This article examines the aesthetic forms of appearance of the snowflake during the 16th and 17th centuries at the crossroads between art and science. Through activating all the senses and pointing to the interaction between the human body and snow as a cold form of material, the scientific revolu-tion actualizes a relation reminding us of that which artists may seek today. Through Timothy Morton’s concept of ecomimesis and Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis, I seek to describe an aesthetics of the cold which springs from the encounter between different systems, in this case the hu-man body and matter. In this way, I also seek to describe the emergence of the snowflake in the Early Modern Period as image, iconography, scientific object and a Northern climatological symbol.

Den här artikeln behandlar snöflingans estetiska framställningsformer under 1500- och 1600-talet i skärningspunkten mellan konst och vetenskap. Genom att aktivera alla sinnen, och genom att peka på interaktionen mellan mänskliga kroppar och snön som kall materia, aktualiseras under den vetenskapliga revolution en relation som påminner om den som konstnärer också söker idag. Genom att utgå från Timothy Mortons begrepp om ekomimesis, och Donna Haraways begrepp om sympoiesis, söker jag beskriva hur en kylans estetik växer fram ur möten mellan olika system, i det här fallet mänsklig kropp och materia. På så sätt söker jag också beskriva snöflingans framväxt under den tidigmoderna perioden som bild, ikonografi, vetenskapligt objekt och en nordlig klimatologisk symbol.

Many works of art today evoke issues of climate change. In this article, I want to highlight the emergence of a new kind of aesthetics in the wake of climate change, an aesthetics that merges culture, nature, history, science, activism and affects: an aesthetics of cold. With regards to the subject matter, cold, a comparison is made between images of cold from the 17th century, with its distinct paraphernalia and iconography, and contemporary works on the encounter with cold. Climate art grapples with climate phenomena at a wholistic and physical level: operating through sensations and integral forms of experience. As such, it is situated in an expanding field where aesthetics can be considered not only through its subject matter but also through its practices and its effects. Philosophical aesthetics may grasp such an expanding field through new perspectives and concepts.

"I shall here present my life," writes Descartes in Discourse on Method, "as in a painting" and my method "as a fable." Through the Eyes of Descartes demonstrates how a Cartesian aesthetics is interwoven in his thought. It brings together a variety of materials: his metaphysical writings and essays in natural philosophy, through to his letters, drawings, and printed images.

Cecilia Sjöholm and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback seek to bring Descartes into dialogue with contemporary phenomenology as well as contemporary psychoanalytic thought. They focus on how perception interacts with emotions and thought, and the way in which our gaze is directed toward limit-phenomena of beauty and fascination.

In Through the Eyes of Descartes, Cecilia Sjöholm and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback counter the traditional picture of Descartes by presenting his work in an entirely different light: a Descartes of the arts, of sensibility, of inner images, and of imagination.

Estetik kommer av aisthesis, det grekiska ordet för sinnlig varseblivning. På vilket sätt skapar sinnena ett eget fält för vetande? På vilket sätt ska vi förstå deras roll som förmedlare mellan människa och värld, kropp och medvetande, idéer och objekt? Hur ska vi betrakta relationen mellan sinnlig erfarenhet och framväxandet av moderna perceptionsteknologier? 

Aisthesis: Estetikens historia del 2 samlar i två band centrala texter som aktualiserar den estetiska teorins historia och utveckling från tiden kring det första världskriget till det tidiga 2000-talet. Det andra bandet rymmer texter av Leonora Carrington, Clarice Lispector, Peter Eisenman, Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Sylvia Wynter, Jean-Luc Nancy, Rosalind Krauss, Jacques Rancière med flera.   

The study of monuments tends to focus on human agency, inthe form of political history, warhistory, antagonism, trauma and so on. Aesthetic qualities are often seen as superficial and fetishized qualities that belie the impact of the monument in a regional context. The rurally situated monuments of former Yugoslavia, however, must be seen through their extraordinary qualities as works of art, carrying an agency of their own. Rather than restricting the meaning of their impact, their aesthetic qualities and impact in the environment allow them to speak to us today from a new horizon.

This chapter focuses on Hannah Arendt’s concept of sounding. It explores Arendt’s focus on music and poetry producing the phenomena of aesthetics and politics. Arendt’s assertion of an intrinsic relationship between music and poetry offers a way of interpreting musical and poetic works as inherently political. Mood, tone, and sounding belong to the world of appearances that hold inherent political capacity by displaying an explosive ability to give voice to the dispossessed. The chapter then considers Arendt’s basic assumption that music and poetry, as artworks, uphold an ontological status of permanence, while also referencing an immersion in emotions and radical subjectivity.