In this 1922 scholarly landmark, influential British critic I. A. Richards and his colleagues Charles Ogden and James Wood lay out a new theory of harmony and balance in a work of literature-the two mingle with an audience's psychological impulses in order to determine how the work is perceived. This study is a key text of the New Criticism, which forever changed how scholars read and analyze literature.

Elaine Scarry teaches in the English department at Harvard University, where she is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value. She is the author of The Body in Pain, Resisting Representation, Dreaming by the Book, and many articles on war and social contract. Have we become beauty-blind? For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us...

First collected in Italy in 1985, Art's Claim to Truth is considered by many philosophers to be one of Gianni Vattimo's most important works. Newly revised for English readers, the book begins with a challenge to Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, who viewed art as a metaphysical aspect of reality rather than a futuristic anticipation of it. Following Martin Heidegger's interpretation of the history of philosophy, Vattimo outlines the existential...

This early work by Robin G. Collingwood was originally published in 1923 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Principles of Art' is an academic work on the philosophy of art. Robin George Collingwood was born on 22nd February 1889, in Cartmel, England. He was the son of author, artist, and academic, W. G. Collingwood. He was greatly influenced by the Italian Idealists Croce, Gentile, and Guido de Ruggiero. Another...

Leo Stein (1872-1947) was an influential art collector and critic. It has been Stein's ironic fate to be referred to as "Gertrude's brother," ironic as for many years he was her mentor and counsellor. The A-B-C of Aesthetics considers the field of aesthetics not from a theoretical and discursive angle, not as a matter of classification and conceptual method, but from a basis of practical experience. The author insists that the importance of...

"Have you ever gotten chills while listening to a particularly gorgeous piece of music? Or felt a sense of calm while gazing at a painting of a serene landscape? We have experiences like those every day, but rarely stop to consider what's happening internally to cause them. In Your Brain on Art, founder of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Susan Magsamen and Google designer Ivy Ross explain how, by understanding...

This is a sweeping and provocative work of aesthetic theory: a trenchant critique of the philosophy of art as it developed from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, combined with a carefully reasoned plea for a new and more flexible approach to art. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, one of France's leading aestheticians, explores the writings of Kant, Schlegel, Novalis, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to show that these diverse...

From the acclaimed Los Angeles Times science writer, a wise, witty, and elegant study of how math provides practical solutions to everyday problems.
 
Are the secrets of the universe written in words—or is it all about the digits? K.C. Cole follows up her paean to the power of physics, Sympathetic Vibrations, with this engaging and accessible guide to the might and majesty of mathematics. The Universe...

"Wabi-sabi is the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of what we think of as traditional Japanese beauty. It occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West ... Wabi-sabi, in its purest, most idealized form, is precisely about the delicate traces, the faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness ... Author Leonard Koren was trained as an architect...

Gregory Moore is Lecturer in German at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor, and is coeditor of Nietzsche and Science. A seminal figure in the philosophy of history, culture, and language, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) also produced some of the most important and original works in the history of aesthetic theory. A student of Kant, he spent much of his life striving to reconcile the opposing poles...