Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective

In this book the editors brought together outstanding articles concerning intercultural aesthetics.  The concept 'Intercultural aesthetics' creates a home space for an artistic cross-fertilization between cultures, and for heterogeneity, but it is also firmly linked with the intercultural turn within Western and non-Western philosophy.  The book is divided into two parts, yet one can sense a clear unity throughout the whole book.  This unity is related to the underlying subject that the different authors, each in their own way and from their own background, try to reveal. They use related, and overlapping terms such as  'the suchness of things', 'dancing and shaping lives', 'presenting a meaning  beyond words, presenting the unpresentable, experiencing', in order to bring to our awareness the genuine importance of the non-conceptual, next to the conceptual.  Several authors moreover take on a reflective, and at times even a self-reflective stance, pointing to the intrinsic relation between cultural aesthetics and ethics, making this book unique in its kind.

This marvelous book is a compilation of outstanding articles written about art from cross-cultural points of view, effecting a wider perspective of our world and a deeper insight into the art that enriches it.

Antoon Van den Braembussche (1946) has taught from 1980 until 2007 philosophy of history and philosophy of art at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. He currently teaches, on a part time basis, art criticism at the Free University of Brussels. Van den Braembussche was Visiting Professor at the University of Bielefeld, Calcutta University, Javdapour University, the University of Amsterdam, the Universities of Turku and Helsinki. He is currently preparing a publication, titled The Silenced Past, which embodies the first systematic inquiry available into the nature of historical taboos and historical traumas in both history and art. Heinz Kimmerle is a retired professor of philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. At different universities in Kenya, Ghana and South Africa he has been teaching as a visiting professor. Since 1996 he is director of the 'Foudation for Intercultural Philosophy and Art'. In 2003 the University of South Africa in Pretoria conferred an Honorary Doctorate on him. His publications are in the fields of hermeneutics and dialectics, philosophies of difference and intercultural philosophy. Nicole Note is performing research at the interdisciplinary Centre Leo Apostel, at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. Her main subjects are the relation between worldview, self-understanding and understanding the other.

Intercultural aesthetics: an introduction Part one: Towards an intercultural aesthetics. An intercultural approach to a world aesthetics. Grazia Marchianò. Living - in between - Cultures. Downscaling Intercultural Aesthetics to Daily Life. Henk Oosterling. Living (with) Art. The African aesthetic worldview as an inspiration for the Western Philosophy of Art. Heinz Kimmerle. The Origins of Landscape Painting: An Intercultural Perspective. Heinz Paetzold. Nishida, Aesthetics and the Limits of Cultural Synthesis. Robert Wilkinson. Identity and Hybridity - Chinese Art and Aesthetics in the Age of Globalization. Karl-Heinz Pohl. The Rasa Theory: A challenge for Intercultural Aesthetics. Rosa Fernandez. Part two: Trauma and visual art in an intercultural perspective Presenting the Unpresentable. On trauma and Visual Art. Antoon Van den Braembussche. Bisual Archives and the Holocaust: Christian Boltanski, Ydessa Hendeles, Peter Forgacs. Ernst van Alphen. Art in the Face of Radical Evil. Thierry de Duve. Distant Laughter: the Poetics of Dislocation. Jean Fisher. There you end and I begin - the multiple ethics of contemporary art and practice. Pam Johnston. The Ethics of the Wound. Everlyn Nicodemus.