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.

Table of contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I. Grounding The World

  1            Beginning                                                     

  2            Understanding the Aesthetic                     

  3            The Aesthetic Argument             

  4            The World as Experienced             

II. Aesthetics and the Human World

  5            A Rose by Any Other Name             

  6            The Soft Side of Stone              

  7            An Aesthetics of Urbanism             

  8            Celestial Aesthetics             

III. Social Aesthetics

  9            The Negative Aesthetics of Everyday Life             

  10            Art, Terrorism and the Negative Sublime             

  11            Perceptual Politics

  12            The Aesthetics of Politics             

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