Landscape Aesthetics - by Alberto L Siani (Paperback)

About the Book

This book challenges the common understanding of landscape and aesthetics 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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Landscape Aesthetics offers a compelling rethinking of the relationship between landscapes and aesthetics, emphasizing their dynamic, relational, and everyday nature.-- "H-Environment"

Building on a groundbreaking idea of performative landscape as defined by social interactions, Siani focuses on the everyday aesthetic experience of lived spaces. Landscapes and aesthetics, if viewed as integral to each other, trigger a radical paradigm shift in how we address the multiple temporalities and the unstable balance among nature, culture, and societal concerns.--Salvatore Settis, former director of the Getty Research Institute

In this engaging book, Alberto Siani cogently argues that understanding landscape as a phenomenon in the world, as a human construct, and as representation requires transdisciplinary work. He fruitfully suggests that aesthetics-that of Dewey in particular-has a key role to play in promoting that necessary transdisciplinarity. By showing that humans are not separable from the rest of the world in which they act and that acts on them, Siani rewards his readers with new grounds for undermining the nature/culture conceptual divide.--Ivan Gaskell, professor of cultural history and museum studies, Bard Graduate Center

Siani develops a deeply original pragmatist conception of landscape that emphasizes openness, pluralism, and expression. His philosophical, interdisciplinary approach carves out much-needed space to reconceive and relegitimize aesthetics for landscape studies. This book offers outstanding scope on this significant social and political core of lived experience.--Emily Brady, professor of philosophy, Texas A&M University

With a meticulously researched and crafted discussion, Siani challenges long-held scenic exceptionalism and the objectification of landscape as a static external entity. Instead, he gives an impassioned account of landscape as a dynamic and pluralistic sense-making process in which humans are fully present and engaged, forever transforming readers' experience.--Yuriko Saito, professor emerita of philosophy, Rhode Island School of Design

Landscape Aesthetics offers an incisive shift in thinking when it comes to the intersection of landscapes and aesthetics. Combining theoretical rigor with a conversational style, Alberto Siani's deeply philosophical text brings this fresh theory to bear on the ways we think about and live in worlds of crises.--Emma Waterton, Leverhulme International Professor of Heritage Studies and director of the Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre, University of York, editor in chief of Landscape Research

About the Author

Alberto L. Siani is associate professor of aesthetics in the Department of Civilizations and Forms of Knowledge at the University of Pisa. He is the author of Hegel and the Present of Art's Past Character (2023) and coeditor of Women Philosophers on Autonomy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2018), among other publications.