Images represent a fusion of creativity, imagination, and symbolism and are crucial to the human quest to discover, invent, and experiment with ever-new visions. Philosophy plays a vital role in interpreting change in an era of rapid and dramatic transformations and provides the means to view the phenomenon of taste through the lenses of form, doing, and representing. Adopting a perspective that runs from antiquity to the future, the works in this volume analyze human work as expressed in the arts, poetics, and creative techniques in the light of a formative idea that cuts across cultures and epochs and within the framework of the history of Japanese, East Asian, and Western civilizations.
Christopher Craig is Associate Professor of Japanese History at Tohoku University in Japan.
Enrico Fongaro is Associate Professor of Italian and Western Aesthetics at Tohoku University in Japan.
Raffaele Milani is Professor of Psychology of Art, High School of Specialization in Arts, University of Bologna, Italy.
James Tink is Associate Professor of English Literature at Tohoku University.
