Book Review: Tom Cochrane, The Aesthetic Value of the World, Oxford University Press, 2021, pp. 240, £55 (hardback), 9780192848819

Abstract

Modern media, particularly the Internet, have made it harder than ever to deny that the world is, in a large part, a place of misery and suffering. The war in Ukraine, the recent Turkish earthquake, and the seemingly unending sequence of mass shootings in the United States, are the headline grabbing examples of such suffering. But for billions surely, life comprises not just drudgery, but a precarious and pained existence. Given this, ‘What’, Tom Cochrane asks, ‘can prevent us from falling into nihilism and despair?’