Artistic Visions and the Promise of Beauty

Kathleen M. Higgins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.  Her main areas of research are aesthetics, continental philosophy, and philosophy of emotion.  She is author of a number of books, including The Music of Our Lives (1991/ rev. 2011) and The Music between Us: Is Music the Universal Language? (2012), which received the American Society for Aesthetics Outstanding Monograph Prize in 2013.  She has been a Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.Shakti Maira is a respected contemporary artist in India.  His work is in international collections and in the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.  In 2005 he helped organize the ‘Learning through the Arts in Asia’ symposium.  Subsequently, UNESCO invited him to formulate

• 1:  Introduction, K. Higgins and S. Maira.- I. What Happened to Beauty?- 2: “Beauty: A Promise of Enduring Art,” R. Lorand.- 3: “The Hollowing of Art and the Call of Beauty,” S. Maira.- 4: “Iconoclasm and the Demise of Aesthetics,” A. Menon.- II. Judging Beautiful Bodies.- 5: “Western Theories of Beauty and Non-Western Peoples,” P. Mitter.- 6: Valli and Devasena,” A. Pande.- 7: “Female Bodies in China: Literati Fantasies, Iron Girls and Olympics Hoopla,” E. Man.- III. Beauty, Virtue, and Happiness.- 8: “Buddhism, Beauty, and Virtue,” D. Cooper.- 9: “Confucian Aesthetics of Persons,” E. Mullis.- 10: “Beauty and the Sense of Life,” K. Higgins.- 11: “Dwelling with Beauty,” S. Sikka.- IV. Beauty and the Self.- 12: “Artistic Creativity,” S. Miri.- 13: “Letting Objects Speak: Beauty in the Japanese Artistic Tradition,” Y.Saito.- 14: “Perceiving Beauty, Recognizing Self,” Y. Lochan.- V. Beauty as Daily Practice.- 15: “Art, Craft and Beauty – A Subjective Vision?” L. Tyabji.- 16:  “The Beatiful in Bali,” S. Davies.- 17: “The Aesthetics of Everyday Life: An Exploration through the Buddhist Concept of Vikalpa,” P. Patnaik.- 18: “Daoist Aesthetics of the Everyday and the Fantastical,” S. Mattice.