Overview

""In a society saturated with simulacra, Reality is no longer reported but edited, traded, and sold."" Everything you know is wrong. Years of post-truth ideologies and international propaganda convinced everyone the aesthetics of reality and reason, language and perception are distorted, more so now by the Digital Revolution. Society ""woke"" up to cultural critique, at the highest level of existential toxicity and queasy scientists swerve to find a meta-physically coherent answer to a ragbag of warranted beliefs, lampooned by humanities. From Plato to Zizek, philosophical invasion has constrained human knowledge to skepticism, will to art, normativity to value. But what triggers our mind to attribute epistemic and/or moral value to phenomena, at individual and social level, to the cost of false absolutes and alienating the fabric of society? Is value a property inherent in objects, events or is it a quality people ascribe to them? In 21st century, aesthetic experience is ever such predominant and an official theory of [mis]understanding ever so required. Largely based on his 2022 BA thesis from the University of London, The Aesthetic Shift is Bozzino's authoritative, cutting-edge probe into the aesthetic falsification of epistemic value and its snowball effect on normativity. In 1968, Nelson Goodman made an observation about aesthetic forgery that has never been fully appreciated. Goodman described a case where the viewer is confronted with an original work and a forgery perceptually indistinguishable from true. On the basis of lab tests, we know which of the works is forged but cannot see any difference between them. Bozzino's interdisciplinary assessment begins at the intersection of expression, representation and interpretation, crossing natural and social sciences to sift through epistemic desiderata, perceptual discrimination, moral intransigence and everyman's practical interests - the political self. A synoptic survey of how fundamental aspects of reality, truth and morality = our value judgment can be distorted or customized by aesthetic factors, creating a conflict between epistemic and aesthetic norms, in the blink of an eye. The 1° book to collect fresh insights from aesthetic normativity, teasing new research paradigms in the metaphysics of value, process philosophy and strategic realism One-of-a-kind, influential monograph riding the new waves of normative conflict, jurisprudence and neurodynamics For early researchers and scholars in philosophy of mind and psychology, social scientists, moral philosophers and those interested in the broad value theory. EXCLUSIVE: Featuring Bozzino's private letter to the late Edmund Gettier, just before his death.

Full Product Details

9781068214004

Table of Contents

Reviews

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ""Bozzino applies vast interdisciplinary research in a meta-analysis of normative conflict to ultimately side with epistemological impenetrability, expanding notable cases when knowledge is aesthetically manipulated, altered, misrepresented, depending on how much is at stake for that person or party, at that time."" - Canadian Philosophical Reviews ★ ★ ★ ★ ""In an enriched revisitation of his original undergraduate thesis, Bozzino exasperates aesthetics as epistemology or knowledge without certainty, illogical evidence, the society of the spectacle, our mythologies and political self - from ugliness to the multimedia epistemic facelifts - convincing how we have been at war, for at least two decades already: a war of meanings."" - Rational Kingdom ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ""A scholarly odyssey that foments natural sciences to deal with the shadows of metaphysics & humanities to tame their wild abstraction. Good at capturing the origin of liquid society in economical evolution, and of the individual who swims - sometimes drowns and floats in it - agent to patient of any event that makes sense to their political ends."" - Digital Journal ★ ★ ★ ★ ""One of the most provocative considerations is certainly the concept of 'cosm-ethics' that takes a jab at the post-modern ethical appeals to personalising institutional or social responsibilities."" - Thought Exchange ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ""> is one of the most hilarious and refreshing opening lines I have NEVER/EVER read in a serious philosophical study, since George Carlin."" - The Writing Bastards ★ ★ ★ ★ ""Praiseworthy critique of contemporary post-truth normativity - from private taste to public policy - derivative of our congenital aesthetic tendency to alter the original epistemic value, for interest and escalate distorted ethical absolutisms for civilization. It was about time we had a full classification of the false idols (constructed social goods and evils) alienating the 21st century."" - The Last Critic ★ ★ ★ ★ ""As Foucault, Zizek and contemporary cultural theorists like Byung-Chul Han, his writings are pervaded by deep emotional currents. Bozzino addressees philosophical concepts practically from an economical perspective, which is a rare combo in the work of a humanist but mass appealing."" - Skeptical Enquiry ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ""I fairly doubt there exist an emerging scholar out there matching Bozzino's broad range of knowledge, effortlessly crossing over from financial markets to neurosciences, in a heartbeat, without dropping the transcendental project, against the trends of overspecialization and partisanship."" - BuzzFeed

Author Information

Vincent Bozzino graduated in Philosophy at the University of London in 2022, with the germinal thesis of this book. With Libertine, he published Love Don't Pay the Bills (2022), Comfortable in the Chaos (2023), The Joy of Missing Out (2023) and the hot seller Philosophy Trips. A Naive's Guide (2024). His top-down, philosophical work lies at the intersection of metaphysics and ethics, with academic interests in social sciences, philosophy of mathematics, finance and jurisprudence. He is also a business executive, record producer and composer.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available