Images represent a fusion of creativity, imagination, and symbolism and are crucial to the human quest to discover, invent, and experiment with ever-new visions. Philosophy plays a vital role in interpreting change in an era of rapid and dramatic transformations and provides

the means to view the phenomenon of taste through the lenses of form, doing, and representing. Adopting a perspective that runs from antiquity to the future, the works in this volume analyze human work as expressed in the arts, poetics, and creative techniques in the light of a formative idea that cuts across cultures and epochs and within the framework of the history of Japanese, East Asian, and Western civilizations.