Aesthetics after Darwin

Regular price €97.99
A01=Winfried Menninghaus
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Alexander G. Baumgarten
Alexander von Humboldt
Author_Winfried Menninghaus
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=ABA
Category=AC
Category=AGA
Category=HPN
Category=JMH
Category=PSAJ
Category=PSXE
Category=QDTN
Charles Darwin
COP=United States
Darwin
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
eq_society-politics
Evolution
Evolution of the Human Arts
Immanuel Kant
Language_English
Lawrence Sterne
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
Social Evolution
softlaunch

Product details

  • ISBN 9781644690000
  • Dimensions: 155 x 234mm
  • Publication Date: 22 Aug 2019
  • Publisher: Academic Studies Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock

10-20 Working Days
: On Backorder

Will Deliver When Available
: On Pre-Order or Reprinting

We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!

Darwin famously proposed that sexual competition and courtship is (or at least was) the driving force of "art" production not only in animals, but also in humans. The present book is the first to reveal that Darwin's hypothesis, rather than amounting to a full-blown antidote to the humanist tradition, is actually strongly informed both by classical rhetoric and by English and German philosophical aesthetics, thereby Darwin's theory far richer and more interesting for the understanding of poetry and song.

The book also discusses how the three most discussed hypothetical functions of the human arts––competition for attention and (loving) acceptance, social cooperation, and self-enhancement––are not mutually exclusive, but can well be conceived of as different aspects of the same processes of producing and responding to the arts.

Finally, reviewing the current state of archeological findings, the book advocates a new hypothesis on the multiple origins of the human arts, posing that they arose as new variants of human behavior, when three ancient and largely independent adaptions––sensory and sexual selection-driven biases regarding visual and auditory beauty, play behavior, and technology––joined forces with, and were transformed by, the human capacities for symbolic cognition and language.


Winfried Menninghaus is Director of the Department of Language and Literature at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt) and Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. His empirical, evolutionary, and philosophical work on aesthetics has a special focus on the nature and the emotional effects of poetic language.