Sensibility and Sense : The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World

Aesthetic sensibility rests on perceptual experience and characterizes not only our experience of the arts but our experience of the world. Recognizing the scope and force of the aesthetic, Sensibility and Sense develops an understanding of the human world, focusing on the aesthetic as a dimension of social experience. It offers a philosophically comprehensive account of humans' social and cultural embeddedness that is encountered, recognized, and fulfilled in an aesthetic mode of experience. The guiding idea of a pervasive interconnectedness, both social and environmental, leads to an aesthetic critique of the urban environment, the environment of daily life, and of terrorism, and has profound implications for grounding social and political values.