Available:*
Library | Item Barcode | Call Number | Material Type | Item Category 1 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... | 30000010298380 | Q175.32.A47 B49 2011 | Open Access Book | Book | Searching... |
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Summary
Summary
Throughout its long history, and not just as the key aesthetic category for the Romantic Movement, the sublime has created the necessary link between aesthetic and moral judgment, offering the prospect of transcending the limits of measurement, even imagination. The best of science makes genuine claims to the sublime. For in science, as in art, every day brings the entirely new, the extreme, and the unrepresentable. How does one depict negative mass, for example, or the folding of a protein that is contagious? Can one capture emergent phenomena as they emerge? Science is continually faced with describing that which is beyond. This book, through contributions from nine prominent scholars, tackles that challenge. The explorations within Beyond the Finite range from the images taken by the Hubble Telescope to David Bohm's quantum romanticism, from Kant and Burke to a "downward spiraling infinity" of the 21st century sublime, all lucid yet transcendent. Squarely positioned at the interface between science and art, this volume's chapters capture a remarkable variety of perspectives, with neuroscience, chemistry, astronomy, physics, film, painting and music discussed in relation to the sublime experience, topics surely to peak the interest of academics and students studying the sublime in various disciplines.
Author Notes
Roald Hoffmann is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor Emeritus of Humane Letters at Cornell University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1981 for his work concerning the course of chemical reactions.Iain Boyd White is Professor of Architectural History at The University of Edinburgh and Director of the Visual Arts Research Institute Edinburgh (VARIE). His current research interests include visual cognition in the arts and sciences, and translation as cultural exchange.
Reviews 1
Choice Review
This interesting collection of essays grew out of conversations that took place during a 2005 Getty Center conference, Image and Meaning 2, and seeks to bring together varied viewpoints on the possibility of extending discussions of the sublime into the realm of contemporary science. Although the sublime has never been a term of precision and its meanings and interpretations have continually shifted in response to cultural changes, including the present context of postmodernism, certain core notions seem to persist. These include defying conventional conceptual rules, surpassing reason and language, evoking "supersensible capacities," and in the process creatively combining previously unrelated concepts and insights. The editors make the controversial claim that in dealing with such challenging phenomena as negative mass, emergent properties, misfolded proteins, Hubble images, etc., science too is making use of the sublime. Contributors examine this claim through a variety of perspectives. Ian Greig explores David Bohm's "quantum romanticism"; Jaak Panksepp addresses the notion of the "biology of the soul"; Barbara Maria Stafford looks at the "art and science of submergence"; Scott Bukatman discusses "disobedient machines"; and John Onians considers "neuroscience and the sublime," to name but a few. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals; general readers. R. M. Davis emeritus, Albion College
Table of Contents
| Contributors | p. xiii |
| 1 The Sublime: An Introduction | p. 3 |
| 2 Affective Foundations of Creativity, Language, Music, and Mental Life: In Search of the Biology of the Soul | p. 21 |
| 3 Still Deeper: The Nonconscious Sublime; or, The Art and Science of Submergence | p. 43 |
| 4 Pretty Sublime | p. 57 |
| 5 Against the Sublime | p. 75 |
| 6 Neuroscience and the Sublime in Art and Science | p. 91 |
| 7 Quantum Romanticism: The Aesthetics of the Sublime in David Bohm's Philosophy of Physics | p. 106 |
| 8 Disobedient Machines: Animation and Autonomy | p. 128 |
| 9 On the Sublime in Science | p. 149 |
| Index | p. 165 |
