The fine arts first emerged divided by the five senses yet, since their very origin, they have projected aesthetic networks among themselves. Music, song, painting, architecture, sculpture, theatre, dance - distinct in themselves - grew together, enhancing each other. In the present outburst of technical ingeniosity, individual arts cross all barriers, as well as proliferate in kind. Hence the traditional criteria of appreciation and enjoyment vanish. The enlarged and ever-growing field calls for new principles of appreciation and new values, essential to our culture.
This collection initiates an inquiry into the aesthetic foundations of the fine arts. Their common aesthetic nature, as well as the differentiating specificities which sustain them, might reveal the universal role of aesthetics in human life.
Studies by Paula Carabell, J. Fiori Blanchfield, R. Riese Hubert, R. Gray, D. Lipten, J. Parsons, S. Brown, C. Osowie Ruoff, T. Raczka, K. Karbenier and others.

Autorentext
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka is a Polish-born American philosopher, one of the most important and continuously active contemporary phenomenologists, founder and president of "The World Phenomenology Institute".

Inhalt
Inaugural Essay.- The Creative Impulse and the Aesthetic Discourse of the Arts.- Section One.- Breaking the Frame: Transgression and Transformation in Giulio Romano's Sala dei Giganti.- The nineteenth-Century Landscape and Twentieth-Century Space: Traumatic Loss or Trace of Memory? Robert Smithson and the Entrophic Metaphor.- Alechinsky, Cobra and the Book.- Aspiring to the Condition of Music: Hardy and His Art from the 1840s to the 1890s.- Counterpoint in Print: Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol.- Section Two.- Semiotics and Musical Choice: Beyond Analysis Revisited.- When is a Work of Music Real?.- Section Three.- Machine-Time, Passion-Time, and Time that Trembles: Debussy and Baudelaire.- Baroque and Classical Aesthetic Visions.- To Consociate and Foster the Self.- Section four.- Inanimorata: The Dread of Things.- Musical and Visual Encounters: An Investigation of the Aesthetic Experience.- We Need Not Fear Expressivity and Silence in the Early Work of John Cage.- Berlioz's Programme and Proust's Sonate: Parallel Quests to Bridge the Gaps in Musico-Literary Expression.- Index of Names.