Bentham and the Arts

Description

Bentham and the Arts considers the skeptical challenge presented by Bentham’s hedonistic utilitarianism to the existence of the aesthetic, as represented in the oft-quoted statement that, ‘Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either.’ Ranging from poetry and sexual nonconformity to the auto-icon and public sculpture, from Hume, Kant, and de Staël to Freud and Michel Onfray, an excellent crew of contributors brings Jeremy Bentham out from the shadow cast by John Stuart Mill with much new to say on taste and politics.   Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents List of contributors List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction Part I. Philosophy and sexuality 1. The Epicurean universe of Jeremy Bentham: Taste, beauty and reality 2. Not Kant, but Bentham: On taste 3. ‘Envy accompanied with antipathy’: Bentham on the psychology of sexual ressentiment Part II. Intellectual history and literature 4. Literature, morals and utility: Bentham, Dumont and de Staël 5. Jeremy Bentham’s imagination and the ethics of prose style: Paraphrase, substitution, translation 6. ‘Is it true? … what is the meaning of it?’: Bentham, Romanticism and the fictions of reason 7. More Bentham, less Mill Part III. Aesthetics, taste and art 8. Enlightenment unrefined: Bentham’s realism and the analysis of beauty 9. Jeremy Bentham’s principle of utility and taste: An alternative approach to aesthetics in two stages 10. From pain to pleasure: Panopticon dreams and Pentagon Petal 11. Bentham’s image: The corpo-reality check Index Back Cover