Aesthetic Dimensions of Modern Philosophy
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:29th May '25
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The agenda of analytical philosophy is heavily influenced by the assumptions governing modern scientific knowledge. Such philosophy can consequently neglect questions about why and how things matter at all. Aesthetic Dimensions of Modern Philosophy explores the idea that, because they offer responses to existential questions of meaning, art and aesthetics are vital for the future of philosophy. Andrew Bowie regards the development of modern scepticism, not primarily as an epistemological problem to be solved, but rather as a symptom of how traditional ways of making sense of the world are disrupted in modernity. The modern attention to art and aesthetics is a response to this disruption, and is explored in Montaigne, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Schelling, the early German Romantics, Hegel, and Cassirer. The work of Karl Polanyi, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Dewey, and others can suggest how the modern sciences and capitalism change humankind's relationship to nature, and so transform the significance of art, such that art can become a kind of philosophy, and philosophy a kind of art.
Andrew Bowie's Aesthetic Dimensions of Modern Philosophy is a tour-de-force and astonishingly wide-ranging exploration of the idea of art as a form of philosophical thought. It is also as compelling a defense of that idea as any written; erudite, original, lucid, fair-minded, and wise. It is as well a deeply thoughtful reflection on the great "dissonance" in modernity between the spectacular success of modern natural science and technology, on the one hand, and the ever more impoverished sources of meaning on the other. This is an invaluable contribution to our attempts to understand ourselves in this "destitute" time. * Robert Pippin, University of Chicago *
Andrew Bowie sees philosophy which is naturalistically constricted as dispensing with the richness of experience. The guardian of sensibility for experience has always been aesthetics, and Bowie does not regard aesthetics as a separate philosophical discipline, but as something which is woven into the project of modern philosophy itself. He takes his reader through 'stages' of emerging subjectivity and explains to them the growing weight which 'the aesthetic' takes on, as a supplement of the lost supersensuous world in modern philosophy. An eminently stimulating read, written by a profoundly erudite scholar. * Manfred Frank, University of Tübingen *
ISBN: 9780198965008
Dimensions: 235mm x 155mm x 14mm
Weight: 366g
240 pages