By Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 2010), xxx + 607 pp. £15.99 paper. A combination of social theory, statistical data, illustrations, and interviews, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg...

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Knowledge and the Flow of Information.

In this paper I propose that only part of our experience of events, and products in particular, should be coined aesthetic. This part, the aesthetic experience, is restricted to the (dis)pleasure that results from sensory perception. The main part of the paper is devoted to explaining why we experience certain things as gratifying to our senses. Following thinking in evolutionary psychology, it is argued that we aesthetically prefer environmental patterns and features that are beneficial for the development of the senses’ functioning and our survival in general. Four general principles of aesthetic pleasure, operating across the senses, can be explained on the basis of such argumentation: (1) maximum effect for minimum means, (2) unity in variety, (3) most advanced, yet acceptable, and (4) optimal match.

Design aesthetics: principles of pleasure in design

In \"The Company We Keep\", Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of this particular encounter with this particular work. Yet it will give up the old hope for definitive judgments of 'good' work and 'bad'. Rather it will be a conversation about many kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us as we read? Who am I, during the hours of reading or listening? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: 'friendship with books', 'the exchange of gifts', 'the colonizing of worlds', 'the constitution of commonwealths'. He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain.

The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction

Organizational research has long focused on the instrumental sphere with its questions of efficiency and effectiveness and in recent decades there has been interest in the moral sphere with its questions of ethics. Within the last decade there has also emerged a field that draws on the aesthetic sphere of our existence in organizations. In this review we look at the field of organizational aesthetics in terms of content and method, suggesting four broad categories of organizational aesthetics research: intellectual analysis of instrumental issues, artistic form used to look at instrumental issues, intellectual analysis of aesthetic issues, and artistic form used to look at aesthetic issues. We then suggest how organizational scholars might pursue artistic aesthetic organizational research.

Finding Form: Looking at the Field of Organizational Aesthetics

History of aesthetics Plato / Christopher Janaway -- Aristotle / Nickolas Pappas -- Medieval aesthetics / Joseph Margolis -- Empiricism: Hutcheson and Hume / James Shelley -- Kant / Donald W Crawford -- Hegel / Michael Inwood -- Idealism: Schopenhauer, Schiller and Schelling / Dale Jacquette -- Nietzsche / Ruben Berrios and Aaron Ridley -- Formalism / Noel Carroll -- Pragmatism: Dewey / Richard Shusterman -- Expressivism: Croce and Collingwood / Gordon Graham -- Heidegger / Thomas E Wartenberg -- Phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and Sartre / Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin -- Sibley / Colin Lyas -- Goodman / Jenefer Robinson -- Foucault / Robert Wicks -- Postmodernism: Barthes and Derrida / David Novitz -- Aesthetic theory Definitions of art / Stephen Davies -- Ontology of art / Guy Rohrbaugh -- The aesthetic / Alan Goldman -- Taste / Carolyn Korsmeyer -- Aesthetic universals / Denis Dutton -- Value of art / Matthew Kieran -- Beauty / Jennifer A McMahon -- Interpretation / Robert Stecker -- Imagination and make-believe / Gregory Currie -- Fiction / David Davies -- Narrative / Paisley Livingston -- Metaphor / Garry L Hagberg -- Pictorial representation / Mark Rollins -- Issues and challenges Criticism / Roger Seamon -- Art and knowledge / Eileen John -- Art and ethics / Berys Gaut -- Art, expression and emotion / Derek Matravers -- Tragedy / Alex Neill -- Humor / Ted Cohen -- Creativity / Margaret A Boden -- Style / Aaron Meskin -- Authenticity in performance / James O Young -- Fakes and forgeries / Nan Stalnaker -- High art versus low art / John A Fisher -- Environmental aesthetics / Allen Carlson -- Feminist aesthetics / Karen Hanson -- The individual arts Literature / Peter Lamarque -- Theater / James R Hamilton -- Film / Murray Smith -- Photography / Patrick Maynard -- Painting / Dominic McIver Lopes -- Sculpture / Curtis L Carter -- Architecture / Edward Winters -- Music / Mark DeBellis -- Dance / Graham McFee

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The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics

Sight and sensibility

1. The machine in the ghost 2. A computer art form 3. Live wires: computing interaction 4. Work to rule 5. Artist to audience 6. Computer art poetics 7. Atari to art Envoi: a new Laocoon. Notes. Bibliography. Index

A Philosophy of Computer Art

Part 1: Imagination, Narrative, and Emotion 1. Reasons, Emotions, and Fiction, Berys Gaut 2. How I Really Feel About JFK, Stacie Friend 3. Imagination and Emotion in Fiction, Peter Goldie 4. In Search of a Narrative, Matthew Kieran Part 2: Truth in Imagination 5. Fictional Assent and the (So-Called) Problem of Imaginative Resistance, Derek Matravers 6. The Owl, the Pussycat, and Other Impossible Tales, Kathleen Stock 7. Quarantining and Contagion, Fertility and Unproductivity, Tamar Szabo Gendler 8. Literature, Thought Experiments and the Value of Detail, Eileen John 9. The Aesthetic and ethical Value of Literature, Roman Bonzon 10. Imagining the Truth: An Account of Tragic Pleasure, James Shelley Part 3: Sensory Imagination 11. Seeing Things Twice Over, Christopher Williams 12. Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Dominic McIver Lopes 13. The Imaged, the Imagined, and the Imaginary, David Davies 14. Film and the Transcendental Imagination: Kant and Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, Melissa Zinkin 15. The Funerary Sadness of Mahler's Music, Saam Trivedi 16. Sculpture and Space, Robert Hopkins Part 4: Afterthoughts 17. The Capacities that Enable Us to Produce and Consume Art, Gregory Currie. Index

Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts

Everybody assumes (1) that musical performances are sonic events and (2) that their expressive properties are sonic properties. This paper discusses recent findings in the psychology of music perception that show that visual information combines with auditory information in the perception of musical expression. The findings show at the very least that arguments are needed for (1) and (2). If music expresses what we think it does, then its expressive properties may be visual as well as sonic; and if its expressive properties are purely sonic, then music expresses less than we think it does. And if the expressive properties of music are visual as well as sonic, then music is not what we think it is—it is not purely sonic.

Dominic McIver Lopes

Papers

The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics

Sight and sensibility

A Philosophy of Computer Art

Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts

Hearing and Seeing Musical Expression