Aesthetics as Phenomenology The Appearance of Things [Hardcover]

Connecting aesthetic experience with our experience of nature or with other cultural artifacts, Aesthetics as Phenomenology focuses on what art means for cognition, recognition, and affecthow art changes our everyday disposition or behavior. G?nter Figal engages in a penetrating analysis of the moment at which, in our contemplation of a work of art, reaction and thought confront each other. For those trained in the visual arts and for more casual viewers, Figal unmasks art as a decentering experience that opens further possibilities for understanding our lives and our world.

Translators Foreword
Introduction
Chapter One: Art, Philosophically
1. Why Art?
2. Which Art?
3. Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics
Chapter Two: Beauty
4. Free Play
5. Appearances and Things
6. Showing and Self-Showing
Chapter Three: Art Forms
7. Arts
8. Essential Determinations
9. Mixtures
Chapter Four: Nature
10. Oppositions
11. Limits and Inclusions
12. Primordial Appearance
Chapter Five: Space
13. Places
14. Emptiness
15. Here
Bibliography
Index of Names and Subjects
Index of Terms

G?nter Figal is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg in Breisgau, Germany. He is author of Objectivity: Philosophy and the Hermeneutical and editor of The Heidegger Reader (IUP, 2009).

Jerome Veith teaches at Seattle University.

Phenomenology of the Visual Arts by Paul Crowther (Stanford University Press, 2010). ISBN 9780804776028.

Aesthetics as Phenomenology is an important and potentially major contribution to the philosophy of art.Carefully wrought and consummately presented, G?nter Figal promises a rehabilitation of aesthetics against philosophical approaches that would detach the significance of art from the question of beauty.