This book explores the Japanese notion of hakanasa - the evanescence of all things. Responses to this idea have been various and even contradictory: asceticism, fatalism, conformism, hedonism, materialism, and careerism. This book examines the ties between an epistemology of constant change and Japan's formal emphasis on etiquette and visuality.

In premodern China, painters used imagery not to mirror the world, but to evoke unfathomable experience. Considering this art alongside the philosophical traditions that inform it, this book explores the 'nonobject', a notion exemplified by paintings that do not seek to represent observable surroundings.

In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to—and substantially shifts—that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity. Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling—more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.

In this work, Rodenbeck recovers the critical force of happenings, addressing them both as theoretical objects and as artworks, investigating broader epistemological and formal concerns as well as their material and performative aspects.

Having studied philosophy at a time when its traditions were being seriously uprooted by the atrocities of World War II, Theodor Adorno had an enormous impact on thinking about aesthetics at a transitional historical moment when the philosophy of science and leftist politics were looking for new ground. Moreover, with his focus on the rise of commercial culture and its effects on identity-construction, Adorno can be said to have reinvigorated modernist concerns by introducing the prevailing terms in our contemporary versions of cultural politics and cultural studies. Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism traces Adorno's social and aesthetic ideas as they appear and reappear in his corpus. As per other volumes in the series, this book is divided into three parts. The first, “Adorno's Keywords,” is organized by the aesthetic terms around which Adorno's philosophy circulates. The second section is devoted to “Adorno and Aesthetics.” While Adorno's philosophical viewpoints influenced modernism's evolution into the 21st century, the history of modernist aesthetics also shaped his philosophical approaches. The third and final part, “Adorno's Constellations,” discusses how aesthetic form in Adorno's thinking underlies the terms of his social analysis.

Laws of Form is a seminal work in foundations of logic, mathematics and philosophy published by G Spencer-Brown in 1969. The book provides a new point of view on form and the role of distinction, markedness and the absence of distinction (the unmarked state) in the construction of any universe. A conference was held August 8-10, 2019 at the Old Library, Liverpool University, 19 Abercromby Square, L697ZN, UK to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Laws of Form and to remember George Spencer-Brown, its author. The book is a collection of papers introducing and extending Laws of Form written primarily by people who attended the conference in 2019.