Early Modern Aesthetics is a concise and accessible guide to the history of aesthetics in the early modern period. J. Colin McQuillan shows how philosophers concerned with art and beauty positioned themselves with respect to the ancients and the moderns, how they thought the arts were to be distinguished and classified, the principles they proposed for art and literary criticism, and how they made aesthetics a part of philosophy in the eighteenth century. The book explores the controversies that arose among philosophers with different views on these issues, their relation to the philosophy, science, and art, and their legacy for contemporary aesthetics.
Volume I: The development of aesthetics was one of the great accomplishments of eighteenth-century philosophy, as the classical conception of aesthetic experience as a form of knowledge came under pressure from increasing recognition of the emotional impact of art and from increasing emphasis on the value of freedom in the moral and political thought of the century. This opening volume of A History of Modern Aesthetics recounts how philosophers in Britain, France, and Germany developed these new approaches and searched for ways to combine them with the cognitivism of traditional aesthetics. A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle's defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato's famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact - precisely what Plato criticized - and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. This book tells how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by both the best-known and lesser-known aestheticians of modern times, focusing on Britain, France, and Germany in the eighteenth century; Germany and Britain in the nineteenth; and Germany, Britain, and the United States in the twentieth.
First published in 1933. The purpose of this work was to bridge a gap in English philosophical literature by completing the elaborate history of Bosanquet and to stimulate and enrich the whole study of aesthetics by means of his personal destructive and constructive criticism. This title will be of interest to students of philosophy.
This volume re-examines traditional interpretations of the rise of modern aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain and Germany. It provides a new account that connects aesthetic experience with morality, science, and political society. In doing so, it challenges long-standing teleological narratives that emphasize disinterestedness and the separation of aesthetics from moral, cognitive, and political interests. The chapters are divided into three thematic parts. The chapters in Part I demonstrate the heteronomy of eighteenth-century British aesthetics. They chart the evolution of aesthetic concepts and discuss the ethical and political significance of the aesthetic theories of several key figures: namely, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Part II explores the ways in which eighteenth-century German, and German-oriented, thinkers examine aesthetic experience and moral concerns, and relate to the work of their British counterparts. The chapters here cover the work of Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Madame de Staël. Finally, Part III explores the interrelation of science, aesthetics, and a new model of society in the work of Goethe, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Friedrich Hölderlin, and William Hazlitt, among others. This volume develops unique discussions of the rise of aesthetic autonomy in the eighteenth century. In bringing together well-known scholars working on British and German eighteenth-century aesthetics, philosophy, and literature, it will appeal to scholars and advanced students in a range of disciplines who are interested in this topic. The Introduction and Chapters 2, 10, and 12 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
"A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle's defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato's famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact - precisely what Plato criticized - and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. This book tells how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by both the best-known and lesser-known aestheticians of modern times, focusing on Britain, France, and Germany in the eighteenth century; Germany and Britain in the nineteenth; and Germany, Britain, and the United States in the twentieth."--
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"First published in Spanish in 1988, David Estrada-Herrero's monumental survey of European aesthetics is translated into English for the first time. Moving across two thousand years of thought and arriving in the 20th century where concepts of ugliness dominate, the story begins in ancient Greece with reflections on beauty by Homer, Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus. Asking what causes changes in taste and judgement, Estrada introduces the traditional aesthetic ideas which went on to shape theories and concepts. He follows the enormous influence early reflections have had on later philosophers including Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Leonardo da Vinci, Cooper, Addison, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Diderot, Baumgarten, Ingarden, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. Discussing popular and lesser-known aestheticians, a new history of aesthetics is brought to life as Collingwood, Hanslick, Heidegger, Croce, Adorno, Bosanquet appear alongside Bell, Benjamin, Hartmann, Rosenkranz, Morawski, Tatarkiewicz, Arnheim Dewey, Beardsley, Gombrich, Hamilton, Osborne, Otto, Malevich and Langer. Throughout Estrada focuses on the two basic fundamentals of aesthetics. Organizing his history into 'The Nature of the Work of Art' and 'Aesthetic Judgment' allows him to cover major subjects such as the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the relation of the aesthetic to the artistic, the functions of art, the distinctions between art and craft, tekhne and art and emotion. His encyclopedic history of aesthetics plots a fascinating journey from the definition of art to the abstract heights of defining judgment, following the route mapped out by the great eighteenth century German aesthetician Alexander Baumgarten. For anyone looking to understand the origins of the beautiful, the ugly and the sublime, here is the place to start."--
