color in our time is its uncanny ability to evade all attempts to systematically codify it," writes Charles A. Riley in this series of interconnected essays on the uses and meanings of color.

Color Codes : Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology, Used [Paperback]

8. On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry [Paperback - Used]

CONDITION - USED - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included. On Being Blue is a book about everything blue--sex and sleaze and sadness, among other things--and about everything else. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among contemporary American writers, can do. Gass writes: Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.

On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry [Paperback - Used]

9. Critique of the Power of Judgment, Used [Paperback]

This entirely new translation of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment follows the principles and high standards of all other volumes in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. This volume includes for the first time the first draft of Kant's introduction to the work; the only English edition notes to the many differences between the first (1790) and second (1793) editions of the work; and relevant passages in Kant's anthropology lectures where he elaborated on his aesthetic views.

Critique of the Power of Judgment, Used [Paperback]

10. Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, Used [Hardcover]

A philosophical and chronological history of architecture examines natural and man-made structures from ancient Greece to present-day Manhattan.

Architecture : The Natural and the Man-Made, Used [Hardcover]