The Aesthetic Shift

"In a society saturated with simulacra, Reality is no longer reported but edited, traded, and sold."

Everything you know is wrong. Years of post-truth ideologies and international propaganda convinced everyone the aesthetics of reality and reason, language and perception are distorted, more so now by the Digital Revolution. 

Society "woke" up to cultural critique, at the highest level of existential toxicity and queasy scientists swerve to find a meta-physically coherent answer to a ragbag of warranted beliefs, lampooned by humanities. 

From Plato to Žižek, philosophical invasion has constrained human knowledge to skepticism, will to art, normativity to value.

But what triggers our mind to attribute epistemic and/or moral value to phenomena, at individual and social level, to the cost of false absolutes and alienating the fabric of society? Is value a property inherent in objects, events or is it a quality people ascribe to them?

In 21st century, aesthetic experience is ever such predominant and an official theory of [mis]understanding ever so required.

Largely based on his 2022 BA thesis from the University of London, The Aesthetic Shift is Bozzino's authoritative, cutting-edge probe into the aesthetic falsification of epistemic value and its snowball effect on normativity. 

In 1968, Nelson Goodman made an observation about aesthetic forgery that has never been fully appreciated. Goodman described a case where the viewer is confronted with an original work and a forgery perceptually indistinguishable from true. On the basis of lab tests, we know which of the works is forged but cannot see any difference between them.

Bozzino's interdisciplinary assessment begins at the intersection of expression, representation and interpretation, crossing natural and social sciences to sift through epistemic desiderata, perceptual discrimination, moral intransigence and everyman's practical interests - the political self. 

A synoptic survey of how fundamental aspects of reality, truth and morality = our value judgment can be distorted or customized by aesthetic factors, creating a conflict between epistemic and aesthetic norms, in the blink of an eye. 

• The 1° book to collect fresh insights from aesthetic normativity, teasing new research paradigms in the metaphysics of value, process philosophy and strategic realism
• One-of-a-kind, influential monograph riding the new waves of normative conflict, jurisprudence and neurodynamics
• For early researchers and scholars in philosophy of mind and psychology, social scientists, moral philosophers and those interested in the broad value theory. 

EXCLUSIVE: Featuring Bozzino's private letter to the late Edmund Gettier, just before his death.