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Aesthetic Pursuits is a new collection of essays from Jerrold Levinson, one of the most prominent philosophers of art today, focusing on literature, film, and visual art, while addressing issues of humour, beauty, and the emotions. More than half of the essays in the volume are previously unpublished.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Farewell to the Aesthetician?
- 2: Aesthetic Contextualism
- 3: Toward an Adequate Conception of Aesthetic Experience
- 4: Artistic Achievement and Artistic Value
- 5: Artistic Worth and Personal Taste
- 6: Falling in Love with a Book
- 7: Immoral Jokes
- 8: Beauty Is Not One: The Irreducible Variety of Visual Beauty
- 9: Emotional Upheavals
- 10: Artful Intentions
- 11: Defending Hypothetical Intentionalism
- 12: Seeing, Imaginarily, at the Movies
- 13: Sound in Film: Design versus Commentary
About the author
Jerrold Levinson is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland and past president of the American Society for Aesthetics, 2001-2003. He is the author of four collections of essays, Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Cornell Univeristy Press 1990, 2nd ed. Oxford Univeristy Press 2010), The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Cornell Univeristy Press 1996), Contemplating Art (Oxford Univeristy Press 2006), and Musical Concerns (Oxford Univeristy Press 2015). He has also published a monograph, Music in the Moment (Cornell Univeristy Press 1998) and is the editor of Aesthetics and Ethics (Cambridge Univeristy Press 1998), Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford Univeristy Press 2003), and Suffering Art Gladly (Palgrave/Macmillan 2013).
Summary
Jerrold Levinson, one of the most prominent philosophers of art today, presents a new collection of essays, following on from his four previous collections, Music, Art and Metaphysics (1990), The Pleasures of Aesthetics (1996), Contemplating Art (2006), and Musical Concerns (2015).
Aesthetic Pursuits specifically complements Levinson's last volume, Musical Concerns, by collecting recent essays not concerned with music, but instead focusing on literature, film, and visual art, while addressing issues of humour, beauty, and the emotions. The essays in Aesthetic Pursuits, which are wide-ranging, will appeal strongly to aestheticians, art lovers, and philosophers alike.
The volume contains seven previously unpublished essays by Levinson, in which the author critically engages with notable contemporary contributions to aesthetic theory.
