Introducing Aesthetics

My research and publishing has consistently been engaged with the relationship between art theory, aesthetics and philosophy - especially, Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. The question of this relationship is central to my book ‘Introducing Aesthetics’ which introduces readers to the history of aesthetics and represents an original contribution to scholarship by arguing that aesthetics is not simply a branch of philosophy but the lynchpin of western thought in its transition from metaphysics to the radically atheistic idea of alterity.

In this context it emphasises the importance of the contribution of Kant’s and Nietzsche’s ideas to the ‘overcoming’ of metaphysics through a sense of experience as this is theorised by the branch of philosophy which became known in the eighteenth century as ‘aesthetics’. As such, the book focuses upon the Continental tradition of philosophy/aesthetics originating in Kant’s intriguingly contradictory ideas about both the sublime and the phenomenon/noumenon duality in which he claims that there are experiences, which are unrepresentable.

Thereafter, the book proceeds to consider Kant’s legacy through a number of key thinkers, including: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida and Kristeva. Besides arguing for the importance of Continental aesthetics, the book is intended to make an original contribution not just to philosophy but also visual studies in so far as it explains different thinkers’ approaches to the issue of art and what the implications of their thinking is for art and art theory.