Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is widely regarded as a "masterpiece of modern cinema" and is regularly ranked as one of the great films of all time. Set in a dystopian future where the line between human beings and ‘replicants’ is blurred, the film raises a host of philosophical questions about what it is to be human, the possibility of moral agency and freedom in ‘created’ life forms, and the capacity of cinema to make a genuine contribution to our engagement with these kinds of que...

More than just a box office flop that resurrected itself in the midnight movie circuit, Blade Runner (1982) achieved extraordinary cult status through video, laserdisc, and a five-disc DVD collector's set. Blade Runner has become a network of variant texts and fan speculations-a franchise created around just one film. Some have dubbed the movie "classroom cult" for its participation in academic debates, while others have termed it "meta-cult," in line with the work of Umb...

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference. In this Very Short Introduction the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object - either in art, in nature, or the human form - beautiful, and examining how we can compare differing judgements of beauty when it is evident all around...

Arthur C. Danto's essays not only critique bodies of work but reflect upon art's conceptual evolution as well, drawing for the reader a kind of "philosophical map" indicating how art and the criteria for judging it has changed over the twentieth century. In Unnatural Wonders the renowned critic finds himself at a point when contemporary art has become wholly pluralistic, even chaotic-with one medium as good as another-and when the moment for the "next thing" has already passed. So...

Aesthetics is about some special and unusual ways of experiencing the world. Not just artworks, but also nature and ordinary objects. But then if we apply the remarkably elaborate and sophisticated conceptual apparatus of philosophy of perception to questions in aesthetics, we can make real progress. The aim of this book is to bring the discussion of aesthetics and perception together. Bence Nanay explores how many influential debates in aesthetics look very different, and may beAesthetics...

Collected here in this omnibus edition are Immanuel Kant's three most important works on the Metaphysics of Morals and Ethics. Included are Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals, and The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics. Kant's Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals is one of the most important works in modern moral philosophy. It belongs beside Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. Here Kant sets out to articulate and defe...

Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation.The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dalí's The Lu...

The main purpose of this book is to explicate the problematic relationship between the heterogeneity of what is experienced as beautiful and the homogeneity of the conceptualization of that experience, or attempt at such a conceptualization in the era of modern philosophy. While the heterogeneity of what is experienced as beautiful was permitted, and indeed celebrated, in the dominant ancient conception-for example, in the Symposium and Phaedrus of Plato-the need for homogenization in the ...

Aesthetics: The Key Thinkers offers a comprehensive historical overview of the field of aesthetics. Eighteen specially commissioned essays introduce and explore the contributions of those philosophers who have shaped the subject, from its origins in the work of the ancient Greeks to contemporary developments in the 21st Century.The book reconstructs the history of aesthetics, clearly illustrating the most important attempts to address such crucial issues as the nature of aesthetic ...

Analyzing features of Wittgenstein's philosophical work and including in-depth textual analyses, this study investigates the impact of Ludwig Wittgenstein's work on contemporary German and French novelists.Drawing upon aesthetics, architectural history, philosophy of science, and photography, the book seeks to explain why references both to Wittgenstein as a person, as well as to his work are more pervasive than other equally renowned twentieth century philosophers and asks why som...

This innovative study re-evaluates the philosophical significance of aesthetics in the context of contemporary debates on the nature of philosophy. Lewis's main argument is that contemporary conceptions of meaning and truth have been reified, and that aesthetics is able to articulate why this is the case, with important consequences for understanding the horizons and nature of philosophical inquiry. Reification and the Aesthetics of Music challenges the most emphatic and problemat...

Feminism and Popular Culture maps the fraught and often unpredictable relationship between popular culture, feminism and postfeminism. From the shadowy city spaces of Mad Men and Homeland to the dystopic suburbia of The Stepford Wives and American Horror Story, the authors trace the maniacal career women, hysterical housewives and amnesiac daughters who roam the postfeminist landscape. Through recourse to these figures, they illuminate postfeminism's obsessive resuscitation of seemingly an...