From medieval contemplation to the early modern cosmopoetic imagination, to the invention of aesthetic experience, to 19th century decadent literature, and to early 20th century essayistic forms of writing and film, Niklaus Largier shows that mystical practices have been reinvented across the centuries, generating a notion of possibility with unexpected critical potential. Arguing for a new understanding of mystical experience, Niklaus Largier foregrounds the ways in which devotion builds on experimental practices of figuration in order to shape perception, emotions, and thoughts anew. Largier illuminates how devotional practices are invested in the creation of possibilities, and this investment has been a key element in a wide range of experimental engagements in literature and art from the 17th to the 20th century, and most recently in forms of 'new materialism.' Read as a history of the senses and emotions, the book argues that mystical and devotional practices have long been invested in the modulating and reconfiguring of sensation, affects, and thoughts. Read as a book about practices of figuration, it questions ordinary protocols of interpretation in the humanities, and the priority given to a hermeneutic understanding of texts and cultural artefacts.

The majority of aestheticians have focused their attention during the past three decades on the identity, or essential nature, of art: can 'art' be defined? What makes an object a work of art? Under what conditions can we characterize in a classificatory sense an object as an art work? The debate, and at times controversy, over these questions proved to be constructive, intellectually stimulating, and in many cases suggestive of new ideas. I hope this debate continues in its momentum and creative outcome. The time is, however, ripe to direct our attention to another important, yet neglected, concept - viz. , 'aesthetic experience' - which occupies a prominent place in the philosohpy of art. We do not only create art; we also enjoy, i. e. , experience, and evaluate it. How can we theorize about the nature of art in general and the art work in particular, and about what makes an object a good work of art, if we do not experience it? For example, how can we identify an object as an art work and distinguish it from other types of objects unless we first perceive it, that is in a critical, educated manner? Again, how can we judge a work as good, elegant, melodramatic, or beautiful unless we first perceive it and recognize its artistic aspect? It seems to me that experiencing art works is a necessary condition for any reasonable theory on the nature of art and artistic criticism.

Despite the very obvious differences between looking at Manet’s Woman with a Parrot and listening to Elgar’s Cello Concerto, both experiences provoke similar questions in the thoughtful aesthete: why does the painting seem to express reverie and the music, nostalgia? How do we experience the reverie and nostalgia in such works of art? Why do we find these experiences rewarding in similar ways? As our awareness of emotion in art, and our engagement with art’s emotions, can make such a special contribution to our life, it is timely for a philosopher to seek to account for the nature and significance of the experience of art’s emotions. Damien Freeman develops a new theory of emotion that is suitable for resolving key questions in aesthetics. He then reviews and evaluates three existing approaches to artistic expression, and proposes a new approach to the emotional experience of art that draws on the strengths of the existing approaches. Finally, he seeks to establish the ethical significance of this emotional experience of art for human flourishing. Freeman challenges the reader not only to consider how art engages with emotion, but how we should connect up our answers to questions concerning the nature and value of the experiences offered by works of art.

Aesthetic experience has had a long and contentious history in the Western intellectual tradition. Following Kant and Hegel, a human’s interaction with nature or art frequently has been conceptualized as separate from issues of practical activity or moral value. This book examines how art can be seen as a way of moral cultivation. Scott Stroud uses the thought of the American pragmatist John Dewey to argue that art and the aesthetic have a close connection to morality. Dewey gives us a way to reconceptualize our ideas of ends, means, and experience so as to locate the moral value of aesthetic experience in the experience of absorption itself, as well as in the experience of reflective attention evoked by an art object.

Aesthetic sensibility rests on perceptual experience and characterizes not only our experience of the arts but our experience of the world. Sensibility and Sense offers a philosophically comprehensive account of humans' social and cultural embeddedness encountered, recognized, and fulfilled as an aesthetic mode of experience. Extending the range of aesthetic experience from the stone of the earth's surface to the celestial sphere, the book focuses on the aesthetic as a dimension of social experience. The guiding idea of pervasive interconnectedness, both social and environmental, leads to an aesthetic critique of the urban environment, the environment of daily life, and of terrorism, and has profound implications for grounding social and political values. The aesthetic emerges as a powerful critical tool for appraising urban culture and political practice.

Features productive (re)interpretations of 21st century experience using the lens of Dewey’s Art as Experience, through putting an array of international philosophers, educators, and artists-researchers in transactional dialogue and on equal footing in an academic text.