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Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: A Case-Driven Approach
Aesthetics and the philosophy of art are about things in the world – things like the Mona Lisa , but also things like horror movies, things like the ugliest dog in the world, and things like wallpaper. There's a surprising amount of philosophical content to be found in wallpaper.
Using a case-driven approach, Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art is grounded in real-world examples that propel thought, debate, and discussion about the nature of art and beauty. Now in its third edition, this tried-and-tested text features fresh cases and new activities. Hands-on Do Aesthetics! activities pepper the text, and Challenge Cases appear at the end of each chapter to test intuitions, to complicate the field of discussion, and to set a path forward. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-Paper” serves as a recurring case throughout, and this edition includes the full text of this classic short story.
From classical debates that continue to bother philosophers today, to emerging problems of identity, appropriation, and morality, this introduction is designed to engage you in a field that itself engages with so much of the world around you. Here is everything you need to know about the history, themes, thinkers and theories to get you started on aesthetics and the philosophy of art.
Using a case-driven approach, Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art is grounded in real-world examples that propel thought, debate, and discussion about the nature of art and beauty. Now in its third edition, this tried-and-tested text features fresh cases and new activities. Hands-on Do Aesthetics! activities pepper the text, and Challenge Cases appear at the end of each chapter to test intuitions, to complicate the field of discussion, and to set a path forward. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-Paper” serves as a recurring case throughout, and this edition includes the full text of this classic short story.
From classical debates that continue to bother philosophers today, to emerging problems of identity, appropriation, and morality, this introduction is designed to engage you in a field that itself engages with so much of the world around you. Here is everything you need to know about the history, themes, thinkers and theories to get you started on aesthetics and the philosophy of art.
368 pages, Paperback
Published January 12, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 3, 2025
best textbook I have ever read I must say
April 27, 2025
I originally bought an older edition of this textbook, because that's what my school's bookstore listed for my Aesthetics class. I remember the weird feeling in my stomach the first day we got to class and everyone--actually, only most people-- had an ugly yellow book, compared to my bluish-purple cover with two plastic flamingos. Based mostly on my aesthetic judgement, I decided to stick with my version and assume everyone else was wrong. I couldn't help but think back to the Asch conformity studies, so I stood my ground.
As we started things off, I didn't actually notice any difference between my edition and the other edition everyone else had. Our page numbers were slightly off, but otherwise the content for the first couple chapters seemed to be the same. I enjoyed reading about mimesis (which I had only heard of but didn't really know much about) and catharsis (which I knew about but never heard anyone discuss), as well as Kant and Hume and Shaftesbury. But for me as someone who is deeply interested in theology, the Church Fathers, and the middle ages, the Medieval section (at least in the older edition) was very vague and unhelpful, and needed badly to be improved. If I couldn't follow it, there's no chance that any of my heathen peers could have.
When we surpassed the basics, and the two editions diverged noticeably. I could no longer translate their page numbers into my page numbers, and people started mentioning things mine didn't even talk about. So I was finally peer pressured into buying the newer edition.
And it was at this point that the book dipped in quality; or rather, I loved a lot of the concepts, but hated a lot of the examples. For example, in the chapter on different emotional theories related to art, I thought Get Out (2017) was a horrible example. Apparently I'm in a tiny minority, but I found the movie to be extremely counterproductive, and Peele (even jokingly) tweeting "'Get Out' is a documentary" isn't much of an own, rather only showing how paranoid-schizophrenic he is. I was also quite surprised that it took until page 164 for the "muse" to be mentioned (a word not even in the index). For me and my limited experience writing poetry, the Muse is a central concept I wholeheartedly believe in. I'm not superstitious, I just think that the metaphor of the muse is the best way to explain how it feels entering and exiting flow states.
Lastly, that emotion-in-art chapter ends with a brief discussion of Content Warnings (and by extension "Spoiler Alerts"). I'm opposed to both, for similar reasons. For the former, I'm not opposed because I think people are "snowflakes" who need to be less sensitive; quite the opposite: I think that content creators have a moral duty to take into account their audience, rather than going to the extremes that they now do. I've been shocked by how exponentially explicit movies have become in recent years (of which Saltburn is an excellent example of excess). In other words, my complaint about Content Warnings is that we shouldn't be making art in the first place which will damage people; shock value is utterly at odds with catharsis, and the former is worthless while the latter is absolutely necessary.
Now, for Spoiler Alerts. Throughout all of history until the postmodern age, needing to keep your plot secret was the sign of a weak plot. This inversion coincided exactly with the pornographizing of art. When consuming “spoiler alert” media, faith has been misplaced in the hands of gimmicky street magicians rather than priests who have dedicated their lives to a religion. Street magicians become boring once you discover the trick, but priests continue to enchant because there is no trick. Thus there is no need to enact a double negative like “suspending disbelief” when the author and audience are both in agreement, when they both hold the same “faith." It's important to remember that if the media we ingest is like food (can be binged, can sustain us healthily, etc.), then good media is fine wine which ages well, while bad media is milk which spoils quickly (at the slightest disclosure of its plot).
I appreciated how Hick included Nietzsche and Tolstoy in both that chapter and the next chapter on morality in art, because it made me feel like I'm well-read even though I'm quite ignorant of aesthetics. The chapter which followed these two, on Identity (thus mostly focusing on appropriation) has proven to be already outdated and too narrow to have much worth. As we discovered when Paisley Rekdal, author of Appropriate visited our campus this last semester, she admitted that the arguments and discussions in her book (now only three years old) are already out of date, and she'd like to move beyond it. If this doesn't disenchant you to the contemporary discourse around aesthetics and politics, I don't know what will. Basically, these trends shift so rapidly that I'm skeptical they're worth even interacting with to any degree. I'm also feeling the same way about contemporary media (all of it, art, writing, movies, youtube videos, the whole shebang); in other words, I'd like to treat contemporary media like candy: a little treat you can have once in a while, but definitely something so full of toxins and microplastics that you should never make it your main diet.
This in a way brings us to the close of the textbook, which ended with a full reproduction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper." This was probably the third time I had read the story, but I still got new things from it, and the end still chilled me. I appreciated the observations some of my peers had, especially because I and some of the men in the class took it as somewhat of a cathartic experience, while some of the women in the class said it only made them more anxious, in pat because they weren't in a place to "enjoy" it. But of course, with its adjacency to horror, enjoy is the wrong word. I don't "enjoy" the cover of the textbook, but I do smile at it, for a few reasons: first off, you're used to some typical cover (like the older edition, one which has no relation to the contents inside); it's a memorable cover, because it so breaks with the typical aesthetics of most textbooks; secondly, it references the Gilman story, and I had a faint realization the moment I saw all my peers had that book, that it was referring to her story. It's a clever shibboleth. I'm thankful to Hick for writing this textbook and to Dr. Clark for leading one of my favorite classes of my entire grad school experience. It wouldn't have been the same without this book.
As we started things off, I didn't actually notice any difference between my edition and the other edition everyone else had. Our page numbers were slightly off, but otherwise the content for the first couple chapters seemed to be the same. I enjoyed reading about mimesis (which I had only heard of but didn't really know much about) and catharsis (which I knew about but never heard anyone discuss), as well as Kant and Hume and Shaftesbury. But for me as someone who is deeply interested in theology, the Church Fathers, and the middle ages, the Medieval section (at least in the older edition) was very vague and unhelpful, and needed badly to be improved. If I couldn't follow it, there's no chance that any of my heathen peers could have.
When we surpassed the basics, and the two editions diverged noticeably. I could no longer translate their page numbers into my page numbers, and people started mentioning things mine didn't even talk about. So I was finally peer pressured into buying the newer edition.
And it was at this point that the book dipped in quality; or rather, I loved a lot of the concepts, but hated a lot of the examples. For example, in the chapter on different emotional theories related to art, I thought Get Out (2017) was a horrible example. Apparently I'm in a tiny minority, but I found the movie to be extremely counterproductive, and Peele (even jokingly) tweeting "'Get Out' is a documentary" isn't much of an own, rather only showing how paranoid-schizophrenic he is. I was also quite surprised that it took until page 164 for the "muse" to be mentioned (a word not even in the index). For me and my limited experience writing poetry, the Muse is a central concept I wholeheartedly believe in. I'm not superstitious, I just think that the metaphor of the muse is the best way to explain how it feels entering and exiting flow states.
Lastly, that emotion-in-art chapter ends with a brief discussion of Content Warnings (and by extension "Spoiler Alerts"). I'm opposed to both, for similar reasons. For the former, I'm not opposed because I think people are "snowflakes" who need to be less sensitive; quite the opposite: I think that content creators have a moral duty to take into account their audience, rather than going to the extremes that they now do. I've been shocked by how exponentially explicit movies have become in recent years (of which Saltburn is an excellent example of excess). In other words, my complaint about Content Warnings is that we shouldn't be making art in the first place which will damage people; shock value is utterly at odds with catharsis, and the former is worthless while the latter is absolutely necessary.
Now, for Spoiler Alerts. Throughout all of history until the postmodern age, needing to keep your plot secret was the sign of a weak plot. This inversion coincided exactly with the pornographizing of art. When consuming “spoiler alert” media, faith has been misplaced in the hands of gimmicky street magicians rather than priests who have dedicated their lives to a religion. Street magicians become boring once you discover the trick, but priests continue to enchant because there is no trick. Thus there is no need to enact a double negative like “suspending disbelief” when the author and audience are both in agreement, when they both hold the same “faith." It's important to remember that if the media we ingest is like food (can be binged, can sustain us healthily, etc.), then good media is fine wine which ages well, while bad media is milk which spoils quickly (at the slightest disclosure of its plot).
I appreciated how Hick included Nietzsche and Tolstoy in both that chapter and the next chapter on morality in art, because it made me feel like I'm well-read even though I'm quite ignorant of aesthetics. The chapter which followed these two, on Identity (thus mostly focusing on appropriation) has proven to be already outdated and too narrow to have much worth. As we discovered when Paisley Rekdal, author of Appropriate visited our campus this last semester, she admitted that the arguments and discussions in her book (now only three years old) are already out of date, and she'd like to move beyond it. If this doesn't disenchant you to the contemporary discourse around aesthetics and politics, I don't know what will. Basically, these trends shift so rapidly that I'm skeptical they're worth even interacting with to any degree. I'm also feeling the same way about contemporary media (all of it, art, writing, movies, youtube videos, the whole shebang); in other words, I'd like to treat contemporary media like candy: a little treat you can have once in a while, but definitely something so full of toxins and microplastics that you should never make it your main diet.
This in a way brings us to the close of the textbook, which ended with a full reproduction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper." This was probably the third time I had read the story, but I still got new things from it, and the end still chilled me. I appreciated the observations some of my peers had, especially because I and some of the men in the class took it as somewhat of a cathartic experience, while some of the women in the class said it only made them more anxious, in pat because they weren't in a place to "enjoy" it. But of course, with its adjacency to horror, enjoy is the wrong word. I don't "enjoy" the cover of the textbook, but I do smile at it, for a few reasons: first off, you're used to some typical cover (like the older edition, one which has no relation to the contents inside); it's a memorable cover, because it so breaks with the typical aesthetics of most textbooks; secondly, it references the Gilman story, and I had a faint realization the moment I saw all my peers had that book, that it was referring to her story. It's a clever shibboleth. I'm thankful to Hick for writing this textbook and to Dr. Clark for leading one of my favorite classes of my entire grad school experience. It wouldn't have been the same without this book.
January 12, 2024
Một cuốn sách, nói đúng hơn là một giáo trình về triết học nghệ thuật mà bạn phải đọc nhiều lần mới thấy cái hay của nó. Mặc dù mới tiếp xúc thì trông nó nhiều chữ và khiến bạn cảm thấy cực kỳ buồn ngủ, nhưng khi thực sự đem nó ra nghiên cứu chúng ta sẽ thấy được trong cái đẹp, cái nghệ thuật mà chúng ta được chiêm ngưỡng, chứa đựng nhiều điều hơn bản thân nghĩ đằng sau đó.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews