The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution

The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution
ISBN-10
0199539421
ISBN-13
9780199539420
Category
Aesthetics
Pages
289
Language
English
Published
2009
Publisher
Oxford University Press, USA
Author
Denis Dutton

Description

The Dinka have a connoisseur's appreciation of the patterns and colours of the markings on their cattle. The Japanese tea ceremony is regarded as a performance art. Some cultures produce carving but no drawing; others specialize in poetry. Yet despite the rich variety of artistic expression to be found across many cultures, we all share a deep sense of aesthetic pleasure. The need to create art of some form is found in every human society.In The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton explores the idea that this need has an evolutionary basis: how the feelings that we all share when we see a wonderful landscape or a beautiful sunset evolved as a useful adaptation in our hunter-gather ancestors, and have been passed on to us today, manifest in our artistic natures. Why do people indulge in displaying their artistic skills? How can we understand artistic genius? Why do we value art, and what is it for? These questions have long been asked by scholars in the humanities and in literature, but this is the first book to consider the biological basis of this deep human need.This sparking and intelligent book looks at these deep and fundamental questions, and combines the science of evolutionary psychology with aesthetics, to shed new light on longstanding questions about the nature of art.

Get the book

Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Search the book
eBay.com
eBay.com
Search the book

Other editions

Similar books

  • 美学
    By 鲍姆嘉滕

    鲍姆嘉滕在西方素有"美学之父"之称. 本书收录了他三部著作:"理论美学","诗的哲学默想录"和"`诗的哲学默想录'英译本导言".

  • 西方文学理论四讲
    By 亚当斯

    西方文学理论四讲

  • The Soul of Beauty: A Psychological Investigation of Appearance
    The Soul of Beauty: A Psychological Investigation of Appearance
    By Ronald Schenk

    Nathan Schwartz - Salant and Murray Stein ( Wilmette , Illinois : Chiron Publications , 1984 ) . 22. Sally Parks , “ Experiments in Approaching A New Way of Listening , ” Journal of Analytical Psychology 32 ( 1987 ) : 93-115 . 23.

  • Immanuel Kant: Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings
    By Immanuel Kant

    The volumes are designed for student use at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and will be of interest not only to students of philosophy but also to a wider audience of readers in the history of science, the history of theology, and the ...

  • Engaging Visual Culture
    Engaging Visual Culture
    By Karen T. Keifer-Boyd, Jane Maitland-Gholson

    Engaging Visual Culture is a guidebook for teachers to help students make sense of the pervasive flow of visual information shaping their worldview and way of being.

  • Theories of Art Today
    Theories of Art Today
    By Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Noel Carroll, Noel Carroll

    See my forthcoming Parodies as Politics , which discusses feminist theories of humor in comparison to traditional theories written by Plato , Aristotle , Hobbes , Hutcheson , Kant , Schopenhauer , Kierkegaard , Bergson , Freud , and ...

  • Satisfacciones imaginarias: Del lado de los cautivos
    Satisfacciones imaginarias: Del lado de los cautivos
    By Francisco Javier Pérez

    Del lado de los cautivos Francisco Javier Pérez ... Herrera , Fray Luis de León , Fray Luis de Granada , Calderón y Cervantes : « ¡ Tesoros todos ésos preciosos , que forman como un museo en los anales de las grandezas humanas !

  • Theory of the Avant-garde
    Theory of the Avant-garde
    By Peter Bürger

    Herbert Marcuse's essay " The Affirmative Character of Culture ” can be read as an attempt at such an application . 18 Marcuse outlines the global determination of art's function in bourgeois society , which is a contradictory one : on ...

  • Image: Three Inquiries in Technology and Imagination
    Image: Three Inquiries in Technology and Imagination
    By Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Mark C. Taylor, Thomas A. Carlson

    See also transhumanism Extropy: e Journal of Transhuman ought, 56 Gagarin, Yuri, 135, 189–91 Gasché, Rodolphe, 102 Gates, Bill, 52, 61, 67 Genetech, 68 Gibson, William, 53 Gingrich, Newt, 161 Gnostics, 249 God: benevolent, 40; death of, ...

  • Überflüssiges?: wahn-witzige Sprach- und Denk-Spiele in einer alten Stadt
    Überflüssiges?: wahn-witzige Sprach- und Denk-Spiele in einer alten Stadt
    By Barbara Smitmans-Vajda

    ... zerrinnnt ihm immer wieder ; niemals also ist Eros der Mittel völlig ledig , niemals aber auch wirklich reich . Zwischen Weisheit und Unweisheit hält er die Mitte ... " ( Symposion 203 b.e ; vgl . Phaidr . 242 d ) 77 Die barfüßige ...