Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.It may be responsible for a greater improvement in human diet and longevity than any other technology of the last two thousand years-but have you ever thought seriously about your refrigerator? That box humming in the background displays more than you might expect, even who you are and the society in which you live. Jonathan Rees examines the past, present, and future of the ho...

This book provides a richly rewarding vision of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. Composed of fourteen wide-ranging but finely integrated essays by Richard Shusterman, the originator of the field, Thinking through the Body explains the philosophical foundations of somaesthetics and applies its insights to central issues in ethics, education, cultural politics, consciousness studies, sexuality and the arts. Integrating Western philosophy, cognitive science and somatic...

Winner of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Book Prize 2018Since the 1980s the number of women regularly directing films has increased significantly in most Western countries; in France, Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat have joined Agnès Varda in gaining international renown, while British directors Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold have forged award-winning careers in feature film. This new volume in the “Thinking Cinema” series d...

What does it mean to say something is beautiful? On the one hand, beauty is associated with erotic attraction; on the other, it is the primary category in aesthetics, and it is widely supposed that the proper response to a work of art is one of objective contemplation. At its core, then, beauty is a contested concept, and both sides feel comfortable appealing to the authority of Plato, and via him, to the ancient Greeks generally. So, who is right-if either? Beauty offers an elega...

This is the first comprehensive introduction to Deleuze's work on literature. It provides thorough treatments of Deleuze's early book on Proust and his seminal volume on Kafka and minor literature. Deleuze on Literature situates those studies and many other scattered writings within a general project that extends throughout Deleuze's career-that of conceiving of literature as a form of health and the writer as a cultural physician.

The Contracts of Fiction reconnects our fictional worlds to the rest of our lives. Countering the contemporary tendency to dismiss works of imagination as enjoyable but epistemologically inert, the book considers how various kinds of fictions construct, guide, and challenge institutional relationships within social groups. The contracts of fiction, like the contracts of language, law, kinship, and money, describe the rules by which members of a group toggle between tokens and type...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and another can groan with gravitas in the Library of Congress. Writer and historian Lydia Pyne finds bookshelves to be holders not just of books but of so many other things: values, vibes, and verbs that can be contained and displayed ...

Yuriko Saito explores the nature and significance of the aesthetic dimensions of people's everyday life. Everyday aesthetics has the recognized value of enriching one's life experiences and sharpening one's attentiveness and sensibility. Saito draws out its broader importance for how we make our worlds, environmentally, morally, as citizens and consumers. Saito urges that we have a social responsibility to encourage cultivation of aesthetic literacy and vigilance against aesthetic manipula...

A verse prose book on Kit's semanticism---or voice and style. The light he uses to find his way---the dark he knows and the day time was. Enjoy the read heed the call and be the one. I mean take your time and say what is so.

This book marks the centenary of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain by critically re-examining the established interpretation of the work. It introduces a new methodological approach to art-historical practice rooted in a revised understanding of Lacan, Freud and Slavoj Žižek. In weaving an alternative narrative, Kilroy shows us that not only has Fountain been fundamentally misunderstood but that this very misunderstanding is central to the work’s significance. The author brings t...

First published in 1927, Science and Philosophy: And Other Essays is a collection of individual papers written by Bernard Bosanquet during his highly industrious philosophical life. The collection was put together by Bosanquet’s wife after the death of the writer and remains mostly unaltered with just a few papers added and the order of entries improved. The papers here displayed consist of various contributions Bosanquet made to Mind, the Proceedings of the Aristotel...

In De Gustibus Peter Kivy deals with a question that has never been fully addressed by philosophers of art: why do we argue about art? We argue about the 'facts' of the world either to influence people's behaviour or simply to get them to see what we take to be the truth about the world. We argue over ethical matters, if we are ethical 'realists,' because we think we are arguing about 'facts' in the world. And we argue about ethics, if we are 'emotivists,' or are now what are call...