Kathleen J. Higgins

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.

One of the reasons for the disappearance of beauty in the artistic ideology of the late twentieth century has been the seeming similarity of beauty to certain kinds of kitsch. Beauty has also been associated with flawlessness and with glamour. I will content that the flawless and the glamorous are actually categories of kitsch, and that the dominance of these images in marketing has contributed to our societal tendency to confuse them with beauty. The quests for flawlessness and glamour are both self-sabotaging, a premise on which the marketing of beauty depends. These false paradigms of beauty have ob cured the fact that human beauty manifests an ideal of balance and health that is neither self-conscious nor a consequence of deliberate effort. I will defend the relevance of this ideal to beauty to our personal and cultural well-being.

This article proposes to discuss the role of music within confucian philosophy as a whole and within neo-Confucian philosophy in particular. The discussion includes a consideration of the construction of chinese music; philosophical correlations drawn between musical elements and features of both macrocosm and microcosm; musical aesthetics in the confucian and neo-Confucian philosophical systems; and affinities between the nature of music and the broader outlook of confucian and neo-Confucian philosophy. The suggestion is made that these affinities help to explain the prominent role of music in these two philosophical schools

This collection of essays fairly exhibits the diversity of opinions about and approaches to the study of Nietzsche within the contemporary academy’s influential and far flung Nietzsche establishment. Notwithstanding the absence of feminist interpretations of Nietzsche and despite the omission of chapters that take seriously Nietzsche’s debt to the ancients, critique of the spirit of democracy, defense of a rank order of desires and souls, recurring articulations of an aristocratic politics, attack on the morally and politically debilitating effects of professional scholarship, and persistent celebration of the philosopher as the highest human type, this book will prove useful to amateurs and professionals alike.

ABSTRACT In Living with Nietzsche, Robert C. Solomon defends the view that Nietzsche is an existentialist avant la lettre, a view that I defend. I concur with Ariela Tubert that her case that Nietzsche is a skeptic about metaphysical freedom supports Solomon's position, even if he did not necessarily see Nietzsche as holding a skeptical view. I counter Ivan Soll's arguments against Solomon's view that Nietzsche was mainly interested in promoting the life of passion, which Soll takes as insufficiently appreciative of the importance of will to power in Nietzsche's thought. I argue that Solomon's construal of will to power is defensible and not really so distant from Soll's own stated interpretation.

Confucius condemned Zheng 鄭 and Wei 衛 music, which had widespread popular appeal. He may have expected music to display fundamental patterns in the natural world and thriving human relationships, tasks that could be compromised by irregular and relatively complicated music like that of Zheng and Wei. He was also convinced that Zheng and Wei music would motivate undisciplined behavior in listeners. A third consideration may have been that even if some benefits of participation would derive from music that included innovations, traditional forms should be preferred because they would further bonds between generations and encourage a sense of community by emphasizing shared inheritance. Confucius seems unaware that innovation can help keep musical traditions alive, but he may have recognized that well-known music facilitates kinds of engagement that novel music cannot. Such engagement was key to what Confucius sought from music and would be reason enough for his judgment.

The significance of Friedrich Nietzsche for twentieth century culture is now no longer a matter of dispute. He was quite simply one of the most influential of modern thinkers. The opening essay of this 1996 Companion provides a chronologically organised introduction to and summary of Nietzsche's published works, while also providing an overview of their basic themes and concerns. It is followed by three essays on the appropriation and misappropriation of his writings, and a group of essays exploring the nature of Nietzsche's philosophy and its relation to the modern and post-modern world. The final contributions consider Nietzsche's influence on the twentieth century in Europe, the USA, and Asia. New readers and non-specialists will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Nietzsche currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Nietzsche.