The Promise Of Beauty And Why It Matters

Author : Shakti Maira
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2016-12-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9789352641680

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The Promise of Beauty and Why It Matters by Shakti Maira Pdf

'A concern for beauty would certainly make us better shapers of the world.' - Roger ScrutonThe idea of beauty is highly conflicted terrain. Does it only have to do with how things look? Is it merely prettiness? Is it entirely subjective? Does it serve a function?Historically, beauty has been held in high esteem: 'beauty is truth, truth beauty,' the poet Keats wrote. Why then do the high priests of the arts and the arguably progressive socio-political thinkers of the day shun it? Shakti Maira explains how the problem lies with the confused understanding of beauty and with beauty becoming superficially located: quite literally, on the skin. What would happen, he asks, if beauty were to become central to every aspect of our lives: environment, education, economics and governance? Maira engages eighteen eminent thinkers in a series of conversations around the difficult, enthralling notion of beauty.Scientists explore whether there is an evolutionary purpose to it. Philosophers examine its relationship to truth and goodness. Artists speak of beauty and its rejection. Brain-mind experts consider whether the experience of it strengthens certain neural pathways connected with the qualities of balance, harmony, rhythm and proportion. Activists probe how beauty works in the context of social systems. What emerges is a deeper understanding of beauty and how it is a key to our world: a radical new way of evaluating problems and finding solutions, from the personal to the political, the individual to the universal.

Author : Alexander Nehamas
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2010-10-17
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780691148656

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Only a Promise of Happiness by Alexander Nehamas Pdf

This book imparts the fundamental legal understanding required for the purchase and sale of marketing rights for publishing house products. The aim is to enable the reader to competently deal with publishing contracts of every kind. Specific areas of focus include classic copyright and publishing law, the role of collecting societies, issues related to subsidiary rights and their exploitation, as well as questions regarding royalties.

Author : Kathleen M. Higgins,Shakti Maira,Sonia Sikka
Publisher : Springer
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2017-03-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9783319438931

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Artistic Visions and the Promise of Beauty by Kathleen M. Higgins,Shakti Maira,Sonia Sikka Pdf

This volume examines the motives behind rejections of beauty often found within contemporary art practice, where much critically acclaimed art is deliberately ugly and alienating. It reflects on the nature and value of beauty, asking whether beauty still has a future in art and what role it can play in our lives generally. The volume discusses the possible “end of art,” what art is, and the relation between art and beauty beyond their historically Western horizons to include perspectives from Asia. The individual chapters address a number of interrelated issues, including: art, beauty and the sacred; beauty as a source of joy and consolation; beauty as a bridge between the natural and the human; beauty and the human form; the role of curatorial practice in defining art; order and creativity; and the distinction between art and craft. The volume offers a valuable addition to cross-cultural dialogue and, in particular, to the sparse literature on art and beauty in comparative context. It demonstrates the relevance of the rich tradition of Asian aesthetics and the vibrant practices of contemporary art in Asia to Western discussions about the future of art and the role of beauty.

Author : Ginger Curtis
Publisher : Harvest House Publishers
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2021-06-01
Category : House & Home
ISBN : 9780736982252

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Beauty by Design by Ginger Curtis Pdf

New Beauty Emerges “Every day we have the opportunity to embrace and celebrate the beauty our homes and lives are designed to express.”—Ginger Curtis Walk through the door and begin the personal journey of creating a sanctuary that reflects who you are—that unique combination of who God made you to be and how you shape life by what matters most. Award-winning designer Ginger Curtis uses her personal experience to inspire your every step with this truth: You are worthy of beauty. Dream of it. Plan for it. And watch it emerge as you create visual moments, let in color and light, select meaningful treasures, and allow the smallest details to shine. This is the home made for you. This is beauty by design.

Author : Monique Roelofs
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 487 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2014-04-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781472522245

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The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic by Monique Roelofs Pdf

Aesthetic desire and distaste prime everyday life in surprising ways. The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic casts much-needed light on the complex mix of meanings our aesthetic activities weave into cultural existence. Anchoring aesthetic experience in our relationships with persons, places, and things, Monique Roelofs explores aesthetic life as a multimodal, socially embedded, corporeal endeavor. Highlighting notions of relationality, address, and promising, this compelling study shows these concepts at work in visions of beauty, ugliness, detail, nation, ignorance, and cultural boundary. Unexpected aesthetic pleasures and pains crop up in sites where passion, perception, rationality, and imagination go together but also are in conflict. Bonds between aesthetics and politics are forged and reforged. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, and engaging the work of theorists and artists ranging from David Hume to Theodor W. Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Clarice Lispector, and Barbara Johnson, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic lays open the interpretive web that gives aesthetic agency its vast reach.

Author : Heather Widdows
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2020-02-25
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780691197142

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Perfect Me by Heather Widdows Pdf

How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today's worldThe demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to which we judge ourselves good or bad, a success or a failure. Perfect Me explores the changing nature of the beauty ideal, showing how it is more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before.Heather Widdows argues that our perception of the self is changing. More and more, we locate the self in the body--not just our actual, flawed bodies but our transforming and imagined ones. As this happens, we further embrace the beauty ideal. Nobody is firm enough, thin enough, smooth enough, or buff enough-not without significant effort and cosmetic intervention. And as more demanding practices become the norm, more will be required of us, and the beauty ideal will be harder and harder to resist.If you have ever felt the urge to "make the best of yourself" or worried that you were "letting yourself go," this book explains why. Perfect Me examines how the beauty ideal has come to define how we see ourselves and others and how we structure our daily practices-and how it enthralls us with promises of the good life that are dubious at best. Perfect Me demonstrates that we must first recognize the ethical nature of the beauty ideal if we are ever to address its harms.

Author : Lisa A. Dickson,Maryna Romanets
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2014-05-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781134102068

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Beauty, Violence, Representation by Lisa A. Dickson,Maryna Romanets Pdf

This volume explores the relationship among beauty, violence, and representation in a broad range of artistic and cultural texts, including literature, visual art, theatre, film, and music. Charting diversifying interests in the subject of violence and beauty, dealing with the multiple inflections of these questions and representing a spectrum of voices, the volume takes its place in a growing body of recent critical work that takes violence and representation as its object. This collection offers a unique opportunity, however, to address a significant gap in the critical field, for it seeks to interrogate specifically the nexus or interface between beauty and violence. While other texts on violence make use of regimes of representation as their subject matter and consider the effects of aestheticization, beauty as a critical category is conspicuously absent. Furthermore, the book aims to "rehabilitate" beauty, implicitly conceptualized as politically or ethically regressive by postmodern anti-aesthetics cultural positions, and further facilitate its come-back into critical discourse.

Author : Nicola Davies
Publisher : Candlewick Press
Page : 48 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2021-06-15
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN : 9781536221718

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The Promise by Nicola Davies Pdf

“This tale is a sturdy one that is made even more emphatic by Davies’s terse writing style. The text is heightened in every way by Carlin’s outstanding mixed-media artwork.” — Booklist (starred review) On a mean street in a mean, broken city, a young girl tries to snatch an old woman’s bag. But the frail old woman says the thief can’t have it without giving something in return: the promise. It is the beginning of a journey that will change the girl’s life — and a chance to change the world, for good.

Author : Anthony J. Cascardi
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2023-01-10
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781942130703

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Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique by Anthony J. Cascardi Pdf

An innovative study of Goya's unprecedented elaboration of the critical function of the work of art Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique probes the relationship between the enormous, extraordinary, and sometimes baffling body of Goya’s work and the interconnected issues of modernity, Enlightenment, and critique. Taking exception to conventional views that rely mainly on Goya’s darkest images to establish his relevance for modernity, Cascardi argues that the entirety of Goya’s work is engaged in a thoroughgoing critique of the modern social and historical worlds, of which it nonetheless remains an integral part. The book reckons with the apparent gulf assumed to divide the Disasters of War and the so-called Black Paintings from Goya’s scenes of bourgeois life or from the well-mannered portraits of aristocrats, military men, and intellectuals. It shows how these apparent contradictions offer us a gateway into Goya’s critical practice vis-à-vis a European modernity typically associated with the Enlightenment values dominant in France, England, and Germany. In demonstrating Goya’s commitment to the project of critique, Cascardi provides an alternative to established readings of Goya’s work, which generally acknowledge the explicit social criticism evident in works such as the Caprichos but which have little to say about those works that do not openly take up social or political themes. In Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique, Cascardi shows how Goya was consistently engaged in a critical response to—and not just a representation of—the many different factors that are often invoked to explain his work, including history, politics, popular culture, religion, and the history of art itself.

Author : Sarah Stewart-Kroeker
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2017-08-04
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780192527172

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Pilgrimage as Moral and Aesthetic Formation in Augustine's Thought by Sarah Stewart-Kroeker Pdf

Augustine's dominant image for the human life is peregrinatio, which signifies at once a journey to the homeland (a pilgrimage) and the condition of exile from the homeland. For Augustine, all human beings are, in the earthly life, exiles from their true homeland: heaven. Some, but not all, become pilgrims seeking a way back to the heavenly homeland, a return mediated by the incarnate Christ. Becoming a pilgrim begins with attraction to beauty. The return journey therefore involves formation, both moral and aesthetic, in loving rightly. This image has occasioned a lot of angst in ethical thought in the last century. Augustine's vision of Christian life as a pilgrimage, his critics allege, casts a pall of groaning and longing over this life in favor of happiness in the next. Augustine's eschatological orientation robs the world of beauty and ethics of urgency. In Pilgrimage as Moral and Aesthetic Formation in Augustine's Thought, Sarah Stewart-Kroeker responds to Augustine's critics by elaborating the Christological continuity between the earthly journey and the eschatological home. Through this cohesive account of pilgrimage as a journey toward the right ordering of the desire for beauty and love for God and neighbour, Stewart-Kroeker reveals the integrity of Augustine's vision of moral and aesthetic vision. From the human desire for beauty to the embodied practice of Christian sacraments, Stewart-Kroeker develops an account of the relationship between beauty and morality as the linchpin of an Augustinian moral theology.

Author : Christopher Uhl,Dana L. Stuchul
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2011-05-15
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781421400389

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Teaching as If Life Matters by Christopher Uhl,Dana L. Stuchul Pdf

This book is an open letter to teachers offering guidance and encouragement for nurturing students in ways that make teaching and learning meaningful. The authors promote an approach to teaching that fosters self-knowledge, creativity, curiosity, and an appreciation for our planet. Central to their philosophy is the question of what we humans need in order to live meaningful lives, and the answer lies in healthy relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world.

Author : John Burke,Kathy Burke
Publisher : Baker Books
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2018-07-31
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781493414932

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Imagine Heaven Devotional by John Burke,Kathy Burke Pdf

In 2015, John Burke's Imagine Heaven took the book world by storm, landing on the New York Times bestseller list and selling more than half a million copies. Its exhilarating picture of heaven, drawn from Scripture and illustrated with true stories of near-death experiences, enthralled readers and offered real-life evidence that supported their faith and answered some of their most pressing questions about life after death. Scripture tells us to "Think about the things of heaven, not the things of earth" (Col. 3:2). Now readers can meditate daily on the realities of heaven with the Imagine Heaven Devotional. Each of the 100 devotions includes near-death stories from the bestselling book, Scripture, a prayer, as well as brand new stories and content that helps readers apply these heavenly promises to how they live life today.

Author : Cynthia Jean Hahn
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2012
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780271050782

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Strange Beauty by Cynthia Jean Hahn Pdf

"A study of reliquaries as a form of representation in medieval art. Explores how reliquaries stage the importance and meaning of relics using a wide range of artistic means from material and ornament to metaphor and symbolism"--Provided by publisher.

Author : Melody Grace
Publisher : Melody Grace Books
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2016-10-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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The Promise by Melody Grace Pdf

Author : Norman Clark Capshaw
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 378 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2023-08-04
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781527527249

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The Promises and Pitfalls of Technology in Higher Education by Norman Clark Capshaw Pdf

What will universities look like in 30- or 40-years’ time? This book looks at that future, examining the potential impact of technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, smart buildings, drones, robots, and holograms in future universities. It is a story told in three acts. The first act takes the reader through a history of the modern university, highlighting major innovations that have transformed the academy since the founding of the University of Bologna in 1088. A second act builds on this history and transports the reader to the future, observing the application of these technologies in a future university from the point of view of professors, administrators, and students, as we tour the transformed campus with them. The third act examines how these technologies might be adopted most effectively through the combined effort of university leaders, administrators, faculty and students.