This book provides a presentation of the concept of "atmosphere" in the realm of aesthetics. An "atmosphere" is meant to be an emotional space. Such idea of "atmosphere" has been more and more subsumed by human and social sciences in the last twenty years, thereby becoming a technical notion. In many fields of the Humanities, affective life has been reassessed as a proper tool to understand the human being, and is now considered crucial. In this context, the link between atmospheres and aesthetics becomes decisive. Nowadays, aesthetics is no longer only a theory of art, but has recovered its original vocation: to be a general theory of perception conceived of as an ordinary experience of pre-logical character. In its four parts (Atmospheric turn?, Senses and Spaces, Subjects and Communities, Aesthetics and Art Theory), this volume discusses whether atmospheres could take the prominent and paradigmatic position previously held by art in order to make senseof such sensible experience of the world.

1. Is There Such a Thing as an "Atmospheric Turn"? Instead of an Introduction.- 2. Atmospheric Spaces.- 3. Atmospheres and Moods: Two Modes of Being-with.- 4. Japanese Atmospheres: Of Sky, Wind, Breathing.- 5. The Atmospheric Sense: Peripheral Perception and the Experience of Space.- 6. Atmosphere, Place, and Phenomenology: Depictions of London Place Settings in the Three Writings by British-African Novelist Doris Lessing.- 7. A Jungly Feeling: the Atmospheric Design of Zoos.- 8. Atmospheric Aeshteses: Law as Affect.- 9. The Lesser Existence of the Ambiance.- 10.Atmosphere and Memory: A Phenomenological Approach.- 11. Atmospheres of Learning, Atmospheric Competence.- 12. Psychopathology, Atmospheres, and Clinical Transformations: Toward a Field-Based Clinical Practice.- 13. The Lightness of Atmospheric Communities.- 14. Smell and Atmosphere.- 15. Atmosphere and Taste, Individual and Environment.- 16. Renga and Atmosphere.- 17. The Atmosphere of Tones: Notions of Atmosphere in Music Scholarship, 1840-1930.- 18. Architecture as Musical Atmosphere.