Aesthetic Education through Narrative Art

The purpose of this introduction is to set out the scope and content of this special issue of the Journal of Aesthetic Education, which takes Aesthetic Education through Narrative Art as its subject. I begin by delineating the ‘aesthetic’ itself and then identifying the denotation of ‘aesthetic education’ with which the issue’s authors are concerned. This is followed by a characterization of ‘narrative art’ that belies my preference for ‘representation’ rather than ‘art’ and draws attention to the multiple modes of representation that constitute complex narratives. I turn to the title of the special issue next, an abridged version of Aesthetic Education through Narrative Art and its Relevance for the Humanities, which is an installation research project funded by the Croatian Science Foundation to investigate the relationship between aesthetic and artistic values on the one hand and ethical, political, and social values on the other. The project is multidisciplinary among philosophy, criminology, film studies, and cognitive science and three of the authors are also members of the project team. I conclude by introducing each of the six articles, which employ two approaches, one from philosophical aesthetics and the other from critical criminology.