Fregean Realism: Frodo Lives! and Other Fictions argues that literary fictions, pictures, and other artworks are modes of access to Gottlob Frege’s “third realm” of objective thoughts, about both what is in the real world and what is not, but might, or might not, be. Starting with a critique of fictionalism—the doctrine that art makes no ontological commitments because it depends on acts of pretending—Andrei Pop shifts focus to the shared meaning addressed by acts of pretending an...

In this key text in the history of art and aesthetics, Karl Rosenkranz shows ugliness to be the negation of beauty without being reducible to evil, materiality, or other negative terms used it's conventional condemnation. This insistence on the specificity of ugliness, and on its dynamic status as a process afflicting aesthetic canons, reflects Rosenkranz's interest in the metropolis - like Walter Benjamin, he wrote on Paris and Berlin - and his voracious collecting of caricature and popul...