Aesthetic sensibility rests on perceptual experience and characterizes not only our experience of the arts but our experience of the world. Sensibility and Sense offers a philosophically comprehensive account of humans' social and cultural embeddedness encountered, recognized, and fulfilled as an aesthetic mode of experience. Extending the range of aesthetic experience from the stone of the earth's surface to the celestial sphere, the book focuses on the aesthetic as a dimension of social experience. The guiding idea of 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. The aesthetic emerges as a powerful critical tool for appraising urban culture and political practice.

"L'ouvrage offre une reflexion passionnante sur les rapports entre esthetique, art et societe, et, plus specifiquement, sur les rapports entre esthetique et environnement. [...] La lecture esthetique de Berleant [...] s'inscrit dans les pas de nombreux chercheurs contemporains, philosophes et artistes, puisqu'on assiste indeniablement a un retour sur le devant de la scene de l'esthetique comme grille de lecture de nombreux problemes [...]." http://www.espacestemps.net/document8285.html -- Nathalie Blanc * EspacesTemps.net *