What is art-making? What is it in virtue of which an artifact counts as a work of art? In this book, Melvin Chen contends that art-making is best understood in the context of problem-solving. Works of art are various ways in which artists solve problems and overcome obstacles, while typically exhibiting creative thinking. Using the theory of problem-solving, its theoretical milieu, and various philosophical tools, Chen builds a robust, coherent, and consistent computationalist approach to ...

Guiding you through the topics that shape aesthetics and the philosophy of art, this introduction explores the truth, meaning, taste, aesthetic merit and judgement, creativity and the possibility of machine art, and morality and the possibility of immoral art. Each chapter offers a wealth of examples from Southeast Asia, including the Nanyang style of painting, the mooi indie genre and its postcolonial legacy, groundbreaking works of poetry and literature, dragon kiln pottery, the art of m...

Noam Chomsky and linguist Andrea Moro explore language, the history of science, Big Data and AI, and the mysteries of the human brain.Influential linguist Noam Chomsky and his longtime colleague Andrea Moro have a wide-ranging conversation, touching on such topics as language and linguistics, the history of science, and the relation between language and the brain. Chomsky discusses today’s misplaced euphoria about artificial intelligence (Chomsky sees “lots of hype...

" . . . the greatest contribution to [semiotics] since the pioneering work of C. S. Peirce and Charles Morris." —Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism" . . . draws on philosophy, linguistics, sociology, anthropology and aesthetics and refers to a wide range of scholarship . . . raises many fascinating questions." —Language in Society" . . . a major contribution to the field of semiotic studies." —Robert Scholes, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism" . . . the m...

How generative AI systems capture a core function of languageLooking at the emergence of generative AI, Language Machines presents a new theory of meaning in language and computation, arguing that humanistic scholarship misconstrues how large language models (LLMs) function. Seeing LLMs as a convergence of computation and language, Leif Weatherby contends that AI does not simulate cognition, as widely believed, but rather creates culture. This evolution in...

Why human nature is an aesthetic phenomenon—and why we need art and philosophy to understand ourselvesIn The Entanglement, philosopher Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature.Life supplies art with its raw materials, but art, Noë argues, remakes life by giving us resources to live differently. Our lives are permeat...

This truly philosophical book takes us back to fundamentals - the sheer experience of proof, and the enigmatic relation of mathematics to nature. It asks unexpected questions, such as 'what makes mathematics mathematics?', 'where did proof come from and how did it evolve?', and 'how did the distinction between pure and applied mathematics come into being?' In a wide-ranging discussion that is both immersed in the past and unusually attuned to the competing philosophical ideas of contempora...

How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos are bizarre—and why that’s a good thingDo we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the Wo...

Why narrative is essential to mathematicsCircles Disturbed brings together important thinkers in mathematics, history, and philosophy to explore the relationship between mathematics and narrative. The book's title recalls the last words of the great Greek mathematician Archimedes before he was slain by a Roman soldier—"Don't disturb my circles"—words that seem to refer to two radically different concerns: that of the practical person living in the concrete...

How can the human mind represent the external world? What is thought, and can it be studied scientifically? Should we think of the mind as a kind of machine? Is the mind a computer? Can a computer think? Tim Crane sets out to answer these questions and more in a lively and straightforward way, presuming no prior knowledge of philosophy or related disciplines.Since its first publication, The Mechanical Mind has introduced thousands of people to some of the most important id...

Until quite recently, almost no philosophers trained in the continental tradition saw anything of value in realism. The situation in analytic philosophy was always different, but in continental philosophy realism was usually treated as a pseudo-problem. That is no longer the case.In this provocative new book, two leading philosophers examine the remarkable rise of realism in the continental tradition. While exploring the similarities and differences in their own positions, they als...

Models and theories are of central importance in science, and scientists spend substantial amounts of time building, testing, comparing and revising models and theories. It is therefore not surprising that the nature of scientific models and theories has been a widely debated topic within the philosophy of science for many years.The product of two decades of research, this book provides an accessible yet critical introduction to the debates about models and theories within analytic...