"For almost 300 years, an organisation has quietly tried to change almost every aspect of life in Britain. That organisation is the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, often known simply as the Royal Society of Arts. It has acted as Britain's private national improvement agency, in every way imaginable - essentially, a society for the improvement of everything and anything. This book is its history. From its beginnings in a coffee house in the mid-eighteenth century, the Society has tried to change Britain's art, industry, laws, music, environment, education, and even culture. It has sometimes even succeeded. It has been a prize-fund for innovations, a platform for Victorian utilitarian reformers, a convenor of disparate interest groups, and the focal point for social movements. There has never been an organisation quite like it, constantly having to reinvent itself to find something new to improve. The book rewrites many of the old official histories of the Society and updates them to the present day, incorporating over half a century of further research into the periods they covered, along with new insights into the organisation's evolution. The book reveals the hidden and often surprising history of how a few public-spirited people tried to make their country better, offering lessons from their triumphs and their failures for all would-be reformers today"--

Gregory Currie presents a selection of his essays in an area to which he has been a leading contributor: philosophical aesthetics and its interface with cognitive science. He shows that philosophical questions about the arts go naturally with other kinds of questions about them. He offers illuminating discussions of such topics as meaning, interpretation, function, genre, character, empathy, imagination, and pretence. His lively and clear writing will make this an enjoyable and stimulating book for readers who are interested in the arts from any academic perspective. - ;Gregory Currie presents a selection of his essays in an area to which he has been a leading contributor: philosophical aesthetics and its interface with cognitive science. He shows that philosophical questions about the arts go naturally with other kinds of questions about them. He offers illuminating discussions of such topics as meaning, interpretation, function, genre, character, empathy, imagination, and pretence. His lively and clear writing will make this an enjoyable and stimulating book for readers who are interested in the arts from any academic perspective. -

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Gregory Currie shows that philosophical questions about the arts go naturally with other kinds of questions about them. He offers discussions of such topics as meaning, interpretation, function, genre, character, empathy, imagination, and pretence.

Philosophical questions about the arts go naturally with other kinds of questions about them. Art is sometimes said to be an historical concept. But where in our cultural and biological history did art begin? If art is related to play and imagination, do we find any signs of these things in our nonhuman relatives? Sometimes the other questions look like ones the philosopher of art has to answer. Anyone who thinks that interpretation in the arts is an activity that leaves the intentions of the author behind needs to explain how and why this differs so fundamentally from ordinary conversational interpretation, where the only decent models we have are ones that depend crucially on the recovery of intention. Anyone who thinks that imaginative literature has anything to tell us about time had better have a position on how earlier and later relate to past and future. Anyone who thinks that empathy plays a role in literary engagement had better have a psychologically plausible account of what empathy is. Philosophical questions about the arts also go naturally with other kinds of philosophical questions: we can't think constructively about representation in art without thinking about representation; text, meaning, reference and existence get similarly drawn into the conversation. Some ideas that philosophers of art deal with emerge from other disciplines. In literary theory an enormous amount of attention has been lavished on tracing the sources of unreliability in narrative. Is the result adequate to the details of the particular works we call unreliable? Contemporary film theory is generally hostile to the fiction/documentary distinction. Are there in fact any grounds for this? This book of thirteen connected essays examines questions of all these kinds. It ranges from the semantics of proper names, through the pragmatics of literary and filmic interpretation, to the aesthetic function of stone age implements. Some of the essays have not been published before; some that have are here substantially revised.

Learning in and through the visual arts can develop complex and subtle aspects of the mind. Reviews in: Journal of aesthetic education. 38(2004)4(Winter. 71-98), available M05-194.