Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics
Photographer's Eye. © 2010: Knut Skjærven.
Yes, I admit that this is a somewhat prosaic title for a blog post.
However, using that caption there is a change that random googlers searching for phenomenology and/or aesthetics will find their way to this post. To this blog.
The reason is that when they get here, I am in a position to inform them that this book it now out, and with an impressive scope handled in about 70 separate articles.
The title is, as you might have guessed: Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics. Editors are Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree. It is published by Springer in 2010.
The book is not a collection of essays by the masters themselves: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roman Ingarden, whoever. The editors have done better: All articles have been written specially for this handbook, and they are short(er) introductions to specific thinkers, and to specific themes. You can dive in from there. One way is using the suggested bibliography.
Contributors are distinguished scholars within their fields. They give you summaries, interpretations, updates and contributions to the themes/philosophers in question.
Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics is not a book you want to read page by page. It is a handbook, a book that you will want to keep close at hand and to grab when the questions are about phenomenology and aesthetics. As such, the book comes with a lot of muscle.
My particular interest, for instance, are the crossroads of phenomenology and photography. Not only as theoretical disciplines, but as practical executor of both. There are plenty of interesting stuff for me: Andrea Pinotti have written about Style; Cathrin Nielsen about Work of Art; Cheung Chan-Fai about Photography; Eliane Escoubas about Paintings, just to mention a few contributors and themes.
I need to come back with reviews of specific articles in separate blog posts, and I will. So far this is just a pointer to the book. As I said, it is impressive. Much needed and much wanted. Now it is here.
Good luck with it.
PHENOMENOLOGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 