Introducing Aesthetics

Christopher Kul-Want: Christopher Kul-Want is Course Director of the MA in Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art, London.Piero: Piero is an illustrator, artist, and graphic designer whose work has twice been included in the Royal College of Art in London. He has illustrated many titles.

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 enquiry. Christopher Kul-Want's incisive text is brilliantly adorned by Piero's illustrations.