Comprised of nearly fifty paintings, sculptures and works on paper, The Abstract Impulse highlights artists in such critical movements as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Op Art. Artists who are included are such canonical figures as Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Mangold among others. This publication, together with its coinciding exhibition, seeks to unveil the pluralistic ways in which abstraction developed after 1950, which will be revealed by the grouping of the works stylistically and thematically into three general sections: gesture, geometry, and introspection.

Robert Davidson has been a pivotal figure in the Northwest Coast Native art renaissance since he erected the first totem pole in nearly a century in his ancestral Masset village in 1969. For over forty years he has absorbed the bedrock art traditions of Haida art and craft, working in the ancient forms of his grandfather, the influential Haida artist Charles Edensaw. Davidson has taken new directions within the highly disciplined structure of the old Northwest Coast models--in wood sculpture, ceremonial arts, jewelry, and prints. Less known are his recent forays into abstraction, explored in boldly minimalist easel paintings, graphic work, and sculpture. Pared to essential lines, elemental shapes, and bold colors, these startlingly modern works insinuate themselves into a lifetime's body of work which has usually been labeled as "traditional." Robert Davidson features paintings, sculptures, and prints created since 2005, as well as key images from earlier in his career, that show Davidson's impulse toward an elemental language of form. These essays investigate the complex fusion of sources Davidson draws upon, placing the work in the larger context of contemporary art, and examines the ways in which the work mediates the dualities of tradition and innovation, the spheres of the community and the gallery, and the personal and the collective.

Music is surrounded by movement, from the arching back of the guitarist to the violinist swaying with each bow stroke. To John Paul Ito, these actions are not just a visual display; rather, they reveal what it really means for musicians to move with the beat, organizing the flow of notes from beat to beat and shaping the sound produced. By developing "focal impulse theory," Ito shows how a performer's choices of how to move with the meter can transform the music's expressive contours. Change the dance of the performer's body, and you change the dance of the notes. As Focal Impulse Theory deftly illustrates, bodily movements carry musical meaning and, in a very real sense, are meaning.

The Inner Dimensions of Life is a compressed yet exhaustive educational presentation of the esoteric teachings in three volumes, subtitled Esoteric Philosophy, Esoteric Psychology, and Esoteric Sociology. With a background in many years of work as a teacher in his Esoteric School, the author has gathered and edited a comprehensive and thoroughly tested curriculum, including illustrations and copious source references. Thus, the work appeals to readers who will be content with a general view, as well as those who wish to delve deeper into the subject. The third volume, Esoteric Sociology, touches upon the way one as an esotericist can relate to groups, society, and the world in general. The global perspective is dealt with in four chapters on The Law of Karma, The Dark Forces, The New Group of World Servers, and The Externalization of the Hierarchy. These are followed by a chapter on Economy - the cause of many of humanity's current problems, which are treated in the next chapter. The book and the work is concluded with the subject Group Work, which perhaps holds the most important message for humans nearing an esoteric approach to life.

This volume explores the unity of logic, epistemology and ontology in Hegel's dialectic and the interrelation among the three, thereby revealing the internal features of Hegel's dialectic as well as the connection and divergence between Hegel's and Marx's philosophical thought. As the final volume of a three-volume set that gives insights into Hegel's dialectic and his overall philosophical thought, the book analyzes Hegel's dialectic as "a unity of three." As logic, it transcends language and is therefore epistemology; as epistemology, it transcends theory and is therefore ontology; as ontology, it transcends existing things and is therefore logic. Hegel's dialectic thus demonstrates itself as the revolutionary development of each of these three fields in the history of Western philosophy. The principle of the agreement of logic with history thereby expressed immediately becomes one of the most important philosophical sources of inspiration for Marx's historical materialism. A more profound understanding of Hegel's philosophy will therefore deepen our understanding of the philosophy of Marxism. The title will appeal to scholars and students interested in Hegel's and Marx's philosophy, German classical philosophy and Western philosophy.

Edward Ragg's study was the first to examine the role of abstraction throughout the work of Wallace Stevens. By tracing the poet's interest in abstraction from Harmonium through to his later works, Ragg argues that Stevens only fully appreciated and refined this interest within his later career. Ragg's detailed close-readings highlight the poet's absorption of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century painting, as well as the examples of philosophers and other poets' work. Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction will appeal to those studying Stevens as well as anyone interested in the relations between poetry and painting. This valuable study embraces revealing philosophical and artistic perspectives, analyzing Stevens' place within and resistance to Modernist debates concerning literature, painting, representation and 'the imagination'.

a. 'Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. ' Thus Kant formulates his attitude to morality (Critique of Practical Reason, p. 260). He draws a sharp distinction between these two objects of admiration. The starry sky, he writes, represents my relationship to the natural, empirical world. Moral law, on the other hand, is of a completely different order. It ' . . . begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection (. . . ). ' (p. 260). So Kant sees morality as a separate metaphysical order opposed to the world of empirical phenomena. Human beings belong to both worlds. According to Kant, the personality derives nothing of value from its relationship with the empirical world. His part in the sensuous world of nature places man on a level with any animal which before long must give back to the rest of nature the substances of which it is made.