Theory Of Aesthetic Experience Research Articles

Arts education in Ireland: Visions of a performative teaching, learning and research culture

In this paper we offer an overview of the arts in education in Ireland, making a case for a performative approach. We discuss theory, research and practice – situating the developments in Ireland within a multicultural context. We begin by offering our own definition of Arts (in) Education research, drawing on seminal policies and interrogating various art classifications, from a historical and etymological perspective. Next, we consider their impact at a global and regional level and we examine how policy has influenced the curriculum. Following this, we reflect on the ramifications of theatre and drama in education, highlighting the fragmentation in the field. In the main argument of the paper, we make a case for performative education, illustrating our vision for performative language teaching and research. We suggest that theory of aesthetic experience can be a useful framework, and close with remarks on our contemporary society.

HARK! Hands up who really loves their classroom reading program? TRI this: three approaches to reading instruction

There is unequivocal evidence that student engagement in reading for enjoyment has many wide-ranging and long-term benefits. Yet, obstacles are mounting in terms of complexities, constraints and contentions. In light of growing concerns around students’ reading attainment and the place of contemporary children’s literature, as well as the imminent release of the Australian Curriculum: English Version 9.0, this article is well-timed to elucidate reading instruction. As educators prepare for the revised curriculum, it is important to examine reading demands, student entitlements and classroom practices. In this article, I consider and categorise curriculum content for coherence and cohesion. I outline different facets of reading instruction. I emphasise the vitalness of student engagement in reading for enjoyment (RfE) and the need for a dedicated RfE program. With reference to Dewey’s (1934) theory of aesthetic experience, Maxwell’s (1974) definitions of reading and Kalantzis’ et al. (2016) Learning by design model, I address complications and impediments. I situate RfE as one of three different but concurrent approaches to the teaching of reading. I position children’s literature at the heart of reading instruction. I aim to expand understanding around reading instruction with improved outcomes for students and teachers alike. In the spirit of promoting high-quality children’s literature, I employ playful palimpsests from prized picture book Hark. It’s me Ruby Lee! (Shanahan & Binny, 2017). I draw on literary devices from children’s literature to encourage its classroom usage. My hope is that this article not only advocates enjoyable reading experience, but also constitutes one.

Aesthetic attitude, aesthetic experiences and aesthetic emotions: Analysis from the perspective of Ingarden′s aesthetics

The text discusses three basic aesthetic concepts: the concept of aesthetic attitude, aesthetic experience and aesthetic emotions, as well as their mutual relationship. The basis of the analysis is the Maria Reicher?s determination of the structure of the aesthetic experience and Roman Ingarden?s theory of aesthetic experience. The paper shows how dynamically and mutually conditioned two basic elements - representation and feeling - constitute an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic experiences begins with the original emotion. The original emotion reveals the aesthetic qualities of the object, stops everyday life and enables the transition from everyday practical to aesthetic attitude. Aesthetic attitude based on perceived aesthetic qualities leads to the constitution of an aesthetic object. The aesthetic object re-energizes the aesthetic emotions that now complete the process od constituting the aesthetic experience. The emotional evocation of the immediate aesthetic experience is the basis for assessing the aesthetic value of an aesthetic object. The basic thesis of this paper is that least three moments should be distinguished in the aesthetic component of the aesthetic experience. In the first moment, the original emotions stops the practical everyday attitude, establishes the aesthetic attitude and starts the process of creating an aesthetic experiences. In the second moment, aesthetic emotion is an integral part of the aesthetic experiences and is closely connected with aesthetic representation. In the third moment, evocative aesthetic emotion is the basis of value evaluation of an aesthetic object.

Positive Aesthetic Pleasure in Early Schopenhauer: Two Kantian Accounts

Schopenhauer is widely held to accommodate no positive aesthetic pleasure. While this may be the case in his mature oeuvre overall, where he insists on the negative character of all gratification, I reconstruct two early accounts of such pleasure in his manuscripts, both of which are a direct result of Schopenhauer’s engagement with Kant’s first and third Critiques. To do so, I analyze his so-called metaphysics of the ‘better consciousness’ and his transition from it to the metaphysics of will (roughly 1811–14). The first account turns out to be an almost literal adoption of Kant’s theory of aesthetic experience as revealing the supersensible character of nature and the cognizing subject. Likewise, Schopenhauer’s second account is a version of the CJ theory of the free interplay of cognitive faculties. These accounts have been underappreciated in Schopenhauer scholarship, but recognizing their importance for the development of his philosophy is essential for gaining a fuller picture of his aesthetics.

Feeling the Aesthetic: A Pluralist Sentimentalist Theory of Aesthetic Experience

Sentimentalist aesthetic theories, broadly construed, posit that emotions play a fundamental role in aesthetic experiences. Jesse Prinz has recently proposed a reductionistic version of sentimentalist aesthetics, suggesting that it is the discrete feeling of wonder that makes an experience aesthetic. In this contribution, we draw on Prinz’s proposal in order to outline a novel version of a sentimentalist theory. Contrasting Prinz’s focus on a single emotion, we argue that an aesthetic experience is rudimentarily composed of a plurality of emotions. We acknowledge and discuss significant problems that follow from such a theory, arguing that a pluralist version of sentimentalism is nonetheless the soundest position within sentimentalist aesthetics.

Ästhetische Erfahrung und die Macht der Besitzergreifung

Abstract After briefly noting key contemporary critiques of aesthetic experience, this article revisits its original account in Plato’s theory of aesthetic experience as the madness of divine possession and then Aristotle’s response of defending art’s rationality as poiesis, which largely dominates the ensuing aesthetic tradition. I subsequently explore how the mysterious notion of possession continues to surface in important modern accounts of aesthetic experience (e. g. in Theodor W. Adorno, T. S. Eliot, John Dewey) and explain how the supernatural idea of possession could find a naturalistic explanation that integrates the concepts of artworld, habitus and atmosphere. The article then exemplifies this naturalistic explanation through an analysis of the possession experience pertaining to performance art as documented in The Adventures of the Man in Gold.

Lev S. Vygotsky on the visual arts followed by a translation of the essay: The graphic art of Alexandr Bykhovsky

During his studies at Moscow University and thereafter, Lev S. Vygotsky’s (1896–1934) interests focused mostly on the scholarly study of literary and theatre criticism. Shakespeare’s Hamlet served as a leitmotiv to understand the specificity of the arts within western culture: through analysis of the structural particularities of Hamlet, he provided a model for an understanding of how the mind functions during interactions with artworks and reconstructed the internal activity caused by art. His thoughts on the visual arts are few, but fragments are found in his seminal work entitled Psychology of Art (1926). Here, he showed the function of catharsis, the main concept of his theory of aesthetic experience. This paper presents a translation of Vygotsky’s essay published in 1926, dedicated to the art of Alexandr Bykhovsky (1888–1978), a companion since his Gomel period (1919–1924). The significance of this essay is twofold. First, it represents a concise and lasting testimony to the creativity of an important Russian artist; second, the essay goes beyond formal analysis of the artwork. Instead, Vygotsky’s analysis explains the phenomenon of aesthetic experience as the viewer and the artwork interact and transform each other. The paper is preceded by a note on the contextual and biographical settings in which both Vygotsky and Bykhovsky worked.

Image schemas in visual semiotics: Looking for an origin of plastic language

Abstract The aim of this article is to present a hypothesis explaining the origin of plastic meaning. In visual semiotics, plastic meaning is that produced by visual configurations per se, i.e. independently from what they represent. This meaning can be assimilated to the kind of effects studied by (Arnheim, R. 1954/1974. Art and visual perception: A psychology of the creative eye, 2nd edn. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press). In his book The Body In the Mind, (Johnson, M. 1987. The body in the mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) is the first to propose that image schemas and their metaphorical projections could be used to explain some of these visual effects. Nevertheless, I think that his approach presents some shortcomings. Above all, Johnson’s examples always concern cases in which visual stimuli match an image schema, while Arnheim’s observations are mostly about effects of tension and dynamism generated by a conflict with our expectations. I will propose that, to complete Johnson’s proposal, we need an inferential theory of aesthetic experience, derived from Meyer’s and Eco’s works. This theory would explain how expectations and their verifications can produce different kinds of tension and arousal, the basic mechanisms of plastic meaning.

John Dewey’s Theory of Aesthetic Experience: Bridging the Gap Between Arts and Sciences

Abstract John Dewey’s philosophical pragmatism offers a reformatory approach to the arduous relationship between natural sciences and humanities. The crucial issue, which Dewey sets himself to resolve, is the pre-Darwinian influence of classical philosophy upon various scholarly practices. Ancient background assumptions still today permeate a considerable proportion of academic research and argumentation on both sides of the debate. Even evolutionary accounts appear to be affected. In order to avoid the often implicit, but nonetheless problematic, consequences that ensue from such archaic premises, I examine Dewey’s reappraisal of the concepts of art, science and knowledge. An analysis of these key concepts renders it possible to understand the proper function of aesthetic experience. In this paper, natural constitution of an aesthetic experience, which carries one of the intrinsic relations between art and science, comprises the core of the proposed solution. Furthermore, establishment of an integral aesthetic connection forms a fruitful basis for further bridging of the gap between hard sciences and humanities.

Hearing/seeing dread: thought of distortion and transformation in Kafka’s The Burrow and Odradek

In Kafka’s unfinished story, The Burrow, an unidentified subterranean creature struggles while digging in a burrow, constantly engulfed in anxiety for potential intruders. His obsessive anxiety starts to be materialised in his hearing of a noise everywhere and at constant intensity. Incessantly speculating the cause of this noise, his dreadful imagination first finds it as a swarm of small fries, eventually growing into a single gigantic monster threatening his burrow, as if desiring an irresistible entity that goes beyond the idea of the individual. Inspired by this story of a creature suffocating from his lonesome effort of nesting, this paper discusses how an individual sensation of dread could potentially transcend to an ability to imagine social totality, drawing on the philosophical readings of Kafka’s other character Odradek by Benjamin and Adorno. I further argue that this process is aesthetic, correlating Freud’s idea of the uncanny with Adorno’s theory of aesthetic experience which examine the negotiation between individuation and socialisation in an experience of desubjectification. By sketching out the anxious hearing in The Burrow in reference to the disturbing seeing of object-creature Odradek, I discuss the feeling of dread that marks the transformation of individual entities into a transcendent social/collective being.

Ueno, Masamichi , Democratic Education and the Public Sphere: Towards John Dewey's Theory of Aesthetic Experience , Routledge, 2015 (自著紹介)

Ueno, Masamichi , Democratic Education and the Public Sphere: Towards John Dewey's Theory of Aesthetic Experience , Routledge, 2015 (自著紹介)

The ‘body pedagogics’ of an elite footballer’s career path – analysing Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s biography

ABSTRACTBackground: Pedagogical research on career is encouraged to not limit sport learning to athletic skills, coaching effectiveness and coach–athlete relationships, but to also focus on learning in a multidimensional sense in the context of an athlete’s individual and social biography. This article examines an elite athlete’s career path as a body pedagogic phenomenon involving processes of self-transformation in relation to practical, social and embodied environments.Purpose: The purpose is to analyse the career path of the elite footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic by focusing on how different learning environments relate to different embodiments of techniques and skills and how values and norms shape professionalism.Theoretical frameworks: A combined framework of body pedagogics and John Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience is used to understand an elite career path as a learning trajectory involving different self-transformation means. Hence, the elite athlete is viewed as a career climber who creates his own educational pathway and engages in processes of participating, acquiring and becoming.Data analysis: A practical epistemology analysis (PEA) with a focus on aesthetic judgements is used to analyse the narrative of Zlatan’s career path as it is portrayed in the biography I Am Zlatan: My Story on and Off the Field. One major theme is identified, namely that Zlatan develops from being a dribbler to a striker. Against this background, Zlatan Ibrahomovic’s self-transformation is scrutinised in relation to three different sub-themes (suburb, arena and team) in three different ways (auto-didactic, education and educator) to create distinct and heterogeneous forms of knowledge in support of professional artistry.Results: The analysis offers an elaborated empirical description of how the means and ends of self-transformation develop reciprocally throughout Zlatan’s elite career and how this relates to practical, social and embodied environments. Examples of body pedagogic outcomes are: (1) different commitments to training, team culture and the coach–athlete relationship (social), (2) that Zlatan uses his dribbling skills more purposefully for scoring goals and satisfying the coach (embodied) and (3) that he is able to win different leagues and titles with different teams (practical).

The Dao of Dressage: Mysticism and Aesthetic Experience in Equestrian Sports

There are many popular treatments of Zen/Chan and Daoist themes related to working with horses; however, these works tend to be fairly superficial treatments of philosophical traditions. For deeper consideration of the philosophy of horse sports such as dressage, I explore themes and imagery in the Daodejing, such as noncontention, flow, humility, and mysticism that may help riders to unpack and enhance the experience of working with a nonhuman teammate. Comparative work, such as with Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience and the psychology of “flow,” further helps to conceptualize the relationship between athleticism and artistic value in formal equestrian sports.

Reid on the moral sense

Some interpret Reid's notion of a moral sense as merely analogical. Others understand it as a species of acquired perception. To understand Reid's account of the moral sense, we must draw from his theory of perception and his theory of aesthetic experience, each of which illuminate the nature and operation of the moral faculty. I argue that, on Reid's view, the moral faculty is neither affective nor rational, but representational. It is a discrete, basic, capacity for representing the real moral properties of humans and human conduct.

Praktische Theologie und Ästhetik

No AccessPraktische Theologie und ÄsthetikDietrich StollbergDietrich StollbergSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:May 2014https://doi.org/10.13109/path.2014.103.6.241SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail About Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited byLuthers Erben und das Unbehagen vor der spielerischen Dissonanz der Freiheit des Jazz29 December 2018 Download book coverVolume 103Issue 6June 2014 ISSN: 0720-6259eISSN: 2197-0831HistoryPublished online:May 2014 PDF download

Pictorial hows. Vedere-in ed esperienza estetica di immagini

It has recently been suggested that seeing-in can sometimes be central to the aesthetic appreciation of pictures. The key concept is that of inflected seeing-in, a special case of picture perception connected with the wollheimean notion of twofoldness. In order to further understand inflection, I focus on Nanays account. He holds that conscious attention is essential to inflected seeing-in. I agree, but I suggest our conceptualization of the properties of the pictorial vehicle is necessary to account for the complexity of this experience. Developing a suggestion from Wollheim, I then characterize inflected pictorial experience in terms of different pictorial hows and our grasping of them. This makes it possible to account for the intuitive link between properties of experiences and properties of the pictures that trigger them, as well as for the appealing idea that our conscious apprehension of the way a picture depicts its subject - what I may call the pictorial hows - plays a significant role in our aesthetic experience of pictures. I finally look at these results in the more general perspective of a representationalist theory of aesthetic experience.

Economic Experience as Art? John Dewey's Lectures in China and the Problem of Mindless Occupational Labor

ABSTRACTThis article examines the importance of John Dewey's visit to China in 1919–21 to his general philosophy of meliorism. I will argue that Dewey's view of the economic realities in China, as well as his well-known work on the U.S. educational system, points to an underlying problem—that of mindless work activity. Extending past research on Dewey's notion of artful activity, I will argue that one cannot completely understand Dewey's advice to his Chinese and American audiences without reference to his theory of aesthetic experience and its relation to everyday conduct. Art as Experience then becomes an important point of departure for endeavors that seek to constructively determine what workers can do to make occupational experience more meaningful or artful. Additionally, I will argue that Dewey's reticence to explore the aesthetic in the early 1900s does not entail that this concept was not present. To the contrary, one can see his work in the 1910s and 1920s—including his experience in China—as a precursor for the account of aesthetic experience in everyday life that he finally explicates in the 1930s. In this sense, one can detect a further emphasis on the Chinese conceptual overlay of spontaneity in his evolving thought on artful activity.

I—Richard Glauser

Shaftesbury’s theory of aesthetic experience is based on his conception of a natural disposition to apprehend beauty, a real ‘form’ of things. I examine the implications of the disposition’s naturalness. I argue that the disposition is not an extra faculty or a sixth sense, and attempt to situate Shaftesbury’s position on this issue between those of Locke and Hutcheson. I argue that the natural disposition is to be perfected in many different ways in order to be exercised in the perception of the different degrees of beauty within Shaftesbury’s hierarchy. This leads to the conclusion that the exercise of the disposition depends, from case to case, on many different cognitive and affective conditions, that are realised by the collaborative functionings of our ordinary faculties. Essential to Shaftesbury’s conception of aesthetic experience is a disinterested, contemplative love, that causes (or contains) what we may call a ‘disinterested pleasure’, but also an interested pleasure. I argue that, within any given aesthetic experience, the role of the disinterested pleasure is secondary to that of the disinterested love. However, an important function of the disinterested pleasure is that, in combination with the interested pleasure, it leads one to aspire to pass from the aesthetic experience of lower degrees of beauty to the experience of higher ones in the hierarchy.

Dufrenne's theory of aesthetic experience

SUMMARY This article is a study of aesthetic experience based on Dufrenne's theory. It is essentially a study of communication between the artist and the recipient by means of a work of art. The aesthetic object is distinguished from the work of art. It is shown how the work of art only becomes an aesthetic object when it is perceived by a recipient. The ontological characteristics of the aesthetic object serve as a point of departure for discussing the aesthetic object. The aesthetic object being a quasi-subject belongs to the world; it is "for-itself" in that it belongs to a world of its own; it is "in-itself" through the sensuous; and it is also "for-us", in that it needs the spectator's interpretation. Aesthetic perception is the result of the recipient's presence, representation and reflection. It is the involvement of the individual with the work of art. Perception culminates in feeling. It is through feeling that the human subject becomes present in the aesthetic object.