Aesthetics in Europe and the Americas - Eighteenth-century Foundations, Classical Anticipations, The Growth Of Modern Aesthetics, Contemporary Trends And Issues
art history follows criticism
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy concerned with aesthetic experience and the fundamental principles of art and criticism. It is distinct from the history of art and the practice of art criticism, although its own history follows a path parallel to both. It is not an empirical study of the psychology or sociology of art, nor is it the same as aestheticism, which names a particular attitude to aesthetic matters, exemplified by the fin-de-siècle "art for art's sake" movement. There is no need to be an "aesthete" to engage in aesthetics. In what follows, a brief history of the subject will be outlined from its eighteenth-century foundations, back through earlier anticipations from the classical period, and on to the modern legacy. Then an analytical survey of contemporary trends and current issues will be offered.
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Aesthetics in the European tradition, conceived as philosophical inquiry into the experience of beauty, acquired its name and essential nature in the eighteenth century, even though cognate concerns had been debated in Europe for two millennia before that. The term aesthetics, from the Greek aesthēsis (perception), was coined, in roughly its modern sense, in 1735 by Alexander Baumgarten (171…
This debate about the truth of art resonates through the centuries. Plato's pupil Aristotle addressed the matter in his treatise Poetics, a discussion of the nature and status of poetic tragedy that has become one of the seminal texts in Western aesthetics. For Aristotle the desire to imitate is both natural and a source of pleasure. Tragedy is an imitation of action and attains, according …
A striking development in aesthetics after the eighteenth century was a gradual shift of interest from inquiries into beauty per se and "judgments of taste" to specifically the philosophy of art. Nineteenth-(and late-eighteenth-) century aesthetics was largely dominated by German philosophers, including Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), Friedrich Wilhelm Jos…
Increasingly from the latter half of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century aesthetics grew in stature as an established branch of philosophy in both the Anglo-American (analytic) and European (Continental) schools of philosophy. The subject was widely taught in universities and learned societies devoted to the subject—the American Society for Aesthetics and societies from the …
Aesthetics, as noted earlier, is not always concerned with art. The core of Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment had little to
do with art but rather with the special kind of pleasure taken in the appearance of things (of any kind). There are longstanding debates over whether there exists a distinctive "aesthetic attitude" or "aesthetic experience" associated wit…
Aristotle. The Poetics of Aristotle. Translated by Stephen Halliwell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Beardsley, Monroe C. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981. Brand, Peggy, and Carolyn Kormeyer, eds. Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Useful anthology on femin…
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