Erscheinungsdinge

In this book Günter Figal presents an aesthetics that has been systematically developed. He discusses art as a whole and does not limit his study to the visual arts, literature and music, but also includes arts such as dance, ceramics, landscape design and architecture. The book is phenomenological in the most rigorous sense. It takes up the foundations of phenomenology developed by Husserl in order to think them anew on the basis of the phenomenological reformulation of aesthetics as conceived by Kant. In carrying out this project, this book furthers the work of the author that has been published in Gegenständlichkeit (2006) and Verstehensfragen (2009). In order to determine the essence of art, Figal repeatedly refers to individual works of art. The main concepts required to understand art can be drawn from experiencing and describing it. Things of Appearance is at the same time a confrontation with the tradition of the philosophy of art insofar as it critically discusses the conceptions of art in Plato and Aristotle, up through Hegel and Nietzsche to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, and Adorno. This book orients itself as well studies of art, culture and media; it makes clear just what is different about working with texts, images, or musical works which are not works of art, and in this way it exposes the special disclosive power of art works. Thus Figal's conception of art has consequences for our everyday self-understanding. Things of Appearance shows how human life can be experienced through works of art as a life contingent upon and among things.