Aesthetic Pursuits: Essays in Philosophy of Art

by Jerrold Levinson

Overview

Jerrold Levinson, one of the most prominent philosophers of art today, presents a new collection of essays, following on from his four previous collections, Music, Art and Metaphysics (1990), The Pleasures of Aesthetics (1996), Contemplating Art (2006), and Musical Concerns (2015). Aesthetic Pursuits specifically complements Levinson's last volume, Musical Concerns, by collecting recent essays not concerned with music, but instead focusing on literature, film, and visual art, while addressing issues of humour, beauty, and the emotions. The essays in Aesthetic Pursuits, which are wide-ranging, will appeal strongly to aestheticians, art lovers, and philosophers alike. The volume contains seven previously unpublished essays by Levinson, in which the author critically engages with notable contemporary contributions to aesthetic theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191079986
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	11/17/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	556 KB

About the Author

Jerrold Levinson is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland and past president of the American Society for Aesthetics, 2001-2003. He is the author of four collections of essays, Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Cornell Univeristy Press 1990, 2nd ed. Oxford Univeristy Press 2010), The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Cornell Univeristy Press 1996), Contemplating Art (Oxford Univeristy Press 2006), and Musical Concerns (Oxford Univeristy Press 2015). He has also published a monograph, Music in the Moment (Cornell Univeristy Press 1998) and is the editor of Aesthetics and Ethics (Cambridge Univeristy Press 1998), Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford Univeristy Press 2003), and Suffering Art Gladly (Palgrave/Macmillan 2013).

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Farewell to the Aesthetician?
2. Aesthetic Contextualism
3. Toward an Adequate Conception of Aesthetic Experience
4. Artistic Achievement and Artistic Value
5. Artistic Worth and Personal Taste
6. Falling in Love with a Book
7. Immoral Jokes
8. Beauty Is Not One: The Irreducible Variety of Visual Beauty
9. Emotional Upheavals
10. Artful Intentions
11. Defending Hypothetical Intentionalism
12. Seeing, Imaginarily, at the Movies
13. Sound in Film: Design versus Commentary

Editorial Reviews

"The scope is to be welcomed. Levinson's has a knack of articulating interesting views on a range of topics in essays which soon become required reading. Hence, it is useful to have them collected here in one place. The re-statements, updates, and replies to critics on well-known positions of his are valuable." —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

From the Publisher