PH I LOSOPHY
PH I LOSOPHY • AE STH ETICS
Dawn of a New Feeling
Shattering Silos
The Neocontemplative Condition r a f fa e l e m i l a n i
Reimagining Knowledge, Politics, and Social Critique
Translated by Corrado Federici
l ambert zuidervaart
Examining the nature and aesthetic implications of mass media, and the emergence and proliferation of virtual reality.
A new way to think about truth and politics in a supposedly post-truth society.
Computers have become omnipresent in recent decades, affecting all aspects of modern life and influencing creative pursuits in art, architecture, music, and film. One consequence of this seemingly irreversible trend is its effect on the perception of the aesthetic object, and indeed of nature itself. Dawn of a New Feeling acknowledges that computers have become a formidable tool for creating new and entertaining art forms, while contending that virtual reality is not conducive to meditations on the aesthetic object. Virtual or augmented reality, Raffaele Milani argues, is illusory and blunts the viewer’s capacity for feeling a genuine connection with a work of art. First describing how modernity and postmodernity are entangled with virtual reality, engendering linguistic and anthropological confusion in which art seems to have lost its meaning, Milani then contrasts these developments with classical art forms and reflects on the ways in which traditional art objects stimulate an appreciation of nature, which, upon contemplation, appears as an aesthetic object itself. The saturation of our culture by mass media, he argues, can give rise to a renewed desire to experience a more intimate communication with nature. By identifying reading, contemplation, and care for nature as activities that help us to escape the mental atrophy of a web-dominated world and find refuge from the chaos of virtual mediation, Dawn of a New Feeling offers a reinterpretation of contemplative approaches to appreciating aesthetics and to understanding the profound nature of artistic vision. Raffaele Milani is professor of aesthetics at the University of Bologna and the author of The Art of the City and The Art of the Landscape. Corrado Federici has translated several books and taught Italian language and literature for over forty years in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Brock University. S P E C I F I C AT I O N S April 2022 978-0-2280-1096-8 $39.95T, £28.99 cloth 6 × 9 160pp eBook available 23
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Questions first raised by Hannah Arendt in the 1960s take on new urgency in the post-truth era, as political leaders blithely reject facts in the public domain: Is truth politically impotent? Are politics inherently false? Is the search for truth still relevant? Shattering Silos, a companion volume to Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation and Art, Education, and Cultural Renewal, provides a path-breaking response. As in his two previous books, Lambert Zuidervaart challenges the boundaries philosophers set up between epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. Knowledge, he argues, takes different forms in various social domains, and all are subject to political struggle. A critique of contemporary society must draw on many social domains of knowledge, including the arts and religion, and should recast politics as a striving for truth in the broadest sense. Proposing a new conception of truth – one that emphasizes the unity of knowledge and truth, as well as their diversity among different social domains – Zuidervaart asks what such holism and pluralism suggest about how we understand politics and society. This book proposes a new understanding of large-scale social change, challenging how most people think about knowledge and truth. Interweaving epistemology, social criticism, and political thought, Shattering Silos aims to help redirect an allegedly post-truth society. Lambert Zuidervaart is professor emeritus of philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies and the University of Toronto and coeditor of Truth Matters: Knowledge, Politics, Ethics, Religion.
S P E C I F I C AT I O N S August 2022 978-0-2280-1158-3 $39.95A, £28.99 paper 978-0-2280-1157-6 $130.00S, £95.00 cloth 6 × 9 272pp eBook available
