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Larry Shiner challenges our conventional understanding of art and asks us to reconsider its history entirely, arguing that the category of fine art is a modern invention.

Steinberg argues in this work that the artists regarded the deliberate exposure of Christ's genitalia as an affirmation of kinship with the human condition.

"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved--from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling--Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations--all tempered by personal relationships--altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology.

Judge Dee, the master detective of seventh-century China, sets out to solve a puzzling double murder and discovers complex passions lurking beneath the placid surface of academic life. To connect crimes with betrayals and adulteries from decades past, the clever judge must visit a high-class brothel and the haunted shrine of the Black Fox.

Placing Bruno--both advanced philosopher and magician burned at the stake--in the Hermetic tradition, Yates's acclaimed study gives an overview not only of Renaissance humanism but of its interplay--and conflict--with magic and occult practices. "Among those who have explored the intellectual world of the sixteenth century no one in England can rival Miss Yates. Wherever she looks, she illuminates. Now she has looked on Bruno. This brilliant book takes time to digest, but it is an intellectual adventure to read it. Historians of ideas, of religion, and of science will study it. Some of them, after reading it, will have to think again. . . . For Miss Yates has put Bruno, for the first time, in his tradition, and has shown what that tradition was."--Hugh Trevor-Roper, "New Statesman "A decisive contribution to the understanding of Giordano Bruno, this book will probably remove a great number of misrepresentations that still plague the tormented figure of the Nolan prophet."--Giorgio de Santillana, "American Historical Review "Yates's book is an important addition to our knowledge of Giordano Bruno. But it is even more important, I think, as a step toward understanding the unity of the sixteenth century."--J. Bronowski, "New York Review of Books

What happens when the meaning of life based on a divine revelation no longer makes sense? Luc Ferry argues that modernity has not killed the search for meaning but has transformed the search into a more humanitarian language.

Ever since the renaissance, the female body has been a primary symbol of artistic beauty in the West. With the advent of the avant-garde and modernist art, beauty became suspect. This work explores how this happened, tracing the century's troubled relationship with beauty.

Explores how musicians, both individually and collectively, learn to improvise. Chronicling musicians from their first encounters with jazz to the development of a unique improvisatory voice, Berliner demonstrates that a lifetime of preparation lies behind the skilled improviser's every note.

Willcock provides a line-by-line commentary that explains allusions and Homeric conventions that a student or general reader could not be expected to bring to an initial encounter with the Iliad.

This book presents some of the most stimulating ideas on mind and meaning I have ever read. It is a book that has far-reaching consequences and is sure to rattle the foundations of thinking and research in the cognitive sciences.