From prehistoric stone tools to machines to computers, things have traveled a long road along with human beings. Changing with the times, places, and methods of production, coming from diverse histories, enveloped in multiple layers of meaning, things embody ideas, emotions, and symbols of which we are often unaware. Things are the repositories of ideas, emotions, and symbols whose meaning we often do not understand. The more we are able to recover objects in their wealth of meanings and to integrate them into our mental and emotional horizons, the broader and deeper our world becomes. Philoso ... More

From prehistoric stone tools to machines to computers, things have traveled a long road along with human beings. Changing with the times, places, and methods of production, coming from diverse histories, enveloped in multiple layers of meaning, things embody ideas, emotions, and symbols of which we are often unaware. Things are the repositories of ideas, emotions, and symbols whose meaning we often do not understand. The more we are able to recover objects in their wealth of meanings and to integrate them into our mental and emotional horizons, the broader and deeper our world becomes. Philosophy and art can show us the way. In an unexpected but coherent journey that includes the visions of classic philosophers from Aristotle to Husserl and from Hegel to Heidegger along with the analysis of works of art, this book addresses issues such as fetishism, the memory of things, the emergence of department stores, consumerism, nostalgia for the past, the self-portraits of Rembrandt, and the still lifes of the Netherlandish painters of the seventeenth century.