This paper explores the complexity of Plato’s approach to mimesis and poetry, focusing on his critique in Republic Books II, III, and X. While Plato dismisses poetry as ethically and epistemologically flawed, his arguments reveal a deeper tension between philosophy and artistic representation. Through an analysis of Plato’s tripartite division of reality, the critique of imitation, and the ethical concerns surrounding poetry’s influence, the paper examines whether his rejection of art is absolute or if it leaves room for an alternative poetic function. Drawing on Stephen Halliwell’s interpretation, the study highlights how Plato’s stance is shaped by a broader philosophical concern with truth, knowledge, and the role of art in society. The analysis considers whether Plato’s discussion of mimesis is not merely an attack on art but part of a larger philosophical negotiation over the intersection of aesthetics, morality, and epistemology.

In the post-millennial era, global educational reforms have emphasized fostering innovation and aesthetic competence through the arts. Through the implementation of arts-based curricula, educational systems aim to cultivate learners’ creativity, critical thinking, and ability to appreciate and express beauty. This approach not only enhances students’ aesthetic awareness but also promotes holistic development by integrating cognitive, emotional, and cultural dimensions of learning (Lin, 2025). Furthermore, the intersection of aesthetics and education provides a conceptual space for examining how perception, sensuous experience, beauty, and art contribute to learning and human emancipation. These dimensions have long been regarded as essential for cultivating democratic societies, as they shape citizens’ moral, ethical, and political sensibilities. Yet aesthetics is often perceived as both a dangerous and paradoxical concept for educators: it holds the capacity to foster political transformation, while simultaneously enabling political manipulation through immersive, disruptive, and all-consuming aesthetic experiences. In essence, aesthetic encounters are powerful modes of experience that prompt individuals to think, interpret, and feel beyond the certainty of facts and the routine dimensions of everyday life. Aesthetics heightens human awareness of both self and others. Thus, the study of aesthetics in education reveals a latent potential in learning—one that extends beyond the acquisition of objective information and the logical discernment of reality (Heybach, 2020). Maxine Greene (1995) viewed aesthetic experience as a means of awakening critical consciousness and social imagination, allowing learners to envision possibilities for transformation within themselves and society, and to become more complete beings through ongoing reflection and creation. Therefore, integrating aesthetic principles into curriculum development is of great significance for teachers. When teachers design curricula through an aesthetic lens, they can achieve a balance between emotion and reason in the learning process, creating environments that inspire emotional resonance and creative thinking among students. Such curricula emphasize not only learning outcomes but also the meaningful and affective dimensions of the learning process, encouraging students to cultivate aesthetic perception, ethical concern, and social awareness while exploring knowledge. Through the practice of aesthetic-oriented curriculum design, education can return to its humanistic essence—serving as a process that enlightens the mind and enriches life.

This article explores glamour as a complex and contested cultural phenomenon situated at the intersection of aesthetics, gender politics, and feminist critique. While glamour has traditionally been associated with the spectacle of the female body and framed as a patriarchal tool of control, contemporary feminist and queer theories highlight its disruptive potential. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Laura Mulvey, Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, Naomi Wolf, Deborah Ferreday, and Angela McRobbie, the article examines how glamour operates as a visual code that oscillates between accessibility and unattainability, discipline and emancipation. Special attention is given to the performative practices of neo-burlesque, which reappropriate glamour through parody, exaggeration, and camp aesthetics. Performances by troupes such as The Velvet Hammer, queer reinterpretations of Cabaret, and artists including Perle Noire, Dirty Martini, and Moira Finucane illustrate how glamour becomes a site of negotiation between patriarchal beauty norms and feminist reclamation. In contrast, the highly stylized burlesque of Dita Von Teese highlights the persistence of the traditional glamour aligned with the heterosexual male gaze. By analyzing the inclusivity, gender fluidity, and political agency of neo-burlesque, this study argues that glamour should not be understood as either purely oppressive nor liberating, but as an ambivalent and dynamic practice that continues to evolve in dialogue with feminism, queer theory, and contemporary performance culture.

Furniture design has undergone a significant transformation over the centuries, evolving from purely functional objects to artistic expressions that reflect societal values, technological advancements, and environmental concerns. In contemporary society, furniture design plays a critical role not only in shaping interior spaces but also in influencing lifestyle, culture, and sustainability. The modern emphasis on minimalism, ergonomics, and multifunctionality reflects changing living patterns, urbanization, and an increased focus on well-being. Technological innovations, such as digital fabrication and smart materials, have further expanded the possibilities of design, enabling more personalized and efficient solutions. Additionally, there is a growing consciousness around sustainable practices, leading to the use of eco-friendly materials and circular design principles. This evolution highlights the intersection of aesthetics, utility, and ethics in modern design. By examining key trends and innovations, this study explores how contemporary furniture design responds to the needs of a dynamic society and contributes to shaping the future of living environments.

This paper examines Renaud Camus’s trilogy (Roman roi, Roman furieux, Voyageur en automne) as a multifaceted literary and theoretical intervention within the framework of a political and queer political novel. The analysis argues that Camus interrogates the intersections of aesthetics, politics and representation, particularly focusing on the notion and dynamics of presence and absence, thus challenging both contemporary queer discourse and dominant political paradigms. The study situates his trilogy within a broader critique of the increasing (de/re) politicisation of French Literature, as Camus’s refusal to adhere to progressive norms, which positions him as both an anachronistic and controversial figure. The trilogy offers an alternative approach to the traditional political novel by prioritising ambiguity and the interplay of presence and absence, rather than explicit engagement with overt activism or political movements. Through its narrative exploration of memory, exile and historical and fictional displacement, and by integrating layers of absence, memory gaps and metaphors, the trilogy suggests a novelistic form that critically interrogates the dynamics of political representation (even his own), the very fabric of identity and politics as iterative, metaphorical processes, rather than static linear narratives that draw on memory as a fraught and unstable mechanism for constructing meaning.

At the intersection of aesthetics in philosophy and philosophy in aesthetics, my article takes specific situations and their concrete settings into consideration. It no longer asks what appears and is experienced but how and in what way something appears and is experienced as something. Its phenomenological focus highlights the lived body’s resourcefulness as a point of passage for ethical observations of its movements towards the world, in experiencing between intention and execution, in understanding the correspondence between what is aimed at and what is given and in dealing with others and things. Examples of this are a desk and a chair in a feminist’s life, a pair of scissors in a bodily experience and a caravan and a calliope in Kara Walker’s installation The Katastwóf Karavan in collaboration with Jason Moran on the slave trade in historic New Orleans, all leading to performative (re-)orientations in ethics and aesthetics through their use by following the concept of a ‘queer furnishing’ as suggested by Sara Ahmed to disrupt and reorder what has already been arranged and thereby linking it directly to social and political questions about race, gender and sexuality.

The article analyzes Memoires en vrac by Jean Ajalbert, a forgotten poet and writer at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, in the context of the functioning and creation of memory about the fin de siècle era, particularly the decade of Symbolism 1880-1890. In the process of resurrecting of the past, affective memory in Ricœure’s approach turns out to be important, enabling the author to combine autobiography with a testimony about the era in which he was to play an important role alongside masters (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Mallarmé…) and (un)famous writers and artists. Thanks to the impressive nature of his writing and discontinuous style, Ajalbert composed a hybrid text in which he included fragments of letters, symbolist poems and his own works. The author’s desire to create a personal myth at the intersection of aesthetics allowed him to show non-obvious connections between symbolism and naturalism.

Although sensuous and embodied engagement is an integral part of child–environment relationalities, the intersections of aesthetics, children and environments remain scarcely addressed. As a response, this study develops a concept of ‘aesthetic flux’ to delve into the sensuous dynamics of matter and bodies in the context of a storying workshop in a forest with first graders in a Finnish primary school. An arts-based, post-qualitative methodology guided our analysis of video recordings from the workshop, resulting in visual-sonic montages that draw attention to the intense movements and sounds of children, soap bubbles, air, a research camera and trees. Thinking through the concept of aesthetic flux, our study experiments with the abundance, indeterminacy and potentiality of sensuous dynamics where bodies (human and otherwise) become together and linger. Thus, our study reconfigures aesthetics as a creative and unpredictable force that materialises in both embodied and conceptual ways in environmental education and research with children.

Flowers are placed on the altar in many Christian churches. However, while many other items on the altar have given rise to a vast body of theological research, this is not the case with altar flowers. In this article the author makes a constructive contribution to the theology of altar flowers and looks at the contexts in which altar flowers are imagined and how these can help to illustrate theological elements. Two initial contexts for altar flowers are assumed: the liturgical and the extra-liturgical, suggesting that altar flowers hold particular meanings both for those who know the Christian story, and equally for those who do not. It is suggested that a role which seems merely decorative is not that after all, as deeper Christian meanings can be offered in both contexts. Moreover, altar flowers as objects of nature have the capacity to speak to new groups of people on urgent contemporary themes. Finally, it is suggested that altar flowers may also bridge a divide between the secular and sacred. Apart from contributing to the construction of a theology of altar flowers, a deeper understanding of the intersections of aesthetics, faith and reason is sought.

What happens when politics enters strongly aesthetic cultural fields? This article proposes a novel conceptual framework, which we propose to call ideologization, to understand how political-ideological considerations influence cultural legitimation. We build on theories of legitimation and cultural intermediaries to examine the strategic case of fashion as a cultural production field at the intersection of aesthetics and economics. Combining an analysis of frames in fashion magazines since the 1980s with critical discourse analysis of British Vogue in turning-point year 2020, we theorize ideologization as consisting of three elements: aesthetic agenda-setting; the reimagination of relations between producers, consumers and intermediaries; and the generation of discursive contradictions. This process of ideologization, which we see across cultural fields since the late 2010s, has strong implications for intermediaries who act as framers and brokers of legitimate culture. We conclude by proposing future research to further develop the ideologization framework and detail the long-term impact of political-ideological logics on cultural fields.

This review explored the recent advancements in fiber-reinforced composites (FRCs) within the context of restorative dentistry. Dental composites have undergone significant transformations, with FRCs emerging as a groundbreaking development at the intersection of aesthetics and mechanical performance. The objective of this review is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the innovative strategies employed in FRCs to address the challenges of polymerization shrinkage, wear resistance, mechanical strength, and aesthetics. FRCs, composed of fiber reinforcements strategically aligned within a resin matrix, offer enhanced flexural strength, fracture toughness, and wear resistance, essential for the longevity of dental restorations. The review further explored the dynamic relationship between fiber alignment and restoration design, highlighting the adaptability of FRCs for varied applications, from post and core restorations to bridges and splints. Through an intricate interplay of materials science and clinical demands, FRCs have revolutionized dental composites by seamlessly integrating form and function. This review underscores the transformative potential of FRCs in restorative dentistry, shedding light on the path to enhanced clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction

In the process of moving from obscuration to openness, the concept of the body has evolved into subdivided fields such as Somaesthetics. In recent years, more film studies have been shown using Somaesthetics to explore science fiction films, especially Cyberpunk films, which have a direct impact on the body. However, a systematic presentation of body aesthetics in Cyberpunk films has yet to be established. This article discusses the body elements in Cyberpunk films, through Somaesthetics and the political body theories, this paper studies the Somaesthetics in Cyberpunk films from three aspects: the material body in mainstream aesthetics, the technical body in the spectacular landscape, as well as the cultural body within the meaning system. The paper demonstrates how these films explore the tension between technological progress and embodied experience. Specifically, when adapting to the rapid development of technology and culture, humans should maintain attention on the human body, otherwise, they will fall into the myth of high-tech but low life.

The inhabiting of art. Local and global practices for inhabitation of the sensuous and poeticThis essay explores the intersection of aesthetics and ecology in the author’s artistic works with Sisters Hope. It is in continuation of the findings in her PhD dissertation, in which she investigates how sustainability may be attained through stimulation of an ecological awareness, which the aesthetic, evoked through contemporary art processes, can arouse.

Reviewed by: Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First Century World ed. by Vania Barraza and Carl Fisher Fernanda Righi Barraza, Vania, and Carl Fisher, editors. Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First Century World. Wayne State UP, 2020. Pp. 375. ISBN: 978-0-8143-4682-2. Over the last twenty years, Chilean films have received praise and prizes at international film festivals and awards ceremonies, drawing the attention of critics and the public all around the [End Page 304] world. During this time, the incipient local productions of the post dictatorship period have improved in quality and presented a wide variety of topics and aesthetics. This diversity makes putting them into a single category (other than country of origin) difficult. Indeed, even the “Chilean” label has proven problematic, as some films are set abroad and/or feature foreign actors, making their “Chileanness” a somewhat flexible notion. While acknowledging the role the state played in the development of a Chilean cinema, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First Century World (2020), edited by Vania Barraza and Carl Fisher, focuses on the tension between local and international, political and personal in Chilean films of the twenty-first century. In the introduction of the volume, the authors address this opposition between the political and the personal. On the one hand, some films focus on local, political issues affecting the wider Chilean society, from issues of memory connected to the dictatorship, to LGBTQ+ struggles. On the other hand, films that sidestep a clear political statement and focus on personal dramas and everyday life, as well as genre pieces like horror and action films, can offer innovative aesthetics—such as the so-called Novisimo generation. Considering this tension and the limited local distribution and audience, the editors ask a central question: “what choices do filmmakers have to make in order to make domestic issues intelligible to global audiences?” (2). Working at the intersection of aesthetics and content, local and global audiences, the book is divided into five sections dealing with fiction and documentary films. The first section, entitled “Mapping Theories of Chilean Cinema in the World,” examines the markets, distribution, and exhibition of Chilean films around the world. Then, “On the Margins of Hollywood: Chilean Genre Flicks” considers the political aspects of both horror and martial arts cinema. The third section, “Other Texts and Other Lands: Intermediality and Adaptation beyond Chile(in Cinema),” focuses on film adaptations in transnational contexts. “Migrations of Gender and Genre” looks at how Chilean films enter into the transnational debate on sexual dissidence, and “Politicized Intimacies: Debating (Post)Memory and History” debates how different filmmakers address the issue of memory. With the exception of the last section, which contains four chapters, each section comprises two or three chapters, allowing the reader to explore a variety of creative analysis and connect different films around a common topic. One argument that connects the sections of the book, and strives to provide a resolution to the discussion of personal versus political, is an expanded definition of politics. Indeed, many authors consider that historical topics can be addressed from a personal perspective, as Camilo Trumper analyzes in the chapter “Displacement, Emplacement, and the Politics of Exilic Childhood in Sergio Castilla’s Gringuito.” Here, the author discusses exile from the perspective of the child. The authors also agree on the political potential of films that explore intimate worlds and do not explicitly narrate any urgent social issue. Chapters such as “Films of Loss and Mourning: Bridging the Personal and Collective” by María Helena Rueda show how fictional films like Una mujer fantástica (2017) connect the mourning of Marina, the protagonist, to the relatives of desaparecidos who were unable to have funerals for their loved ones during (and after) the dictatorship, posing the question of who has the right to say goodbye. The chapter “Intimacies and Global Aesthetics in Vida de familia by Alicia Scherson and Cristián Jiménez,” written by Vania Barraza, explores how Vida de familia (2017), in which the aesthetic seems to be the priority, indirectly touches on issues of narratives of memory. While arguing that this film can connect to both local and global audiences, the author analyzes how the intimate...

In a tradition of Black celebrity activism, famous African Americans throughout history have used their platform to speak out and act against racial injustice in the United States. However, in the wake of the contemporary Black Lives Matter uprisings, Black celebrity matters have become increasingly unstable. This report explores the present and future of Black celebrity in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement in Minneapolis, Minnesota on 25 May 2020. In the current moment, celebrity is perniciously constructed through the hyper-visibility of victims of anti-Black violence such as Floyd and Breonna Taylor. While these slain individuals become icons in the circulation of their name and image across media forms, what is termed the Black Celebrity Creative Class has demanded structural change at the intersection of aesthetics and politics in the entertainment industry to varying degrees of effectiveness. Growing frustration with the contradictions of fame amongst Black publics has compelled a turn towards the demand for the abolition of both capitalism and celebrity. Ultimately, this report seeks to identify and assess how the investment in, and stakes of, Black celebrity might be re-imagined in the twenty-first century.

Writing and Democracy in the Early United States

This article analyzes the origins of one of the core problems of philosophical-aesthetic thought of N. Berdyaev – the philosophy of beauty. Importance of the phenomenon of beauty for the formation of its aesthetic concepts and worldview overall is demonstrated. The author determines the main sources that determines the heightened interests towards the phenomenon of beauty, which affected the peculiarities of solution of this problem. Considering the defining character of Berdyaev’s personal and emotional attitude to the surrounding beauty, major attention is given to revelation of this source as most significant for understanding the entire further evolution of his philosophical-aesthetical thought as a whole, as well as establishment of the philosophy of beauty in particular. Therefore, the article reviews a number of life circumstances that defined his aesthetic development, which in the end leads to the fact that the aesthetic component becomes paramount in his worldview, and beauty turns into a universal criteria of assessing other diverse phenomena. The study carries a holistic character, being at the intersection of aesthetics, philosophy, culturology, biographical genre, which determines the applied complex historical-philosophical and philosophical-culturological methodology. This article is first attempt within the national literature to examine and reconstruct the origins of Berdyaev’s aesthetic evolution. The author reveals the key role of the problematic of beauty not only on formation of his aesthetic concept, but philosophical thought overall. Analysis is conducted on the source of Berdyaev’s aesthetic views that drastically affected the development of his philosophy of beauty.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the phenomenon of leadership at the intersection of aesthetics, identity and self within a dynamic, fluid and interactive compositional mixture which is part of a leader’s continuous process of invention and reinvention. Design/methodology/approach The methodology of this paper is a conceptual analysis and presentation involving some of the extant literature in the field of aesthetics, identity and leadership, including Harold Bloom’s theory of poetry that provides an entrance point to understand the problem of identity. The authors argue that a person, such as a leader, has multiple identities and interactions with others which lead to the co-construction of the self. To demonstrate this argument, the authors explore a case study of the life of the opera diva, Maria Callas. Findings An exploratory conceptual model demonstrating the relationship between identity and self, and insights and Bloom’s theory are applied to illuminate the case study of Maria Callas’ life. A key finding of the analysis is that identity is linked to performance and co-constructed in relation to others. Practical implications The paper concludes by discussing two implications for developing school leadership performance: the need for an aesthetic perspective of leadership and the need to provide a range of teaching approaches to teach leadership. Originality/value There have been few, if any, significant breakthroughs in understanding more about leadership from the traditional methods of social science. It is argued that until and unless researchers move towards working in aesthetic traditions there is not likely to be new understandings of it.

Hutcheson holds that the aesthetic and the moral can be prised apart in the course of an analytic exercise, and this is in fact something that Hutcheson himself accomplishes when he analyses beauty in terms of unity amidst diversity and analyses moral motivation in terms of benevolence. But he believes that the loveliness of a moral act is not a mere accident supervenient upon the act, any more than the morality of a lovely act is accidental to the act. Hutcheson's moral theory is essentially aesthetic.

Getting People Right. Getting Fiction Right:Self-Fashioning, Fictionality, and Ethics in the Roth Books Stefan Kjerkegaard (bio) On the basis of readings in several self-fashioning and thought-provoking novels by Philip Roth this article seeks to rethink a limited set of narratological core concepts such as fiction and fictionality in light of their treatment within recent theories on narrative communication by James Phelan (2011) and Richard Walsh (2007). I will argue in favor of a simpler and more rhetorical model than used by these two leading scholars within narratological studies. According to the definition employed in this essay, the self-fashioning novel uses autobiographical material and means with the intention of reaching specific aesthetic ends. These means might include the author’s name, as in autofiction, or other material such as gender and correspondence in history and identity. Autofictional novels use and abuse the autobiographical contract where author, narrator, and protagonist share the same name. Hence, some autofictions try to hide the fact that they are novels by assimilating autobiographical genres such as autobiography, confession, or memoir, while other autofictions are in fact more or less autobiographies, but use rhetoric related to and imported from fiction. I shall read Roth’s novels consecutively, as gradually developing new understandings of reality and identity, and trace the intersections of aesthetics and ethics in Roth’s body of works. For the most part, my focus will [End Page 121] be on The Facts. A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988) and Operation Shylock. A Confession (1993), two of the most ambiguous of the Roth Books with regard to their limits as works of art, their genre, and their use of autobiographical material. Employing James Phelan’s distinction between ethics of telling and ethics of the told (Phelan 2007), I will argue that the uncompromising aesthetic of these two works, as well as those published immediately before and after them (The Counterlife [1986] and American Pastoral [1997]) is designed to transcend readers’ initially negative moral judgment and lead them to a deeper kind of ethics, grounded in dialogue, discourse, and sociality as such. I will contrast Phelan’s understanding of narrative ethics, as seen from the viewpoint of the literary work as an artifact, with Judith Butler’s thoughts on ethics and self-narration in Giving an Account of Oneself. Richard Walsh’s understanding of fictionality as a rhetorical rather than ontological quality plays an important part in the above-mentioned enterprise. Walsh argues that whether you read a text as fictive or assume that a statement is fictional depends on relevance (The Rhetoric of Fictionality 7). What he wants to develop is not a theoretical discourse that removes the artistic enunciation from the world or from referentiality altogether. On the contrary, to adopt a fictionality approach in relation to any kind of work or discourse is, in Walsh’s view, to maximize relevance. The novelty of his theory is that it leads literature back to a simpler rhetorical model—simpler than the models developed in classic rhetorical narratology as, for instance, Seymour Chatman’s idea of an implied author and reader—and that it takes into account an always already communicative relationship between a sender and a receiver (empirical author and reader), and disengages the concept of fictionality from specific media and genre questions. The concept of fictionality can therefore be applied to literature as well as to everyday conversations or full-blown fictional narratives. In Walsh’s words: Fictionality is neither a boundary between worlds, nor a frame dissociating the author from the discourse, but a contextual assumption by the reader, prompted by the manifest information that the authorial discourse is offered as fiction. (36) [End Page 122] Walsh’s understanding of fictionality is compatible with a more discursive approach like Butler’s. I will use both to argue that Roth’s innovative late novels are not merely quixotic and playful metafiction, but serious attempts to tell us something about who we are and how reality works. Their innovation, to use Walsh’s words from Novel Arguments, “far from being a refusal of engagement, is an attempt to extend fiction’s capacity for thinking about the world” (18). The second part of...