Read more
Much of contemporary philosophy regards aesthetics as of lesser significance than epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, or the philosophy of language. Here, Andrew Bowie explores the crucial implications that art and aesthetics have for those areas of philosophy, revealing unresolved tensions between the different cultural domains of the modern world.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Grounding the Subject
- 2: The Nature of the Subject
- 3: The Aesthetic Demand
- 4: The Art of Language and the Language of Art
- 5: The Value of the Aesthetic
- 6: The World of Art
- 7: Art, Commodity, and Metaphysics
- Conclusion
About the author
Andrew Bowie is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and German at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published very widely on Philosophy, as well as musical and literary topics, including German Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. He studied Modern Languages at Cambridge University and attained a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of East Anglia. He was a DAAD scholar at the Free University in Berlin, Professor of Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University, Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow in Philosophy at Tübingen University, and twice Leverhulme Major Research Fellow in Philosophy. He is also a jazz saxophonist.
Summary
Much of contemporary philosophy regards aesthetics as of lesser significance than epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, or the philosophy of language. Here, Andrew Bowie explores the crucial implications that art and aesthetics have for those areas of philosophy, revealing unresolved tensions between the different cultural domains of the modern world.
Additional text
Andrew Bowie's Aesthetic Dimensions of Modern Philosophy is a tour-de-force and astonishingly wide-ranging exploration of the idea of art as a form of philosophical thought. It is also as compelling a defense of that idea as any written; erudite, original, lucid, fair-minded, and wise. It is as well a deeply thoughtful reflection on the great "dissonance" in modernity between the spectacular success of modern natural science and technology, on the one hand, and the ever more impoverished sources of meaning on the other. This is an invaluable contribution to our attempts to understand ourselves in this "destitute" time.
