Introducing Aesthetics

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty", - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. So wrote the Romantic poet John Keats in 1820. But what is beauty, and what is truth? These are some of the questions which aesthetics tries to answer. In our everyday life, we talk about the "aesthetics" of an artwork or a piece of design. But aesthetics goes beyond the simple experience of art. It is also a branch of philosophy concerned with the whole nature of experience itself, explored through our perceptions, feelings and emotions. For philosophers, aesthetics crucially opens out onto issues of subjectivity and identity. This is because experience relates to the question of consciousness and, by implication, the role of the unconscious in shaping identity. The subject of experience is also bound up with questions of politics, psychoanalysis and art and, more widely, with the vital issues of modernity and postmodernity. "Introducing Aesthetics" is a lively and engaging tour through this vital field of inquiry. Christopher Kul-Want's incisive text is brilliantly adorned by Piero's illustrations.