Journal of the History of Philosophy

The principal thing to note about The British Aesthetic Tradition is that Timothy Costelloe has produced a true monograph. Scholars of this tradition will compare it with Walter J. Hipple Jr.’s The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (1957). However, Hipple produced a set of relatively free-standing essays on individual philosophers. Although the first third of Costelloe’s history is a superficially similar parade of successive figures, Costelloe’s approach is actually quite different, for he aims to locate and trace the central intellectual themes of each period and the major lines of influence. More obviously, the eighteenth century occupies only the first of three major parts, successively covering the last three centuries. If Costelloe’s survey accomplishes nothing else, it reminds us that beauty is not necessarily the aesthetic quality that ought to interest aestheticians, and that William Wordsworth’s influence should never be underestimated. These points are masterfully demonstrated in chapters 4 and 5, on the picturesque and the early Romantics, respectively.

Many readers will be surprised to see that the space devoted to Wordsworth is almost the same as that given to David Hume and Edmund Burke together. Yet, as Costelloe shows, Wordsworth’s influence on the nineteenth century was greater than the influence that any one person had during the first great wave of British aesthetics, the eighteenth century. In part, that is because the eighteenth century was thematically fragmented. In an argument that Costelloe develops from an insight borrowed from James Shelley, eighteenth-century authors divide into three camps: internal sense theorists, imagination theorists, and association theorists. Perhaps because this key insight is borrowed rather than original, Costelloe does not belabor their differences. Thus, given how seldom imagination is mentioned in Costelloe’s accounts of Hume and Burke, one may pause and wonder just why they count as imagination theorists. After all, imagination plays a role in inner sense and association theories, too. Costelloe’s justifications are there, certainly, but he does not always foreground them. He wants us to contextualize and appreciate each figure within the broader context.

Nor does he beat us over the head with counter-arguments and evaluative judgments. When explaining what authors said and argued, Costelloe’s tone is mostly neutral. But then he will slip in his verdict: William Hogarth is “unduly neglected” (37), Burke’s ideas constitute “a fundamental change” in understanding the sublime (70), Henry Home, Lord Kames’s “discussion of tragedy is of considerable interest” (101), despite “a certain naiveté” in Wordsworth’s moralizing (189), his essay on the beautiful and the sublime is “rich, provocative, and informative” (190), John Ruskin is generally “tedious and prolix” (227), and so on. And there is also some sly humor; debates on the picturesque became highly personal, generating “a host of accusations … including charges of misrepresentation, plagiarism, … and, perhaps worst of all, want of taste on both sides” (139).

Not surprisingly, the twentieth-century British tradition is characterized as the age of analysis. Prior to Ludwig Wittgenstein, the century was dominated by post-Victorian theories [End Page 848] of expression. Focusing on Roger Fry, Clive Bell, R. G. Collingwood, and John Dewey, the clarity of this section of the book is exemplary. In Wittgenstein’s wake, there is a new fragmentation, as different thinkers explore a variety of Wittgensteinian insights and themes. Here, the focus is on Frank Sibley, Kendall Walton, Morris Weitz, and Arthur Danto. More might have been said about Walton and Danto, but anyone who wants a brief overview of analytic aesthetics will profit from these thirty pages.

Throughout, discussion of the secondary literature is limited yet judicious, and it is almost exclusively confined to the notes. Scholars will welcome the decision to use genuine footnotes, rather than endnotes. On the other hand, the book’s value as a research tool is slightly lessened by the decision not to document the footnotes in the index; one cannot consult...