Depiction

By Hopkins, Robert

How do pictures work? How are they able to represent what they do? A picture of a goat, for example, is a flat surface covered with marks, yet ...

Depiction

How do pictures work? How are they able to represent what they do? A picture of a goat, for example, is a flat surface covered with marks, depicting ...

Depiction

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Formalism in art

By Budd, Malcolm

Formalism in art is the doctrine that the artistic value of a work of art is determined solely by the work’s form. The concept of artistic form is ...

Erotic art

By Levinson, Jerrold

Erotic art is art with a sexual content, which may be more or less overt. The presence of sexual content, however, is not sufficient for a work of ...

Photography, aesthetics of

Photography and painting are sometimes thought of as different processes with a common goal: the creation of a depiction of an object or scene. One way to characterize ...

Art and truth

By Taylor, Paul

Some things are true within the world of a literary work. It is true, in the world evoked by Madame Bovary, that Emma Roualt married Charles Bovary. In ...

Cosmology and cosmogony, Indian theories of

By Clear, Edeltraud Harzer

Theories of the origin of the universe have been told as stories, riddles and instruction in India since early times. The three prominent religious movements, Hinduism, Buddhism and ...

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908–61)

By Baldwin, Thomas

Merleau-Ponty belongs to the group of French philosophers who transformed French philosophy in the early post-war period by introducing the phenomenological methods of the German philosophers Husserl and ...

Socinianism

By Marshall, John

Socinianism was both the name for a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological movement which was a forerunner of modern unitarianism, and, much less precisely, a polemic term of abuse ...

Aesthetics

By Budd, Malcolm

Aesthetics owes its name to Alexander Baumgarten who derived it from the Greek aisthanomai, which means perception by means of the senses (see Baumgarten, A.G.). As the ...

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888–1965)

By Casey, John

Best known as a poet and writer of verse-drama, T.S. Eliot was also a significant critic and theorist of literature. His philosophical background in Bradleyan idealism is reflected ...

Illustration

By Wartenberg, Thomas E.

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Artistic style

Style in art is typically described as how one describes or depicts something, rather than what is described or depicted. Style is thus often identified with ...

Landscape, aesthetics of

Landscapes vary considerably in scale and kind. At one end are landscaped gardens and parks, carefully designed and maintained, at the other are wilderness areas of ice and ...

Artistic expression

By Davies, Stephen

Many kinds of psychological state can be expressed in or by works of art. But it is the artistic expression of emotion that has figured most prominently in ...

Artistic expression

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Music, aesthetics of

By Levinson, Jerrold

The aesthetics of music comprises philosophical reflection on the origin, nature, power, purpose, creation, performance, reception, meaning and value of music. Some of its problems are general problems ...

Art, abstract

By Brown, John H.

The use of the term ‘abstract’ as a category of visual art dates from the second decade of the twentieth century, when painters and sculptors had turned away ...

Nihilism, Russian

By Lovell, Stephen

The term ’Nihilist’, although it was first used in Russian as early as 1829, only acquired its present significance in Turgenev’s novel Ottsy i deti (Fathers and Sons) ...

Open theism

By Sanders, John

Open theism is the name for a model of God which emphasizes divine love and responsiveness to creatures. It arises from a family of theologies known as free-will ...

Socratic dialogues

By Kahn, Charles H.

After Socrates’ death in 399 bc, a number of his followers composed imaginary dialogues between Socrates and various persons, usually historical. In addition to the dialogues of ...

Encyclopedists, medieval

By Barnish, Samuel

The modern encyclopedic genre was unknown in the classical world. In the grammar-based culture of late antiquity, learned compendia, by both pagan and Christian writers, were organized around ...

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81)

By Townsend, Dabney

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing occupies a central place in eighteenth-century European belles-lettres. He was a significant religious and theological thinker whose work puzzled his contemporaries and still provokes debate. ...

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81)

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