The fifteen original essays in Staging Philosophy make useful connections between the discipline of philosophy and the fields of theater and performance and use these insights to develop new theories about theater. Each of the contributors—leading scholars in the fields of performance and philosophy—breaks new ground, presents new arguments, and offers new theories that will pave the way for future scholarship. Staging Philosophy raises issues of critical importance by providing case studies of various philosophical movements and schools of thought, including aesthetics, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, deconstruction, critical realism, and cognitive science. The essays, which are organized into three sections—history and method, presence, and reception—take up fundamental issues such as spectatorship, empathy, ethics, theater as literature, and the essence of live performance. While some essays challenge assertions made by critics and historians of theater and performance, others analyze the assumptions of manifestos that prescribe how practitioners should go about creating texts and performances. The first book to bridge the disciplines of theater and philosophy, Staging Philosophy will provoke, stimulate, engage, and ultimately bring theater to the foreground of intellectual inquiry while it inspires further philosophical investigation into theater and performance. David Krasner is Associate Professor of Theater Studies, African American Studies, and English at Yale University. His books include A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1920 and Renaissance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910. He is co-editor of the series Theater: Theory/Text/Performance. David Z. Saltz is Professor of Theatre Studies and Head of the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia. He is coeditor of Theater Journal and is the principal investigator of the innovative Virtual Vaudeville project at the University of Georgia.

Encounters in Performance Philosophy is a collection of 14 essays by international researchers which demonstrates the vitality of the field of Performance Philosophy. The essays address a wide range of concerns common to performance and philosophy including: the body, language, performativity, mimesis and tragedy.

In Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture, Jill Stevenson uses cognitive theory to explore the layperson s physical encounter with live religious performances, and to argue that laypeople s interactions with other devotional media - such as books and art objects - may also have functioned like performance events. By revealing the remarkable resonance between cognitive science and medieval visual theories, Stevenson demonstrates how understanding medieval culture can enrich the study of performance generally. She concludes by applying her theories of medieval performance culture to contemporary religious forms, including creationist museums, Hell Houses, and megachurches.

This research project investigates the concepts of absence across the disciplines of theatre, visual art, and performance. Absence in the centre of an ideology frees the reader from the dominant meaning. The book encourages active engagement with theatre theory and performances. Reconsideration of theories and experiences changes the way we engage with performances, as well as social relations and traditions outside of theatre. Sylwia Dobkowska examines and theorises absence and presence through theatre, performance, and visual arts practices. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, visual art, and philosophy.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Aesthetics presents a practical study guide to emerging topics and art forms in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Placing contemporary discussion in its historical context, this companion begins with an introduction to the history of aesthetics. Surveying the central topics, terms and figures and noting the changes in the roles the arts played over the centuries, it also tackles methodological issues asking what the proper object of study in aesthetics is, and how we should go about studying it. Written by leading analytic philosophers in the field, chapters on Core Issues and Art Forms cover four major topics; - the definition of art and the ontology of art work - aesthetic experience, aesthetic properties, and aesthetic and artistic value - specific art forms including music, dance, theatre, the visual arts as a whole, and the various forms of popular art - new areas in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, such as environmental aesthetics and global standpoint aesthetics, as well as other new directions the field is taking towards everyday aesthetics Featuring a list of research resources and an extensive chronology of works in aesthetics and the philosophy of art dating from the fifth century BC to the 21st century, The Bloomsbury Companion to Aesthetics provides an engaging introduction to contemporary aesthetics.

A bold new reconception of ancient Greek drama as a mode of philosophical thinking The Philosophical Stage offers an innovative approach to ancient Greek literature and thought that places drama at the heart of intellectual history. Drawing on evidence from tragedy and comedy, Joshua Billings shines new light on the development of early Greek philosophy, arguing that drama is our best source for understanding the intellectual culture of classical Athens. In this incisive book, Billings recasts classical Greek intellectual history as a conversation across discourses and demonstrates the significance of dramatic reflections on widely shared theoretical questions. He argues that neither "literature" nor "philosophy" was a defined category in the fifth century BCE, and develops a method of reading dramatic form as a structured investigation of issues at the heart of the emerging discipline of philosophy. A breathtaking work of intellectual history by one of today's most original classical scholars, The Philosophical Stage presents a novel approach to ancient drama and sets a path for a renewed understanding of early Greek thought.

Why do people act? Why are other people drawn to watch them? How is acting as a performing art related to role-playing outside the theater? As the first philosophical study devoted to acting, Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self sheds light on some of the more evasive aspects of the acting experience— such as the import of the actor's voice, the ethical unease sometimes felt while embodying particular sequences, and the meaning of inspiration. Tzachi Zamir explores acting’s relationship to everyday role-playing through a surprising range of examples of “lived acting,” including pornography, masochism, and eating disorders. By unearthing the deeper mobilizing structures that underlie dissimilar forms of staged and non-staged role-playing, Acts offers a multi-layered meditation on the percolation from acting to life. The book engages questions of theatrical inspiration, the actor’s “energy,” the difference between acting and pretending, the special role of repetition as part of live acting, the audience and its attraction to acting, and the unique significance of the actor’s voice. It examines the embodied nature of the actor’s animation of a fiction, the breakdown of the distinction between what one acts and who one is, and the transition from what one performs into who one is, creating an interdisciplinary meditation on the relationship between life and acting.