Columbia University Press Landscape Aesthetics: Toward an Engaged Ecology

Winner, 2025 International Original Work, Italian Society for Aesthetics The notion of landscape typically seems innocuous, associated with leisure and contemplation. Likewise, aesthetics is often seen as apolitical, a matter of subjective tastes and preferences. This book challenges the common understanding of these categories as disengaged and demonstrates how uniting landscape studies and philosophical aesthetics opens new ways of addressing both the environmental crisis and the crisis of the humanities. Alberto L. Siani argues that the concept of landscape helps us overcome deeply ingrained oppositions, such as nature and culture, spirit and flesh, or the environment and the human. Landscape represents the intersection of these categories and therefore provides a helpful vantage point on contemporary predicaments that cannot be understood within dualistic frameworks. An engaged aesthetics shows that landscapes are not simply ways of seeing the world but ways of being in the world, offering practical guidance for inhabiting places ethically. Landscape Aesthetics sheds new light on issues spanning art and its interpretation, environmentalism, temporality, lived spaces, justice, education, and interdisciplinarity. Bringing together a wide range of sources across philosophy and other disciplines as well as personal experience, Siani reveals the key role of landscape and aesthetics in responding to the pressing crises we face today.