This book establishes whether contemporary social theory can help us understand the structural origins of environmental degradation and environmental politics.

Co-authored by three prominent philosophers of art, Jazz and the Philosophy of Art is the first book in English to be exclusively devoted to philosophical issues in jazz. It covers such diverse topics as minstrelsy, bebop, Voodoo, social and tap dancing, parades, phonography, musical forgeries, and jazz singing, as well as Goodman's allographic/autographic distinction, Adorno's critique of popular music, and what improvisation is and is not. The book is organized into three parts. Drawing on innovative strategies adopted to address challenges (...) that arise for the project of defining art, Part I shows how historical definitions of art provide a blueprint for a historical definition of jazz. Part II extends the book's commitment to social-historical contextualism by exploring distinctive ways that jazz has shaped, and been shaped by, American culture. Chapters 4 and 5 use the lens of jazz vocals to provide perspective on racial issues previously unaddressed in the work, after which chapter 6 examines the broader premise that jazz was a socially progressive force in American popular culture. Part III concentrates on a topic that has entered into the arguments of each of the previous chapters: what is jazz improvisation? It outlines a pluralistic framework in which distinctive performance intentions distinguish distinctive kinds of jazz improvisation. This book is a comprehensive and valuable resource for any reader interested in the intersections between jazz and philosophy. (shrink)

The practice of architecture takes place in what is aptly called “an architectural practice.” But, in a sense, no architecture takes place there. Unless something outside that practice is built, we merely have plans for architecture, unfulfilled ideas, but nothing that functions or shelters. In this paper, my attempt to show an important connection between improvisation and architecture is about the process of architecture as its execution of a built structure. My idea is to begin with an unheralded example from (...) vernacular architecture, glean from it what I think is improvisational and work with issues I believe are generated from it in order to point out some things about improvisation as well as architecture. That example is the collective of buildings known as the shantytown. The shanty, like the ruin, comes about with “unintentional visual interest” to pervert the phrase of Michael Baxandall, happening as it does without foregrounding concern for architectural beauty or elegance. Philosophical investigations of vernacular architecture are not new, but one where an improvised mode of construction is a serious component of its analysis has largely been passed over. One question I try to answer can put the issue another way: What is the limiting case of improvisation in architecture? (shrink)

Painting -- Photography and film -- Architecture and the third dimension -- Music -- Literature -- Performance -- Popular art and everyday aesthetics -- Classic sources -- Contemporary sources.

93 Categories of Art -- 94 The Role of Theory in Aesthetics -- 95 Art and Natural Selection -- 96 Feminism in Context -- Contributors.

"Like ventriloquial dummies, artworks take on personalities, characters of their own, often saying what the artist herself would or could not say in voices distinct from her daily modes of expression. Goldblatt uses ventriloquism as an apt metaphor to help understand a variety of art-world phenomena - how the vocal vacillation between ventriloquist and dummy is mimicked in the relationship of artist, artwork and audience, including the ways in which artworks are interpreted. Moreover, Goldblatt employs the concept of ventriloquism to (...) generate insights into many of our important philosophers' writings on the arts, discussing the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Cavell, and Wittgenstein, among others."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cavellian Conversation and the Life of ArtDavid GoldblattThe issue of the death or end of art has led me think about its life. Although I will be writing about the life of art, it should be made clear that my use of that phrase is only tangentially related to the issue resurrected by Arthur Danto in his essay "The End of Art."1 In that essay and elsewhere Danto recognized (...) a new period of ahistorical art—an art without a progressive history and relieved of the burden of perpetual self-definition. After the end of art artworks cease to become the carriers of their own history. In a post-historical art world, happily he says, anything can happen. Artworks can engage in ways that are, in a limiting case, uniquely personal and so a work that instigates in this personal manner also may be art. A comparative glance at the art world, say of 1950 and the institutional practices of art today would seem to bear him out.Less ambitiously, however, this essay attempts to connect what I will call the life of artworks with the idea of conversation, a term of great interest, I want to show, in the writing of Stanley Cavell. It is this way of artworks being alive that is perfectly compatible with its death in the Dantonian sense of the term and perhaps, given the posthistorical world it has left as a residue, even lubricated by it. This essay has two points of embarkation: the act of the ventriloquist where conversational exchange between ventriloquist and dummy enlivens the latter for both the former and an audience. The second is the Wittgensteinian remark, [End Page 460] a question really, suggesting that the sign itself is dead, only in its use does it become alive. The ventriloqual analogy interests me, not because it draws bounds between artworks and non-artworks, but rather because of what I hope it will bring into prominence among artworks—that it will help to explain how some works gain a life in a culture while others are aesthetic dead-ends or mere taxidermies, to repeat a term used by Danto—how some art is resurrected, and some, as they say, stand the test of time. It is part of this story that whatever is needed to say about art in a culture it should include a relationship between persons and things that I dramatically refer to as conversational. And those conversations, by the artist with her own work and those by an audience with the artist's work, lie somewhere at the beginning of its cultural animation. What would follow on this perspective would be the conversations that are generated by artworks among their audience members, sometimes inviting or forcing our return to the works that were their cultural origins.If Wittgenstein is right that the relationship between meaning and use is, at least in a large number of cases, an intimate one, and if works of art are objects of meaning, then looking at their use may be a way of seeing their life, something like the way Wittgenstein in his later writings came to look at words in their life situations, often bringing them back from what he called metaphysics. Nelson Goodman, I believe, was on to something like this when he suggested in his essay "When Is Art?" that, "Just by virtue of functioning as a symbol in a certain way does an object become, while functioning, a work of art... a Rembrandt painting may cease to function as a work of art when used to replace a broken window or as a blanket."2 Although I am suggesting here that we should tend to the ways artworks are used, unlike Goodman, I am not interested in their cessation as artworks. I am hoping to draw out one way artworks function, one way we do art without necessarily making artworks. But I am not here interested in the borders between art and the rest of the world.The idea of conversation extends or annexes the notion of interpretation, of saying what artworks say, but allowing for a more personal, less rigid domain of discourse that takes as... (shrink)

This book provides a clear introduction to key philosophical and epistemological issues in the social sciences, to both positivist and interpretative methodologies through comparing contemporary debates surrounding social change.

By some of the top philosophers in the field of aesthetics as well as those in the architectural profession, essays in this book related architecture to other artforms such as photography. literature and painting. relates architecture to other artforms such as photography, literature and painting contains essays by some of the world's top philosophers works with a diversity of architectural concepts and issues philosophical discussions are generated by professionally designed architectural projects as well as vernacular ones extends the bounds of (...) architectural issues presently discussed by philosophers. (shrink)