A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselves In his new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.

"Published by the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition Yoga: The Art of Transformation, October 19, 2013 - January 26, 2014. Organized by the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the exhibition travels to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, February 22-May 18, 2014, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, June 22-September 7, 2014."

When a group of liberal arts students embark on a university assignment about the natural environment, no one could have quite prepared them for the bewildering array of questions and provocations to confront them in their task. What starts out as an earnest attempt to understand nature in the modern world, turns into a philosophical and practical tangle that only a good transdisciplinary education can provide. Can anyone save the day and actually start to value ‘nature’? And if they can’t, then what’s stopping them? The idea of ‘valuing nature’ harmonises diverse areas of natural resource management and is an important dimension of scientific and practical work concerned with managing ecosystems and habitats for sustainability. This graphic book takes the reader on an exploration of the issues that arise from this growing interest and concern in the valuation of nature. Set around the premise of a ‘motley’ group of undergraduates endeavouring to complete a university assignment on ‘nature in the modern world’, the book explores: the many and diverse meanings people assign to nature the different ways the relationship between people and nature might be characterised the many values systems people hold for the natural world the options and approaches society can deploy to manage it the extent to which we need entirely new economic systems to protect and sustain nature. This highly interdisciplinary book invites consideration of a range of philosophical and applied debates and questions. Written in an accessible style, it is an ideal undergraduate text in the fields of ecology, human and physical geography, conservation science, environment, social science and spatial planning, as well as a general primer for graduate natural and social scientists embarking on interdisciplinary research in the natural resource management arena.

An attempt to explain the theory behind medieval European and Asiatic art, especially art in India.

Engaging Art explores what it means to participate in the arts in contemporary society - from museum attendance to music downloading. Drawing on the perspectives of experts from diverse fields (including Princeton scholars Robert Wuthnow and Paul DiMaggio; Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice; and MIT scholars Henry Jenkins and Mark Schuster), this volume analyzes key trends involving technology, audience demographics, religion, and the rise of "do-it-yourself" participatory culture. Commissioned by The Wallace Foundation and independently carried out by the Curb Center at Vanderbilt University, Engaging Art offers a new framework for understanding the momentous changes impacting America's cultural life over the past fifty years. This volume offers suggestive glimpses into the character and consequence of a new engagement with old-fashioned participation in the arts. The authors in this volume hint at a bright future for art and citizen art making. They argue that if we center a new commitment to arts participation in everyday art making, creativity, and quality of life, we will not only restore the lifelong pleasure of homemade art, but will likely seed a new generation of enthusiasts who will support America's signature nonprofit cultural institutions well into the future.

Aesthetic sensibility rests on perceptual experience and characterizes not only our experience of the arts but our experience of the world. Sensibility and Sense offers a philosophically comprehensive account of humans' social and cultural embeddedness encountered, recognized, and fulfilled as an aesthetic mode of experience. Extending the range of aesthetic experience from the stone of the earth's surface to the celestial sphere, the book focuses on the aesthetic as a dimension of social experience. The guiding idea of pervasive interconnectedness, both social and environmental, leads to an aesthetic critique of the urban environment, the environment of daily life, and of terrorism, and has profound implications for grounding social and political values. The aesthetic emerges as a powerful critical tool for appraising urban culture and political practice.

Exploring Art for Perspective Transformation discusses fundamental theories regarding the emancipatory learning potential involved in artworks. It also provides teachers, as well as adult and museum educators a method of exploring artworks with a view to challenge learners’ assumptions.

Museums everywhere have the potential to serve as agents of change—bringing people together, contributing to local communities, and changing people’s lives. So how can we, as individuals, radically expand the work of museums to live up to this potential? How can we more fiercely recognize the meaningful work that museums are doing to enact change around the relevant issues in our communities? How can we work together to build a stronger culture of equity and care within museums ? Questions like these are increasingly vital for all museum professionals to consider, no matter what your role is within your institution. They are also important questions for all of us to be thinking about more deeply as citizens and community members. This book is about the work we need to do to become changemakers and demand that that our museums take action toward positive social change and bring people together into a more just, equitable, compassionate, and connected society. It is a journey toward tapping the energies within all of us to make change happen and proactively shape a new future.

This book considers the idea of nature in the music of Anton Webern. It stands out from other studies because it explores the wider social and cultural dimensions of the music, as opposed to the often narrow, technical analysis of the music. In doing so it offers an important case study for the way in which social ideas can be discussed in relation to apparently 'abstract' modern music. Moreover, it does so in relation to musical details not simply on the level of biography or cultural history.