(Part 2) Best philosophy aesthetics books according to redditors

Want flowery prose rich with elegantly-placed double meanings and new italicized words like habitus or doxa?


Want an elaborate, comprehensive mental model of society developed over a person's lifetime?

You should read Pierre Bourdieu.

Start with An Outline of a Theory of Practice. His model of power and the individual, some of the fieldwork is from his time in the French-Algerian war.

Then I recommend Distinction in which he uses extensive empirical evidence to propose a comprehensive model for understanding human action.

Caution: his language is an acquired taste. 👅

For a newspaper guide this isn't too bad a starter.

For Aesthetic Theory I gained a great deal of insight from The Redemption of Illusion by Lambert Zuidervaart.

\>Breaking me of my last vestiges of Scientism

It might help to look at some philosophers who offer alternatives to (and actively oppose) "scientistic" thought.

In the Anglophone tradition, Stanley Cavell is particularly interesting and profound. I'd recommend you start with Stephen Mulhall's book on him (Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary), rather than plunging straight into The Claim of Reason. It's more transparent than Cavell's own texts and begins with material on the confusions of what might be called "scientistic" thinking about aesthetics and morality.

In the continental tradition, there are numerous different thinkers who highlight the boundaries of the scientific method. One of the major claims here (in various forms) is that science can function as the instrument of oppressive ideological apparatuses. Foucault gives one version of this story (e.g. Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish – if you want good secondary lit, try Arnold Davidson's book on him), but you should also check out Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. The latter is pretty heavy going, and so is most secondary lit on Adorno. This book is quite good, but don't google the author:
https://www.amazon.com/Adorno-Critical-Introduction-Simon-Jarvis/dp/0415920574

This guy. It's really about "taste" but many chapters are on fashion. It's a little too academic to digest, but I'm kind of just skipping around.

For Nietzsche I think a breadth of secondary sources and interpretations are useful. Like Firework said, Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosophy, Psychologist, Antichrist is good. Alternatively both the Cambridge Companion and the Oxford Handbook are decent secondary sources, with more contemporary essays on him. Robert Pippin has an introduction as well, but I'm not sure about the quality.

On another note, both Karl Jaspers and Giles Deleuze have books on him, but they are less 'introductions' that interpretations.

I'm not sure how new you are to philosophy, but I would suggest an online course, such as this one offered at coursera, which starts in a couple of days (there are also many others available on youtube and elsewhere). You get taught by professionals, there is a chance to reinforce learning through assignments/quizzes, and there is a discussion forum where you can discuss the ideas you have just learnt with others.

I personally don't think you should start at the deep end, that is, reading popular historical philosophers, like the ones you mentioned, simply because the terms and ideas put forth are to be interpreted within the context that the particular individual was writing. For example, David Hume uses the term 'impression' very differently from how one would nowadays use the term in everyday language. Impression for Hume means 'lively perceptions' (his words) that occur 'in the moment' so to speak. Whereas the term nowadays means something more like an idea, or feeling. It is for this reason that if you are interested in a particular philosopher, and are struggling to understand their ideas, that I would suggest reading the work of someone who has studied said philosopher and who breaks down said philosophers ideas in an easy to digest manner. For example this text on Hume. Or this text on Schopenhauer.

In addition the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a great resource for introducing one to any number of ideas and philosophers. It is written by professionals in the field, and sometimes the material written there is even cited in academic papers. For example there is an article on Schopenhauer with a section on 'The World as Will'.

Also, Academy of Ideas is a great youtube channel which produces short (~10 min) videos on a whole range of philosophers and ideas. They have a video on Schopenhauer and the will

I have a few suggestions.

The Philosophy Gym has 25 short philosophy things, with pictures and dialogues. Stephen Law also has a lot of other books of similar style that might be worth looking into.

Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar is a philosophy joke book, which might be a fun coffee table book.

The Philosophy Bites book has 25 interviews with leading contemporary philosophers.

The Stone Reader has articles by leading contemporary philosophers that were published in the New York Times philosophy column, The Stone.

Hope that helps!

This is a very divisive issue. I studied it a fair bit about 5 years ago, and the debate gets particularly interesting in the early 20th century, but I forget all the relevant philosophers and schools of thought, they are pretty obscure. It is a pretty interesting topic, that even layman like to argue over, so you'd think the debate might get more attention.

I remember certain sections two introductions to aesthetics offering good introductions to the field: this one and this one

Meanwhile, influential French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that taste is affected by class - most notably in his book Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste . I'll just copy and paste the blurb from amazon, which sums up the book's ideas better than I can:

>No judgement of taste is innocent - we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction brilliantly illuminates the social pretentions of the middle classes in the modern world, focusing on the tastes and preferences of the French bourgeoisie. First published in 1979, the book is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind.

>In the course of everyday life we constantly choose between what we find aesthetically pleasing, and what we consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu demonstrates that our different aesthetic choices are all distinctions - that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. This fascinating work argues that the social world functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgement.

Personally, I do believe all taste is subjective. As I like to put it, there is no such thing as a bad book, there is only a bad reader. Ie show me someone who is displeased at some piece of art, and I show you a reader whose prejudices/ preferences are coming into play. I believe that trying to argue that film x is better than film y is like trying to argue that the colour red is better than the colour orange.

There are a couple of good introductory anthologies with extensive bibliographies: the Blackwell companion, and the Cambridge companion.

You can post again if you have more specific interests in either a play or a tragedian. If you're reading in translation, I don't know if there are many commentaries on individual plays (I only know Seaford's translation and commentary on the Bacchae).

Regarding Birth of Tragedy. Jump right in. An edition with notes like this one might be helpful.