№ 2(59) 2025: Practical aesthetics and cultural mechanisms
Guest editor:
Artem Radeev, Doctor of Philosophy, Associate Professor of the Department of Cultural Studies, Philosophy of Culture and Aesthetics, Institute of Philosophy, St. Petersburg State University, Head of the Russian Society for Aesthetics.
For a long time aesthetics as a branch of philosophy had a strange status. On the one hand, it was closely connected with the problem field of various philosophical trends and movements, which ensured its quiet development. On the other hand, aesthetics often found itself in a position of belated reflection on the processes in culture and art. Clamping aesthetics with axiological frameworks, identifying it as a philosophy of beauty and art, reveals its untenability. And one of the tendencies of contemporary aesthetics is the expansion of its problem field, which is expressed in determining the possibilities of not only the theory of aesthetics, but also its practice.
At the same time, we can notice a tendency to appeal to aesthetic field in contemporary culture. Aesthetic medicine in all its variations (e.g. aesthetic surgery and aesthetic stomatology) is actively developing, various confrontations of “anti-aging” and “pro-aging” trends are taking place in the beauty industry, beauty salons are becoming part of the everyday landscape of our cities, and adherents of the experience society pay great attention to aesthetics as an important component of contemporary economic and social processes.
The idea that different types of aesthetics (theoretical and practical, fundamental and applied) can exist independently of each other is irrelevant both to the contemporary aesthetics as such and to contemporary analysis of cultural mechanisms. We propose to conceptualize the tendencies of practical aesthetics in contemporary culture in the depth of the former and the diversity of the latter.
We invite papers that reflect upon such issues as:
- Conceptual boundaries of practical aesthetics
- What is the fundamental and the applied, the practical and the theoretical in contemporary culture and aesthetics?
- Practical aesthetics and culture: the history of interaction
- The role of practical aesthetics in culture
- Russian culture and its refractions in practical aesthetics
- Forms of contemporary applied aesthetics
- Experience society and contemporary culture
- Aesthetic medicine in the light of contemporary culture and aesthetics
- Beauty salon as a cultural phenomenon
- Aestheticization in contemporary culture
