This is the first single volume to offer a comprehensive and systematic account of British and American aesthetics from the early eighteenth century to the late twentieth century.

'This is a book to which the attention of students of art theory and criticism, and all those interested in the important application of psychoanalysis to other ...

The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein is the first single volume to offer readers a comprehensive and systematic history of aesthetics in Britain from its inception in the early eighteenth century to major developments in Britain and beyond in the late twentieth century. The book consists of an introduction and eight chapters, and is divided into three parts. The first part, The Age of Taste, covers the eighteenth-century approaches of internal sense theorists, imagination theorists and associationists. The (...) second, The Age of Romanticism, takes readers from debates over the picturesque through British Romanticism to late Victorian criticism. The third, The Age of Analysis, covers early twentieth-century theories of Formalism and Expressionism to conclude with Wittgenstein and a number of views inspired by his thought. (shrink)

Taste and Experience in Eighteenth Century Aesthetics acknowledges theories of taste, beauty, the fine arts, genius, expression, the sublime and the picturesque in their own right, distinct from later theories of an exclusively aesthetic kind of experience. By drawing on a wealth of thinkers, including several marginalised philosophers, Dabney Townsend presents a novel reading of the century to challenge our understanding of art and move towards a unique way of thinking about aesthetics. Speaking of a proto-aesthetic, Townsend surveys theories of (...) taste and beauty arising from the empiricist shift in philosophy. A proto-aesthetic was shaped by the philosophers who followed Locke and accepted that theories of taste and beauty must be products of experience alone. Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Alexander Gerard and Thomas Reid were among the most important advocates, joined by others who re-thought traditional topics. Featuring chapters tracing its philosophical principles, issues raised by the subjectivity of the empiricist approach and the more academic proto-aesthetic formed toward the end of the century, Townsend argues that Lockean empiricism laid the foundations for what we now call aesthetics. (shrink)

This book offers the first full-length study of philosophical dialogue during the English Enlightenment. It explains why important philosophers - Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Berkeley and Hume - and innumerable minor translators, imitators and critics wrote in and about dialogue during the eighteenth century; and why, after Hume, philosophical dialogue either falls out of use or undergoes radical transformation. Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment describes the extended, heavily coded, and often belligerent debate about the nature and proper management of dialogue; (...) and it shows how the writing of philosophical fictions relates to the rise of the novel and the emergence of philosophical aesthetics. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, Johnson and Austen are placed in a philosophical context, and philosophers of the empiricist tradition in the context of English literary history. (shrink)

British idealist aesthetics is not well known, and to the extent that it is known, it is generally through the writings of R.G. Collingwood, who is sometimes described as an idealist of the ‘third generation.’.

ABSTRACTThis article surveys and contextualizes the British idealists’ philosophical writings on language, aesthetics and emotions, starting with T. H. Green and concluding with Michael Oakeshott. It highlights ways in which their philosophical insights have been wrongly overlooked by later writers. It explores R. L. Nettleship’s posthumous publications in this field and notes that they exerted significant influences on British idealists and closely related figures, such as Bernard Bosanquet and R. G. Collingwood. The writing of other figures are also (...) explored, not least F. H. Bradley and J. A. Smith. The article concludes by introducing in turn the remaining articles that are found in this special issue. (shrink)

In particular, as we shall see, Collingwood is often dismissed as having held an indefensible, outmoded ‘ideal’ theory, according to which the work of art is primarily ‘mental’, while his potential role in current debates is simply ignored. I will argue that this view is largely mistaken.

Containing twenty-two essays, including Dabney Townsend's essay on the development of eighteenth century aesthetics to make the history of aesthetics accessible to both students and specialists alike.

AS THE twentieth century comes to a close and the twenty-first dawns, the British Journal of Aesthetics begins its fortieth volume and enters its fortieth year. This seems an apt moment, or a good excuse, for a special issue, prefaced by a few general reflections, through the lens of the journal, on nearly half a century of aesthetics and on the prospects ahead. Strictly speaking, the fortieth anniversary of the journal does not fall until the autumn of 2000 as (...) it was in the autumn of 1960 that the first issue appeared. But there is a seductiveness in round numbers and the coincidence of the start of volume 40 with the start of the new millen- nium is justification enough for special attention.1 In fact self-reflection has been a rare event in the BJA. There have been few editorials and only two previous Special Issues, one commemorating the eightieth birthday of the founding editor, Harold Osborne, in 1985 (vol. 25, no. 2), the other in 1994 (vol. 34, no. 1), a collection of papers on the theme of repres- entation. The editorial voice is seldom heard in the journal, at least in the form of observations about the journal’s contents. Both Harold Osborne and Terry Diffey, the two previous editors, were modestly reticent about the development of the journal that they did so much to create and consolidate. On occasion they did publish their own essays and reviews so their ideas on specific topics in aesthetics were on display. Indeed the 1977 volume contained no fewer than four essays and five reviews by Osborne while he was editor. But editorial commentary as such has been light. That said, it has been a feature of the BJA from its inception that the editor’s own stamp has been imprinted on the contents, as a consequence of the large degree of autonomy each editor has possessed in selecting material to publish. (shrink)

Abstract:The value structures associated with distance and proximity have been at the center of the field of environmental aesthetics since its emergence. The British natural sublime acted as a catalyst for those debates by introducing the importance of immersive properties in relation to standards of taste. This article maps out the complex construction of the sublime over the eighteenth century by isolating those figures who emphasized different models of spectatorship in relation to the concept. Unlike contemporary readings, the historical (...) material does not promote one mode of experience over the other. Instead it explores the manner in which distance and proximity are in fact both intertwined within a precarious dialectic, an important insight for those contemporary theorists and practitioners still debating the merits of the two concepts both in relation to the sublime and the larger field. (shrink)

Now reissued with substantial new material, The Seventh Sense is the definitive study of the aesthetic theory of the great eighteenth-century philosopher Frances Hutcheson, and its huge influence on British aesthetics. Peter Kivy's book is a seminal work on early modern aesthetics, and has been much in demand since going out of print some years ago; this new edition brings the book up to date with the addition of eight essays that Kivy has written on the subject since 1976.

Articles on the 'aesthetic philosophy' of the first President of the British Society of Aesthetics and on the Society's formation.

18th-century British aesthetics addressed itself to a variety of questions: What is taste? What is beauty? Is there is a standard of taste and of beauty? What is the relation between the beauty of nature and that of artistic representation? What is the relation between one fine art and another? How ought the fine arts be ranked one against another? What is the nature of the sublime and ought it be ranked with the beautiful? What is the nature of (...) genius and what is its relation to taste? -/- Although none of these questions was peripheral to 18th-century British aesthetics, not all were equally central. The question on which the others tended to turn was the question concerning the nature of taste. But this question was not simply how best generally to define taste. Everyone seems to have been in at least rough agreement with Joseph Addison’s early definition of taste as “that faculty of soul, which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike” (Addison and Steele 1879, no. 409). But agreeing with Addison meant agreeing only to use “taste” to refer to that faculty and to acknowledge that such discerning has something of the phenomenology of sensation. The central question was how to think of taste so defined. Is taste a higher, cognitive faculty, akin perhaps to reason, with objects of a primarily intellectual nature? Or is it a lower, bodily faculty, more akin to the five bodily senses, and with objects of a primarily material nature? The major theories that arose in response to this question can be grouped into three main lineages: (a) internal-sense theories, of which the theories of Shaftesbury (1711), Hutcheson (1725), Hume (1739–40, 1751, and 1757) and Reid (1785) are representative; (b) imagination theories, of which theories of Addison (1712) and Burke (1757/59) are representative; and (c) association theories, of which the theories of Gerard (1757) and Alison (1790) are representative. (shrink)

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, the book challenges longstanding 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 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. (shrink)

A review of T. M. Costelloe's "The British Aesthetic Tradition. From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein" (CUP, 2013).

This volume follows shifting conceptions of decadence in art and society at various moments in British literature. The decline from a higher standard, social malaise, aesthetic ennui -- all of these ideas presume certain facts about the past, the present, and time's linear nature. To reject the past as a given and to relish the subtleties of present nuance is the beginning of decadence. This study explores the inherent conflict between society's moral contempt toward purportedly decadent artists and the (...) artist's belief that the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation was true decadence. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

The aim of this paper is not to focus on a particular thematic issue of Aesthetics, offering an exhaustive approach of it, but to display a broader map allowingto capture the essence of this topic from an overall perspective. To achieve it, I have paid attention to a number of points that will help to place Aesthetics in historical terms in the context of 18th century Great Britain. In this vein, I have addressed certain pillars deemed crucial in understanding Aesthetics, (...) such as the socio-historical background in which it emerged, the meaning of this field of study, its main theoreticians and its three most important aesthetic categories. Finally, I close the paper by drawing some brief conclusions. (shrink)

British writers of the eighteenth century such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson are widely thought to have used the notion of disinterestedness to distinguish an aesthetic mode of perception from all other kinds. This historical view originates in the work of Jerome Stolnitz. Through a re-examination of the texts cited by Stolnitz, I argue that none of the writers in question possessed the notion of disinterestedness that has been used in later aesthetic theory, but only the ordinary, non-technical concept, and (...) that they did not use this notion to define a specifically aesthetic mode of perception or a specifically aesthetic mode of anything else. The nearest thing that they had to the Stolnitzian conception of “the aesthetic” was their conception of taste, which differs from the former in some essential respects. (shrink)

The Seventh Sense is the definitive study of the aesthetic theory of the great eighteenth-century philosopher Francis Hutcheson, arguably the founder of the modern discipline of aesthetics, and one of the most important figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. This new edition brings Peter Kivy's seminal work back into print, substantially expanded by the addition of seven essays, which deal primarily with Hutcheson's relation to other thinkers, and his influence on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century aesthetics.Part I of The Seventh Sense presents (...) a detailed analysis of Hutcheson's aesthetic theory. Part II traces the considerable influence of Hutcheson's theory up to the early years of the nineteenth century. Part III is a new and substantial addition to the original work, collecting Peter Kivy's essays on this topic since the first edition appeared, which deal primarily with Hutcheson, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. Philosophers of art, historians of philosophy, and historians working on eighteenth-century European art and culture will find this new edition an invaluable resource. (shrink)

Everyday aesthetic experiences and concerns occupy a large part of our aesthetic life. However, because of their prevalence and mundane nature, we tend not to pay much attention to them, let alone examine their significance. Western aesthetic theories of the past few centuries also neglect everyday aesthetics because of their almost exclusive emphasis on art. In a ground-breaking new study, Yuriko Saito provides a detailed investigation into our everyday aesthetic experiences, and reveals how our everyday aesthetic tastes and judgments can (...) exert a powerful influence on the state of the world and our quality of life. By analysing a wide range of examples from our aesthetic interactions with nature, the environment, everyday objects, and Japanese culture, Saito illustrates the complex nature of seemingly simple and innocuous aesthetic responses. She discusses the inadequacy of art-centered aesthetics, the aesthetic appreciation of the distinctive characters of objects or phenomena, responses to various manifestations of transience, and the aesthetic expression of moral values; and she examines the moral, political, existential, and environmental implications of these and other issues. (shrink)

Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as (...) William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined. (shrink)

This book affects a rapprochement between memory studies and eighteenth-century aesthetics with the aim of modifying received views on the role and fate of memory in the history of criticism. It argues that the philosophical problems characterizing conceptualizations of memory unsettle its opposition to the imagination and explain its relation to literary discourse. Moving from the Muses through Plato and Descartes to works by Pope, Addison, Gerard, and Kames, the book traces these problems through various "figures" representing notions of memory (...) and claims that eighteenth-century critical thought exploited a constructive sense of memory for accounts of the notion of the imagination. Komáromy thus argues for the persistence of the literary relevance of memory even in a poetics of the imagination, offering a new perspective on the changing relation of memory and imagination at a point in the history of criticism that has determined the critical assessment of these concepts. (shrink)

Yuriko Saito discusses aspects of our everyday experience that have been neglected by modern Western aesthetic theories.

This collection of texts on the Sublime provides the historical context for the foundation and discussion of one of the most important aesthetic debates of the Enlightenment. The significance of the Sublime in the eighteenth century ranged across a number of fields - literary criticism, empirical psychology, political economy, connoisseurship, landscape design and aesthetics, painting and the fine arts, and moral philosophy - and has continued to animate aesthetic and theoretical debates to this day. However, the unavailability of many of (...) the crucial texts of the founding tradition has resulted in a conception of the Sublime often limited to the definitions of its most famous theorist Edmund Burke. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla's anthology, which includes an introduction and notes to each entry, offers students and scholars ready access to a much deeper and more complex tradition of writings on the Sublime, many of them never before printed in modern editions. (shrink)

It would be, at this hour of the day, supererogatory to argue the pre-eminence of Locke's influence on eighteenth-century thought. But though this claim has been made often enough, 1 and has often enough been shown to be true, it has not been shown for aesthetics. I believe it to be true of aesthetics as well, but that the fact has gone unremarked, because the line of influence here is not so overt as in the case of, say, political theory (...) or epistemology. It is, rather, oblique and devious; that the influence is there at all is, even, paradoxical. (shrink)

Thomas Hurka presents the first full historical study of an important strand in the development of modern moral philosophy. His subject is a series of British ethical theorists from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, who shared key assumptions that made them a unified and distinctive school. The best-known of them are Henry Sidgwick, G. E. Moore, and W. D. Ross; others include Hastings Rashdall, H. A. Prichard, C. D. Broad, and A. C. Ewing. They disagreed on (...) some important topics, especially in normative ethics. Thus some were consequentialists and others deontologists: Sidgwick thought only pleasure is good while others emphasized perfectionist goods such as knowledge, aesthetic appreciation, and virtue. But all were non-naturalists and intuitionists in metaethics, holding that moral judgements can be objectively true, have a distinctive subject-matter, and are known by direct insight. They also had similar views about how ethical theory should proceed and what are relevant arguments in it; their disagreements therefore took place on common ground. -/- Hurka recovers the history of this under-appreciated group by showing what its members thought, how they influenced each other, and how their ideas changed through time. He also identifies the shared assumptions that made their school unified and distinctive, and assesses their contributions critically, both when they debated each other and when they agreed. One of his themes is that that their general approach to ethics was more fruitful philosophically than many better-known ones of both earlier and later times. (shrink)

In a time of political, epistemic and aesthetic revolutions, early 18th-century Britain saw the emergence of a public discourse of common sense which had a lasting influence on cliched concepts of cultural identity. By retracing the compensatory impulses of common sense discourse and highlighting the role of literary texts in its formation and dissemination, this study challenges the received view of Augustan England as a mere Age of Reason.".

It would be, at this hour of the day, supererogatory to argue the pre-eminence of Locke's influence on eighteenth-century thought. But though this claim has been made often enough, 1 and has often enough been shown to be true, it has not been shown for aesthetics. I believe it to be true of aesthetics as well, but that the fact has gone unremarked, because the line of influence here is not so overt as in the case of, say, political theory (...) or epistemology. It is, rather, oblique and devious; that the influence is there at all is, even, paradoxical. (shrink)