Ontology Books - Page 8

Entropy and art;: An essay on disorder and order

Rudolf Arnheim

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Editorial Review:

This essay is an attempt to reconcile the disturbing contradiction between the striving for order in nature and in man and the principle of entropy implicit in the second law of thermodynamics; between the tendency toward greater organization and the general trend of the material universe toward death and disorder.

The Zen of Living and Dying: A Practical and Spiritual Guide

Philip Kapleau

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

peace of mind for seekers of answers about death... 5 out of 5 stars.
33 of 33 people found this review helpful.

I did not pick this book up and decided to read it. The book drew me to it when I most needed it. I was troubled by the illness and possible death of a loved one, and this book demanded my attention and in return offered the best answers, the most thought-provoking arguments, and the most soothing advice for my death-troubled mind. You don't have to be a buddhist to enjoy this book, or even to gain insight from its arguments. Philip Kapleau makes a great job in offering a complete perspective on Death, Dying, and Bereavement. This book is divided into four parts. Part one deals with Death, and it includes, among other things, anecdotes about the death of famous historical figures (Gautama the Buddha, Socrates, Sri Ramana Maharshi, etc.), an analysis on why we fear death, and an interesting, albeit brief, look at the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Part two deals with dying, and it is a compassionate explanation of how our views of death affect the way we will undergo the inevitable process of dying. It shows how this process is only as painful or liberating as we make it, through our views, our beliefs, and our hopes and fears. Part three explains karma. Like I said, you don't have to be buddhist (or of any particular religion, at that), and if there's anything about this book that is outstanding, it is this part. Rational, logical, well-argued, and convincing, it wraps up the discussion on "Existential Aspects of Death" from part one, and leaves the reader with a strange assuredness about the nature of change and renewal inherent to life. Part four looks at rebirth. the last two parts of the book require an open mind if you do not belive/are not familiar with eastern beliefs, but if that is the case, I know of no better place to start learning about this subject than here. Philip Kapleau writes compassionately, from the heart, such way that the reader is never challenged in his beliefs, yet at the same time he drives his point home with unerring accuracy, like a Zen Archer. This book changed my life and the way I look at death and what lies beyond, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Editorial Review:

To live life fully and die serenely—surely we all share these goals, so inextricably entwined. Yet a spiritual dimension is too often lacking in the attitudes, circumstances, and rites of death in modern society. Kapleau explores the subject of death and dying on a deeply personal level, interweaving the writings of Western religions with insights from his own Zen practice, and offers practical advice for the dying and their families.

Aesthetics in Perspective

Kathleen M. Higgins

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Mixed Results/Botched editing job 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I found this a very frustrating book, because it could so easily have been a first-rate text. It is one of the few in print which includes both classic and contemporary essays by both philosophers and artists, and "covers" the basic topics. Unfortunately, many of the texts are cut down to such tiny snippets that major parts of the essential arguments and even some widely-quoted passages (e.g. in Plato, Bell, Bullough, Kant), are missing. On the other hand, there are long essays reprinted, with virtually no cuts, which are not only not "classic" but which strike me as quite absurd. For example, there are only 9 1/2 pages from Kant's Critique of Judgment, but 8 pages of nonsense (or, "postmodern paradoxes") about "The Fine Art of Rap." Disappointing!

Editorial Review:

This anthology, appropriate for introductory aesthetics and philosophy of art courses, includes comprehensive coverage of traditional material as well as substantial inclusion of contemporary and non-Western readings. Readings from popular culture entice students into the study of aesthetics and motivate them to learn more. The organization of the text is also student-oriented, with chapters that pose such questions as "What Is Art?" and "Should We Focus on Form?"

A commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and nothingness" (Harper torchbooks)

Joseph S Catalano

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Editorial Review:

"[A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness] represents, I believe, a very important beginning of a deservingly serious effort to make the whole of Being and Nothingness more readily understandable and readable. . . . In his systematic interpretations of Sartre's book, [Catalano] demonstrates a determination to confront many of the most demanding issues and concepts of Being and Nothingness. He does not shrink—as do so many interpreters of Sartre—from such issues as the varied meanings of 'being,' the meaning of 'internal negation' and 'absolute event,' the idiosyncratic senses of transcendence, the meaning of the 'upsurge' in its different contexts, what it means to say that we 'exist our body,' the connotation of such concepts as quality, quantity, potentiality, and instrumentality (in respect to Sartre's world of 'things'), or the origin of negation. . . . Catalano offers what is doubtless one of the most probing, original, and illuminating interpretations of Sartre's crucial concept of nothingness to appear in the Sartrean literature."—Ronald E. Santoni, International Philosophical Quarterly

The Arts of the Beautiful

Etienne Gilson

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Editorial Review:

With his usual lucidity, Etienne Gilson addresses the idea that "art is the making of beauty for beauty's sake." By distinguishing between aesthetics, which promotes art as a form of knowledge, and philosophy, which focuses on the presence of the artist's own talent or genius, Gilson maintains that art belongs to a different category entirely, the category of "making." Gilson's intellectually stimulating meditation on the relation of beauty and art is indispensible to philosophers and artists alike.

The Birth to Presence (Meridian : Crossing Aesthetics)

Jean-Luc Nancy

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Editorial Review:

The central problem posed in these essays, collected from over a decade, is how in the wake of Western ontologies to conceive the coming, the birth that characterises being. The first part of this book, 'Existence' asks how, today, one can give sense or meaning to existence as such, arguing that existence itself, as it comes nude into the world, must now be our 'sense'. In examining what this birth to presence might be, we should not ask what presence 'is'; rather, we should conceive presence as presence to someone, including to presence itself. The second section, 'Poetry', asks: What if art exposes this? In writing, in the voice, in painting? And what if art is exposed to it? How does it inscribe the coming of existence as such? The author's trajectory in this book crosses those of Hegel, Schlegel, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger, in their comments on art and politics, existence and corporeality, everyday life and its modes of existence, and ecstasy. An analysis that dares this crossing involves all the varied accounts of existence, political and philosophical, as well as all the realms of poetry.

The ages of the world

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling

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The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Paul Virilio

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In The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Paul Virilio traces out the relationship of biological optics to the technological "production of appearance." In the perceptual gaps demanding illusions of continuity, Virilio posits a hyper-opportunity for the production of art in speed. Jumping from Old Testament parable to the history of contemporary cinema, to the history of philosophy and contemporary technology, Virilio teleports among an irregular constellation of high-speed artifice where love is a motion faster than light and the paradoxes of empiricism mire science in "motion without mobility."

The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Paul Virilio

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Editorial Review:

In The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Paul Virilio traces out the relationship of biological optics to the technological "production of appearance." In the perceptual gaps demanding illusions of continuity, Virilio posits a hyper-opportunity for the production of art in speed. Jumping from Old Testament parable to the history of contemporary cinema, to the history of philosophy and contemporary technology, Virilio teleports among an irregular constellation of high-speed artifice where love is a motion faster than light and the paradoxes of empiricism mire science in "motion without mobility."