All too often, we think of our minds and bodies separately. The reality couldn’t be more different: the fundamental fact about our mind is that it is embodied. We have a deep visceral, emotional, and qualitative relationship to the world—and any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of the mind must take into account the ways that cognition, meaning, language, action, and values are grounded in and shaped by that embodiment.

This book gathers the best of philosopher Mark Johnson’s essays addressing questions of our embodiment as they deal with aesthetics—which, he argues, we need to rethink so that it takes into account the central role of body-based meaning. Viewed that way, the arts can give us profound insights into the processes of meaning making that underlie our conceptual systems and cultural practices. Johnson shows how our embodiment shapes our philosophy, science, morality, and art; what emerges is a view of humans as aesthetic, meaning-making creatures who draw on their deepest physical processes to make sense of the world around them.

In The Age of Experiences, Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt examines how the advance of happiness science is impacting the economy, making possible new experience-products that really make people happy and help forward-looking businesses expand and develop new technologies. In today’s marketplace there is less interest in goods and services and more interest in buying and selling personal improvements and experiences. Hunnicutt traces how this historical shift in consumption to the “softer” technologies of happiness represents not only a change in the modern understanding of progress, but also a practical, economic transformation, profoundly shaping our work and the ordering of our life goals. 

Based on incisive historical research, Hunnicutt demonstrates that we have begun to turn from material wealth to focus on the enrichment of our personal and social lives.  The Age of Experiences shows how industry, technology, and the general public are just beginning to realize the potential of the new economy. Exploring the broader implications of this historical shift, Hunnicutt concludes that the new demand for experiences will result in the reduction of work time, the growth of jobs, and the regeneration of virtue—altogether an increasingly healthy public life.

An examination of the founding and development of the Seven Sisters colleges--Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr, and Barnard--Alma Mater focuses on the ideas behind their establishment and the colleges' architectural, academic, and social histories, as well as those of their twentieth-century successors--Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, and Scripps.

Fourteen authors, including many of the best-known scholars in the field,
explore how people actually experience their culture and how those experiences are expressed in forms as varied as narrative, literary work, theater, carnival, ritual, reminiscence, and life review. Their studies will be
of special interest for anyone working in anthropological theory, symbolic
anthropology, and contemporary social and cultural anthropology, and useful as well for other social scientists, folklorists, literary theorists, and philosophers.
 

The various lenses—ethical, political, sexual, religious, and so forth—through which we may view art are often instrumental in giving us an appreciation of the work. In Art in Context: Understanding Aesthetic Value, philosopher David Fenner presents a straightforward, accessible overview of the arguments about the importance of considering the relevant context in determining the true merit of a work of art.

Art in Context is a systematic, historically situated, and historically evidenced attempt to demonstrate the importance of considering contexts that will, in the vast majority of cases, increase the aesthetic experience. While focusing on distance, detachment, aestheticism, art for art’s sake, and formalism can at times be instructive and interesting, such approaches risk missing the larger and often central issue of the piece.

Based on the findings of philosophers and critics, and on artwork throughout
history, Art in Context provides a solid foundation for understanding and valuing a work of art in perspective as well as within the particular world in which it exists.