Menninghaus, Winfried (Author)
Darwin famously proposed that sexual competition and courtship is (or at least was) the driving force of “art” production not only in animals, but also in humans. The present book is the first to reveal that Darwin’s hypothesis, rather than amounting to a full-blown antidote to the humanist tradition, is actually strongly informed both by classical rhetoric and by English and German philosophical aesthetics, thereby Darwin’s theory far richer and more interesting for the understanding of poetry and song.The book also discusses how the three most discussed hypothetical functions of the human arts––competition for attention and (loving) acceptance, social cooperation, and self-enhancement––are not mutually exclusive, but can well be conceived of as different aspects of the same processes of producing and responding to the arts.Finally, reviewing the current state of archeological findings, the book advocates a new hypothesis on the multiple origins of the human arts, posing that they arose as new variants of human behavior, when three ancient and largely independent adaptions––sensory and sexual selection-driven biases regarding visual and auditory beauty, play behavior, and technology––joined forces with, and were transformed by, the human capacities for symbolic cognition and language.
...MoreReview Henrik Høgh-Olesen (2019) Review of "Aesthetics after Darwin: The Multiple Origins and Functions of the Arts". Endeavour: Review of the Progress of Science (p. 100698).
Book
Richard O. Prum;
(2018)
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us
(/isis/citation/CBB374533009/)
Article
Pollock, Griselda;
(2007)
Thinking Sociologically: Thinking Aesthetically. Between Convergence and Difference with Some Historical Reflections on Sociology and Art History
(/isis/citation/CBB000773671/)
Book
Brain, Robert Michael;
(2015)
The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-De-Siècle Europe
(/isis/citation/CBB001551935/)
Article
Bidau, Claudio J.;
(2014)
The Katydid That Was: The Tananá, Stridulation, Henry Walter Bates and Charles Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB001321128/)
Thesis
Gerstel, Jennifer Elisabeth;
(2002)
Sexual Selection and Mate Choice in Darwin, Eliot, Gaskell, and Hardy
(/isis/citation/CBB001560548/)
Article
Ruse, Michael;
(2009)
Charles Darwin on Human Evolution
(/isis/citation/CBB001033843/)
Book
Andreas Broeckmann;
(2016)
Machine Art in the Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB460429079/)
Book
Carsten Strathausen;
(2017)
Bioaesthetics: Making Sense of Life in Science and the Arts
(/isis/citation/CBB999637745/)
Article
Challis, Debbie;
(2012)
Fashioning Archaeology into Art: Greek Sculpture, Dress Reform and Health in the 1880s
(/isis/citation/CBB001213317/)
Article
Gayon, Jean;
(2010)
Sexual Selection: Another Darwinian Process
(/isis/citation/CBB001211674/)
Book
Evelleen Richards;
(2017)
Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection
(/isis/citation/CBB265567977/)
Article
Brain, Robert Michael;
(2008)
The Pulse of Modernism: Experimental Physiology and Aesthetic Avant-Gardes circa 1900
(/isis/citation/CBB000931148/)
Article
Millstein, Roberta L.;
(2012)
Darwin's Explanation of Races by Means of Sexual Selection
(/isis/citation/CBB001211288/)
Thesis
Lynch, Jacquelyn Scott;
(2001)
Darwin matters: Modernism and mate choice in Wharton, Joyce, and Hurston
(/isis/citation/CBB001560921/)
Article
Cohen, Claudine;
(2010)
Darwin on Woman
(/isis/citation/CBB001211676/)
Book
Hamlin, Kimberly Ann;
(2014)
From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America
(/isis/citation/CBB001422038/)
Chapter
Endersby, Jim;
(2003)
Darwin on generation, pangenesis and sexual selection
(/isis/citation/CBB000359557/)
Article
Weissman, Charlotte;
(2010)
The Origins of Species: The Debate between August Weismann and Moritz Wagner
(/isis/citation/CBB001022395/)
Chapter
Smith, Jonathan;
(2006)
Picturing Sexual Selection: Gender and the Evolution of Ornithological Illustration in Charles Darwin's Descent of Man
(/isis/citation/CBB000772472/)
Article
Alter, Stephen G.;
(2007)
Separated at Birth: The Interlinked Origins of Darwin's Unconscious Selection Concept and the Application of Sexual Selection to Race
(/isis/citation/CBB000772592/)
Be the first to comment!