Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one's knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticized as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness.

Product Description: In this volume, a team of internationally respected contributors theorize the concept of aesthetic experience and its value. Exposing and expanding our restricted cultural and intellectual presuppositions of what constitutes aesthetic experience, the book aims to re-explore and affirm the place of aesthetic experience--in its evaluative, phenomenological and transformational sense--not only in relation to art and artists but to our inner and spiritual lives...read more

Product Description: This book, written by some of pragmatism's leading scholars, explores the range of pragmatism and its resources for treating crucial contemporary issues. * An exploration of the range of pragmatism and the limits of philosophy. * Probes the range of pragmatism in terms of its international impact...read more

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Product Description: A paradox of surface and depth pervades the field of aesthetics. How can art's surface meanings and qualities be properly appreciated without understanding the cultural context that shapes their creation and perception? But exploring such underlying cultural conditions challenges the perception of thosequalities and meanings of aesthetic surface that constitute the captivating power of art...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Pragmatism is experiencing a powerful revival. But the new pragmatism has not yet expressed itself in a new aesthetic, and not since Dewey's "Art as Experience" (1934) has there been a comprehensive pragmatist treatment of this field. This book seeks to fill the gap by proposing a pragmatist aesthetics for our current postmodern condition. "Pragmatist Aesthetics" treats the traditionally central topics of aesthetics - the definition of art, aesthetic experience and value, form and unity, interpretation and the cognitive and moral worth of art. But it also directs philosophical aesthetics towards a wider and more socially pertinent agenda by considering such contemporary issues as the institutionalization and cultural oppression of art, the aesthetic legitimacy of popular culture and the ethical art of living beauty through the stylization of conduct and the aesthetic construction of the self. (view table of contents)

Product Description: T.S. Eliot, no less a distinguished as a critic than as a poet, began as a student of philosophy. As a young man he planned to take up philosophy as a career, and his later critical theory was deeply influenced by his philosophical outlook...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Combining historical exegesis and systematic elaboration, contemporary American philosopher Joseph Margolis has created and defended a metaphysics and a logic that he has applied throughout the realms of culture. Is his account fully consistent? Is it adequate to the needs of interpretative practice in the natural and human sciences? Scholars of various philosophical persuasions critically engage these questions...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This Critical Reader provides a new perspective on the work of France's foremost social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, by examining its philosophical import and promoting a fruitful dialogue between Bourdieu and philosophers in the English-speaking world. The contributors include leading philosophers who critically assess Bourdieu's philosophical theories and their significance from diverse philosophical perspectives to reveal which dimensions of his thought are the most useful for philosophy today. These discussions also raise important questions about the current institutional limits of philosophy and how those limits may be overcome through a more robust alliance with the social sciences and the practical social world. The contributions cover Bourdieu's use of central figures in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition: his relationship to analytical philosophy and pragmatism through his concept of habitus: his position in twentieth-century continental philosophy: the political dimension of his work: the function and limits of his notion of "the field": and the relation of his explanatory models to new directions in the philosophy of science. The book also discusses some of his most recent writing not yet translated into English, and it concludes with a chapter by Bourdieu in which he analyses the diverse structural problems and the transformations involved in importing intellectual ideas from one national field to another. The volume also offers a specially prepared comprehensive bibliography of Bourdieu's publications in French and English from 1958 to 1998.

Product Description: Applying contemporary pragmatism to the crucial question of how philosophy can help us live better, Shusterman develops his distinctive aesthetic model of philosophical living that includes politics, somatics, and ethnicity, while critically engaging the rival views of Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Foucault, as well as Rorty, Putnam, Goodman, Habermas, and Cavell...read more

Product Description: Book by Hiley, David R., Bohman, James F.

Product Description: The so-called analytic approach has dominated Anglo-American philosophical enquiry in aesthetics in this century. The primary aim of this collection is to assess the nature, contribution, and continuing value of this approach. What, if anything, characterizes analytic aesthetics? How has it changed and developed over the years? What has been its special value? How does it differ from rival modes of enquiry? Recent Marxist, post-structuralist, and post-modernistic theories have suggested that we are deep in an age of post-analytic philosophy but supposedly on the threshhold of a post-philosophical culture...read more