Synopses & Reviews
In this book, ten leading commentators explore the interfaces between art and aesthetics in dialogue with a philosophical text (Theodor Adorno's draft introduction to Aesthetic Theory), a piece of literary writing (Franz Kafka's A Report to an Academy), and a major contemporary painting (Gerhard Richter's Betty, 1988).
Synopsis
This is the first major response to the new challenge of neuroscience to religion. There have been limited responses from a purely Christian point of view, but this takes account of eastern as well as western forms of religious experience. It challenges the prevailing naturalistic assumption of our culture, including the idea that the mind is either identical with or a temporary by-product of brain activity. It also discusses religion as institutions and religion as inner experience of the Transcendent, and suggests a form of spirituality for today.
About the Author
PETER DE BOLLA teaches at the University of Cambridge, UK, and is the author of a number of books, among them
The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (1989),
Art Matters (2001),
The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape and Architecture in Eighteenth Century Britain (2003), and
The Fourth of July and the Founding of America (2007).
STEFAN H. UHLIG is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Cambridge, UK. He has published on the idea of world literature, eighteenth-century conversation, and the value of ordinary life in Gray and Wordsworth. He is writing a study of the conceptual resources of literary studies, and is co-editor of Wordsworths Poetic Theory (forthcoming, 2009).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements and Note on Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction--P.de Bolla and S.H.Uhlig
Theodor W. Adorno: Draft Introduction to Aesthetic Theory
What Does Art Know?--S.Jarvis
Aesthetics and the Fully Emancipated