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This book looks at how the European Court of Human Rights has addressed the question of immigration. As immigration in Europe has increased, so has its criminalisation. This is a multi-faceted phenomenon, with criminal justice and harsh use of immigration measures becoming more and more entwined. This book asks: how has the European Court of Human Rights responded? Drawing on case law from across the spectrum of rights, it will show how effective it has been in countering detention and deportation, if at all. This makes an original contribution to growing focus on 'crimmigration'.

Over recent decades, Spinoza scholarship has significantly developed in both France and the United States, shedding new light on the work of this major philosopher. Spinoza in Twenty-First-Century American and French Philosophy systematically unites for the first time American and French Spinoza specialists in conversation with each other, illustrating the fecundity of bringing together diverse approaches to the study of Early Modern philosophy. Spinoza in Twenty-First-Century American and French Philosophy gives readers a unique opportunity to discover the most consequential and sophisticated aspects of American and French Spinoza research today. Featuring chapters by American scholars with French experts responding to these, the book is structured according to the themes of Spinoza's philosophy, including metaphysics, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy and political philosophy. The contributions consider the full range of Spinoza's philosophy, with chapters addressing not only the Ethics but his lesser-known early works and political works as well. Issues covered include Spinoza's views on substance and mode, his conception of number, his account of generosity as freedom, and many other topics.

Arthâpatti is a pervasive form of reasoning investigated by Indian philosophers in order to think about unseen causes and interpret ordinary and religious language. Its nature is a point of controversy among Mimamsa, Nyaya, and Buddhist philosophers, yet, to date, it has received less attention than perception, inference, and testimony. This collection presents a one-of-a-kind reference resource for understanding this form of reasoning studied in Indian philosophy. Assembling translations of central primary texts together with newly-commissioned essays on research topics, it features a significant introductory essay. Readable translations of Sanskrit works are accompanied by critical notes that introduce arthâpatti, offer historical context, and clarify the philosophical debates surrounding it.Showing how arthâpatti is used as a way to reason about the basic unseen causes driving language use, cause-and-effect relationships, as well as to interpret ambiguous or figurative texts, this book demonstrates the importance of this epistemic instrument in both contemporary Anglo-analytic and classical Indian epistemology, language, and logic.

Drawing together new research from emerging and senior scholars, this open-access volume presents an up-to-date discussion of these notions in the ancient world, both at the individual and community level. This open access edited volume offers insights into how ancient texts, ranging from the historical and biographical to the oratorical and epistolary, demonstrate the negotiation and renegotiation of otherness, identity and culture. Roman identity emerged as the result of multiple interactions with real and imagined Others. This volume analyses specific case studies and networks of inclusion and transformation that informed concepts of unity, otherness and cultural identity. In part one, contributors discuss Roman perceptions of communal identity, considering ethnic, geographical, religious, occupational and social factors that informed various ideas of belonging and exclusion. Part two goes further by examining ancient texts from the perspectives of non-Romans, in addition to famous Roman figures who deviated from traditional models of identity.The ebook editions of this book are available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Exploring the key documents, authors and themes of Early Christian traditions, this volume traces the vital trajectories of emerging distinctive Christian identity in the Graeco-Roman world. Special attention is given to the coherent growth of Christian faith in connection with worship, alongside the crucial transformation of Christian life and doctrine under the Christian Emperors. As well as offering a chronological development of the Early Church, the book examines the interaction between Christian worship and faith. In addition, readers interested in systematic theology can refer to chapters on the roots of some significant theological notions in Christian Antiquity, also with reference to ancient philosophy. Issues addressed include: · Distinctiveness of the Christian identity during the first centuries · Diversity of communities and their theologies· Connection between faith and worship · Transition from the persecuted minority to triumphant Church with Creeds · History of early Christian thought and modern systematic theology

Presenting pragmatist humanism as a form of anti-authoritarianism, this book sheds light on the contemporary significance of pragmatist aesthetics and the revival of humanism.This interdisciplinary study shows that a mediation between pragmatist aesthetics - which emphasizes the significance of creating, making, and inventing - and Marxist materialist aesthetics - which values form - promises interesting results and that the former can learn from the latter.In doing so, Ulf Schulenberg discusses 3 layers of the multi-layered phenomenon that is the revival of humanism: He first explains the potential of a pragmatist humanism, clarifying the contemporary significance of humanism. He then argues that pragmatist humanism is a form of anti-authoritarianism. Finally, he shows the possibility of bringing together the resurgence of humanism and a renewed interest in the work of aesthetic form by arguing that pragmatist aesthetics needs a more complex conception of form.Establishing a transatlantic theoretical dialogue, Humanism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Literary Aesthetics brings together literary and aesthetic theory, philosophy, and intellectual history. It discusses a broad range of authors - from Emerson, Whitman, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Dewey to Wittgenstein, Lukács, Adorno, Jameson, Latour, and Rorty - to illuminate how humanism, pragmatism, and anti-authoritarianism are interlinked.

This book focuses on the enforcement of EU financial law on the national and supra-national levels. Emphasis is laid on the interaction between the EU and national levels (vertical interaction), as well as between the private, administrative, and criminal law levels (horizontal interaction). The book takes a multi-jurisdiction and inter-disciplinary approach and covers a range of issues that are highly topical, such as the new EU Anti-Money Laundering regime, and the ReNEUAL model for administrative law. Over the last few decades, EU financial law has grown exponentially. Virtually all these new rules and regulations require enforcement. However, the EU legislator generally has been reluctant to regulate enforcement at the national level, and often does not prescribe whether enforcement should take place through national criminal, administrative, or private law. This results in both practical and fundamental questions for the legal practitioner and the academic. This book addresses those questions. With contributions by leading academics and senior members of EU and national institutions, the book will be of interest to professionals dealing with financial law in their daily practice such as lawyers, bankers, policy makers, officers at supervisory authorities, and judges, but also for academics interested in fundamental questions of interaction between legal systems.

This book offers an outline of the foundations of a theory of constitutional semiotics. It provides a systematic account of the concept of constitutional semiotics and its role in the representation and signification of meaning in constitution, constitutional law, and constitutionalism. The book explores the constitutional signification of meaning that is stretched between rational entrenchment and constitutional imagination. It provides a critical assessment of the rationalist entrapment of constitutional modernity and justifies the need to turn to 'shadow constitutionalisms': textual, symbolic-imaginary and visual constitutionalism.The book puts forward innovative incentives for constitutional analysis based on constitutional semiotics as a paradigm for representation of meaning in rational, textual, symbolic-imaginary and visual constitutionalism. The book focuses on the textual, imaginative, and visual discourse of constitutionalism, which is built upon collective constitutional imaginaries and on the peculiar normativity of constitutional geometry and constitutional mythology as borderline phenomena entrenched in rational, textual, symbolic-imaginary and visual constitutionalism.The book analyses concepts such as: constitutional text and texture, authoritative constitutional narratives and authoritative constitutional narrators, constitutional semiotic community, constitutional utopia, constitutional taboo, normative ideology and normative ideas, constitutional myth and mythology, constitutional symbolism, constitutional code and constitutional geometric form. It explores the textual entrenchment of constitutionalism and its repercussions for representation and signification of meaning.

This book provides original, diverse, and timely insights into the nature, scope, and implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially machine learning and natural language processing, in relation to contracting practices and contract law. The chapters feature unique, critical, and in-depth analysis of a range of topical issues, including how the use of AI in contracting affects key principles of contract law (from formation to remedies), the implications for autonomy, consent, and information asymmetries in contracting, and how AI is shaping contracting practices and the laws relating to specific types of contracts and sectors. The contributors represent an interdisciplinary team of lawyers, computer scientists, economists, political scientists, and linguists from academia, legal practice, policy, and the technology sector. The chapters not only engage with salient theories from different disciplines, but also examine current and potential real-world applications and implications of AI in contracting and explore feasible legal, policy, and technological responses to address the challenges presented by AI in this field. The book covers major common and civil law jurisdictions, including the EU, Italy, Germany, UK, US, and China. It should be read by anyone interested in the complex and fast-evolving relationship between AI, contract law, and related areas of law such as business, commercial, consumer, competition, and data protection laws.

This book explores to what extent constitutional principles are put under strain in the social media environment, and how constitutional safeguards can be established for the actors and processes that govern this world: in other words, how to constitutionalise social media. Millions of individuals around the world use social media to exercise a broad range of fundamental rights. However, the governance of online platforms may pose significant threats to our constitutional guarantees. The chapters in this book bring together a multi-disciplinary group of experts from law, political science, and communication studies to examine the challenges of constitutionalising what today can be considered the modern public square. The book analyses the ways in which online platforms exercise a sovereign authority within their digital realms, and sheds light on the ambiguous relationship between social media platforms and state regulators. The chapters critically examine multiple methods of constitutionalising social media, arguing that the constitutional response to the global challenges generated by social media is necessarily plural and multilevel. All topics are presented in an accessible way, appealing to scholars and students in the fields of law, political science and communication studies. The book is an essential guide to understanding how to preserve constitutional safeguards in the social media environment.

Listening After Nature examines the constructions and erasures that haunt field recording practice and discourse. Analyzing archival and contemporary soundworks through a combination of post-colonial, ecological and sound studies scholarship, Mark Peter Wright recodes the Field; troubles conceptions of Nature; expands site-specificity; and unearths hidden technocultures. What exists beyond the signal? How is agency performed and negotiated between humans and nonhumans? What exactly is a field recording and what are its pedagogical potentials? These questions are operated by a methodology of listening that incorporates the spaces of audition, as well as Wright's own practice-based reflections. In doing so, Listening After Nature posits a range of novel interventions. One example is the "Noisy-Nonself," a conceptual figuration with which to comprehend the presence of reticent recordists. "Contact Zones and Elsewhere Fields" offers another unique contribution by reimagining the relationship between the field and studio. In the final chapter, Wright explores the microphone by tracing its critical and creative connections to natural resource extraction and contemporary practice. Listening After Nature auditions water and waste, infrastructures and animals, technologies and recordists, data and stars. It grapples with the thresholds of sensory perception and anchors itself to the question: what am I not hearing? In doing so, it challenges Western universalisms that code the field whilst offering vibrant practice-based possibilities.

Invoking key concepts from the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, The Dark Interval examines a subtle but distinct iconography of passivity, stillness and profound self-affection that recurs across noir films of every era. In doing so, it identifies the emergence of a specific cinematic figure - the 'intervallic' noir protagonist exposed to the redemptive force of his or her own passion. Significantly, the book contextualises the iconography of film noir in relation to prior art-historical visual traditions, in particular earlier representations of melancholia and the saturnine, locating noir against a much broader canvas than has been the norm. Examining central noir films of the classic and modern era (The Killers, The Man Who Wasn't There) as well as films at the peripheries of noir (from Jacques Tourneur's Cat People to Wong Kar Wai's 2046), the book locates a series of iconographic gestures, performance traditions and affective tonalities at once specific to noir and yet resonant with a deeper cultural and philosophical heritage. It is a meditation that uniquely grapples with the look and the feel of noir, and which dares to detect a unique quality of 'beatitude' that runs through a certain strain of noir films. In doing so, it illuminates why film noir remains one of the most provocative and affecting visual milieus of our time.

Disciplines from literary studies to environmentalism have recently undergone a spectacular reorientation that has refocused entire fields, methodologies, and vocabularies on the world and its sister terms such as globe, planet, and earth. The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory examines what "world" means and what it accomplishes in different zones of academic study. The contributors raise questions such as: What happens when "world" is appended to a particular form of humanistic or scientific inquiry? How exactly does "worlding" bear on the theoretical operating system and the history of that field? What is the theory or theoretical model that allows "world" to function in a meaningful way in coordination with that knowledge domain? With contributions from 38 leading theorists from a vast range of fields, including queer studies, religion, and pop culture, this is the first large reference work to consider the profound effect, both within and outside the academy, of the worlding of discourse in the 21st century.

World Cinema on Demand brings together diverse contributions by leading film and media scholars to examine world cinema's dialogue with the transformations that took place during 2010-2014, engaging directly with ongoing debates surrounding national cinema, transnational identity, and cultural globalization, as well as ideas about genre, fandom and cinephilia. The contributions look at individual national patterns of online distribution, engaging with archives, SVODS and torrent communities. The essays also investigate the cross-cultural presence of world cinema in non-domestic online markets (such as Europe's, for example). As a result, the volume sheds light on geo-politically specific issues of film circulation, consumption and preservation within a range of culturally diverse filmmaking contexts, including case studies from India, Nigeria, Mexico and China. In this way, the collection maps the impact of different online formats of distribution in the understanding of World Cinema, underlining the links between distribution and media provisions as well as engaging with new forms of intermediation.

Over the last few decades and from across a spectrum of centrist political thought, a variety of academic disciplines, and numerous public intellectuals, the claim has been that we need to empathize more with marginalized people as a way to alleviate social inequalities. If we all had more skill with empathy, so the claim goes, we would all be better citizens. But what does it mean to empathize with others? How do we develop this skill? And what does it offer that older models of solidarity don't? Why empathy-and why now?Rereading Empathy takes up these questions, examining the uses to which calls for empathy are put in the face of ever expanding economic and social precarity. The contributors draw on a variety of historical and contemporary literary and cultural archives to illustrate the work that empathy is supposed to enable-and to query alternative models of building collective futures.

Manoel de Oliveira is the only filmmaker whose career spans from the silent era to the digital age, and yet there is little written in English about his extensive filmography. This volume, the first to discuss Oliveira's later works in English, fills this incredible gap in scholarship on the director with fresh and original analysis of over 50 of Oliveira's films, ranging from 1963's Rite of Spring to 2009's Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl.Organized by tropes and topics, rather than chronological order of release, The Cinema of Manoel de Oliveira creates a unique lens through which to consider the director and the ways in which his work links cinema, literature, and other artforms. Hajnal Király sheds new light on Oliveira's filmography with new readings of his work in relation to 20th and 21st century history.

All too often Albania has been considered a relatively minor player in late-19th and early-20th century history. By contrast, this book highlights the significance of this nation and the Albanian question at this time through a detailed analysis of the relationship between Albania, Britain and the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1914. Making use of a wide range of archival source materials - some of which are published here in English for the first time - this book explores British foreign policy towards the development of the Albanian national movement and parallel demise of the Ottoman Empire. In doing so it illuminates the objectives of the British government, as well as shining a spotlight on the public opinion of both the British people towards Albanian nationalism and on the reaction of the Albanians towards the British diplomatic position. By looking through such a unique lens, here Daut Dauti is able to provide fresh insight into why the Albanians were not supported by the Great Powers in their national quest in the way that other Balkan countries were and draws significant new conclusions on British, Balkan and Ottoman relations. As such, this nuanced study is vital reading for all scholars interested in modern Albanian history, turn-of-the-century British international relations and the fall of the Ottoman Empire more broadly.

This volume considers how the act through which historians interpret the past can be understood as one of epistemological and cognitive translation. The book convincingly argues that words, images, and historical and archaeological remains can all be considered as objects deserving the same treatment on the part of historians, whose task consists exactly in translating their past meanings into present language. It goes on to examine the notion that this act of translation is also an act of synchronization which connects past, present, and future, disrupting and resetting time, as well as creating complex temporalities differing from any linear chronology. Using a broad, deep interpretation of translation, History as a Translation of the Past brings together an international cast of scholars working on different periods to show how their respective approaches can help us to better understand and translate the past in the future.

The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare's World explores Shakespeare's complex art of insults and shows how the playwright set abusive words at the heart of many of his plays. It provides valuable insights on a key aspect of Shakespeare's work that has been little explored to date. Focusing on the most memorable scenes of insult, abusive characters and insulting effects in the plays, the volume shifts how readers understand and read Shakespeare's insults.Chapters analyze the spectacular rhetoric of insult in Henry IV, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens; the 'skirmishes of wit' in Much Ado about Nothing and A Midsummer Night's Dream; insult and duelling codes in Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, the complex relationships between slander and insult in Much Ado about Nothing and Measure for Measure; the taming of the tongue in Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew, the trauma of insults in Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Cymbeline and insult beyond words in Henry V and King lear.Grasping insult as a specific speech act, the volume explores the issues of verbal violence and verbal shields and the importance of reception and interpretation in matters of insult. It offers a panorama of the Elizabethan politics of insult and redefines Shakespeare's drama as a theatre of insults.

James Joyce and Photography is the first book to explore in-depth James Joyce's personal and professional engagement with photography. Photographs, photographic devices and photographically-inspired techniques appear throughout Joyce's work, from his narrator's furtive proto-photographic framing in Silhouettes (c. 1897), to the aggressively-minded 'Tulloch-Turnbull girl with her coldblood kodak' in Finnegans Wake (1939).Through an exploration of Joyce's manuscripts and photographic and newspaper archival material, as well as the full range of his major works, this book sheds new light on his sustained interest in this visual medium. This project takes Joyce's intention in Dubliners (1914) to 'betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city' as key to his interaction with photography, which in his literature occupies a dual position between stasis and innovation.

In Feel-Bad Postfeminism, Catherine McDermott provides crucial insight into what growing up during empowerment postfeminism feels like, and outlines the continuing postfeminist legacy of resilience in girlhood coming-of-age narratives.McDermott's analysis of Gone Girl (2012), Girls (2012-2017) and Appropriate Behaviour (2012) illuminates a major cultural turn in which the pleasures of postfeminist empowerment curdle into a profound sense of rage and resentment. By contrast, close examination of The Hunger Games (2008-2010), Girlhood (2014) and Catch Me Daddy (2014) reveals that contemporary genres are increasingly constructing girls as uniquely capable of resiliently overcoming and adapting to unforgiving social conditions. She develops an affective vocabulary to better understand contemporary modes of defiant, transformative and relational resilience, as well as a framework through which to expand on further modes that are specific to the genres they emerge within. Overall, the book suggests that exploration of the affective dimensions of girls' and women's culture can offer new insights into how coming-of-age, girlhood and femininity are culturally produced in the aftermath of postfeminism.

Traditional dress is a common phenomenon across much of Western Europe, often originating in elaborate practices for rural religious events. Yet despite its fundamentally local nature, traditional dress in various European regions developed along a similar trajectory, sometimes being transformed into political symbols and regional promotion for tourism, and always revealing the complexity of rural society in terms of religious divisions, class inequality and tension between the desires to protect tradition and embrace modernity. To better understand how traditional dress evolved in France and Germany from the 19th to 21st centuries, this book takes Alsace as its case study and in doing so illuminates broad experiences of modernity across rural Europe and answers overarching questions about regionalism and nationalism.Specifically, Sara Hume unpacks why Alsatian dress was adopted as a symbol of loyalty to France despite being closer in style to German dress practices. She explores the impact of political and geographical tensions on the appearance and function of traditional clothing, for example in Alsace's situation at the border between France and Germany and in its transformation from disputed territory into capital of a united Europe. Logically progressing chapters reveal how modernity did not drive out tradition in rural communities but rather led to processes of adaption, preservation and re-evaluation.Through a rich variety of primary sources including costumes, illustrations, political cartoons, legal documents and oral histories, Regional Dress sheds light on the little known and rarely documented experiences of rural Europeans. Its material culture approach to the study of regionalism is essential to students of traditional and folk dress history, European history and design history.

A contemporary appraisal of the breadth, significance, and legacy of the work of Charlene Haddock Seigfried, this book brings together writings focused on pragmatist feminism/feminist pragmatism, contemporary pragmatism, William James and the reconstruction of philosophy, education and American philosophy in the 21st century. Charlene Haddock Seigfried is a looming figure in American thought and feminist theory who coined the phrase 'pragmatist feminist' which has become an increasingly important concept in contemporary philosophy. Seigfried argues that pragmatism and its rich history is a natural ally for feminism and that the creative combination of these two traditions can pave the way for a genuinely emancipatory feminist practice. Pragmatist Feminism and the Work of Charlene Haddock Seigfried explores and pushes this theory and brings it into conversation with some of the most vibrant strands of current philosophy.

This book offers a new definition of metaphor-as an ontological and visual construction, whose roots are external visual forms, and its motivation is our attachment to forms. This definition, which Michalle Gal names "visualist," challenges the ruling conceptualist theory of metaphors and places a new emphasis on how we experience rather than understand metaphors. In doing so, she responds to the visual turn that is taking place in literature and the media, demanding that the visual become a site of philosophical analysis.This focus on the external visual world allows Gal to employ visual theories to capture the essence of metaphor. She looks beyond conceptual or semantic mechanism, and returns to theories of Arnheim and Gombrich and the current evolution of ideas about the visual or material and embodied cognition. Proposing to see visual metaphors in their basic form, she uses a new externalist terminology of ontology, visuality, composition, affordance, construction, and emergence.Setting out a new theory that takes into account that humans are visual no less than cognitive creatures, Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics lays the foundation for a new vocabulary to talk about metaphors.

The tale of twins being reunited after a long separation is a trope that has been endlessly repeated and reworked across different cultures and throughout history, with each moment adapting the twin plot to address its current cultural tensions. In this study, Edward King demonstrates how twins are a means of exploring the social implications of hyper-connectivity and the compromising relationship between humans and digital information, their environment and their genetics. As King demonstrates, twins tell us about the changing forms of connectivity and power in contemporary culture and what new conceptions of the human they present us with. Taking account of a broad range of literary, cultural and scientific practices, Entwined Being probes discussions surrounding twins such as: - The way in which they appear in behavioral genetics as a way of identifying inherited predispositions to social media- How their faces interrupt biometric interfaces such as facial recognition software and undermine advances in neo-liberal surveillance systems- How they represent the uncanny and the weird in the horror genre and how this questions ideologies of communications media and the connectivity it enables- Their association with telepathy and cybernetics in science fiction- Their construction as models for entangled being in ecological thoughtDrawing upon the literary and filmic works of Ken Follet, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Bruce Chatwin, Shelley Jackson, Brian de Palma, Peter Greenway and David Cronenberg, as well as science fiction literature and the television series Orphan Black, King illuminates how twins are employed across a range of disciplines to envision a critical re-conception of the human in times of digital integration and ecological crisis.

This edited volume applies the analytic notions of paradox and play to the ethnographic manifestation of spirits, angels, and demons in different locations around the world. The 10 case studies conceptualize the co-presence of humans and entities with terms that do not exclude spiritual reasoning on the one hand, and social explanations on the other. Through in-depth descriptions of localized possession cosmologies, the different chapters collectively propose path-breaking methodological directions in this field, which incorporate ethnographic theories of simultaneity into anthropological theories of religion, kinship, and ritual.Framed by an introduction written by the editors and an afterword by Michael Lambek, a leading authority in possessions studies, the volume contains cutting edge analyses that will provide readers with new tools to evaluate previously unstudied aspects of spirit possession; all of which stem from the fantastic forms of human movement that accompany the phenomenality of paradoxes in mundane reality.

Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics introduces and integrates key research concepts, principles and techniques in ecolinguistics and corpus-assisted discourse study, answering foundational questions for researchers new to the discipline and asserting the urgent need to expand its scope. Breaking new ground, the book analyzes under-explored environmental discourses that have a tangible impact on ecological wellbeing and sustainability by perpetuating harmful attitudes, practices and ideologies. Chapters present in-depth case studies, including an analysis of the evolving representations of wilderness, an eco-stylistic analysis of a popular novel, and an investigation of the use of humor in reports on animal escapes from slaughterhouses. The studies employ a range of corpus analysis techniques to show how ecological degradation and crisis have become normalized, and even trivialized, in popular discourse but also spaces where positive discourse practices are present. By applying tools from corpus linguistics to a diverse range of environmental discourses, this book makes a significant contribution to advancing the field of ecolinguistics.

What is the future of conceptualism? What expressions can it take in the 21st century? Is there a new role for aesthetic experience in art and, if so, what is that role exactly? Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed uses one of this generation's most important and influential artists to address themes crucial to contemporary aesthetics. Working in an impressive variety of artistic media, Creed represents a strikingly innovative take on conceptualism. Through his ingenious and thought-provoking work, a team of international philosophers, jurists and art historians illustrate how Creed epitomizes several questions central to philosophical aesthetics today and provides a glimpse of the future both of art and aesthetic discourse. They discuss key concepts for Creed's work, including immediacy (in his photographs of smiling people), compositional order (in his geometric paintings), simplicity (in Work No. 218, a sheet paper crumpled into a ball) and shamelessness (in his videos of vomiting people). By bringing a working artist into the heart of academic discussions, Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed highlights the relevance of philosophical discussions of art to understanding art today.

Taste and Experience in Eighteenth Century Aesthetics acknowledges theories of taste, beauty, the fine arts, genius, expression, the sublime and the picturesque in their own right, distinct from later theories of an exclusively aesthetic kind of experience. By drawing on a wealth of thinkers, including several marginalised philosophers, Dabney Townsend presents a novel reading of the century to challenge our understanding of art and move towards a unique way of thinking about aesthetics. Speaking of a proto-aesthetic, Townsend surveys theories of taste and beauty arising from the empiricist shift in philosophy. A proto-aesthetic was shaped by the philosophers who followed Locke and accepted that theories of taste and beauty must be products of experience alone. Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Alexander Gerard and Thomas Reid were among the most important advocates, joined by others who re-thought traditional topics. Featuring chapters tracing its philosophical principles, issues raised by the subjectivity of the empiricist approach and the more academic proto-aesthetic formed toward the end of the century, Townsend argues that Lockean empiricism laid the foundations for what we now call aesthetics.