Aesthetics as Phenomenology: The Appearance of Things

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 affect--how art changes our everyday disposition or behavior. Günter 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.

"Carefully wrought and consummately presented, Günter Figal promises a rehabilitation of aesthetics against philosophical approaches that would detach the significance of art from the question of beauty." --Theodore George, Texas A&M University Indiana University Press Indiana University Press Indiana University Press Indiana University Press

Günter 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.

Translator's 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