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 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)

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)

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.

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. (shrink)

The 18th-century emergence of aesthetics has been interpreted as a symptom of the entrance of a new image of man, individuality, a modern conception of subjectivity, a new mode of experience, as well as a new ideology or the modern concept of (fine) art into European consciousness. And even though these narratives all situate aesthetics within heteronomous contexts—from physiology and psychology to morality and politics, from social and economic history to belief and religion—one narrative came out as victorious, which (...) neglects the eighteenth-century interpenetration of various disciplines. It offers instead a teleological history of aesthetics which leads towards the concept of autonomy, aesthetic and/or artistic, as it takes shape, allegedly, in the aesthetics of Kant and then Romanticism. The new volume of the Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, entitled Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century British and German Aesthetics, joins the growing body of scholarship that re-examines the influential narratives of autonomy. (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)

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)

This is a comprehensive reference source on 18th-century authors writing in the English language about philosophical ideas and issues. It features authors taken from 1689 through to the mid-19th century, the period beginning with John Locke and ending with Dugald Stewart. The word philosophical is used in a wide, 18th-century sense. Therefore, the Dictionary includes epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, education, politics, rhetoric, science, medicine, biology, geology, chemistry and theology.

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)

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)

Although artistic activity has been a major social phenomenon in the western world, aesthetics has not always reflected the changes in techniques, processes, themes and uses through which the arts have developed and had their effect. Theory most often comes after the fact, and properly so. Yet aesthetics in its history has not only displayed an unfitting hubris, with thinkers attempting to legislate about style, suitability and materials to the artist; aesthetics has also lagged far behind the living edge of (...) artistic activity and discussed it in anachronistic terms. (shrink)

Although nowadays aesthetics tends to be marginalized, all the great philosophers of the world, from Plato and Aristotle on, through St. Bonaventure and Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, to Kant and Hegel clearly thought that the Beautiful ought to be in close companionship with the True and the Good. The only open question remains when, specifically, aesthetics came to be recognized as an autonomous or self-controlled discipline. Kivy is the first who makes a solid and eloquent argument for the paternity of the (...) somewhat obscure Francis Hutcheson. The second edition of his book came out conveniently close to a new edition of one of Hutcheson’s main works, Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. During his examination Kivy constantly refers in particular to the first part of this work, Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design. (shrink)

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)

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)

The Education of the Eye examines the origins of visual culture in eighteenth-century Britain. It claims that at the moment when works of visual art were first displayed and contemplated as aesthetic objects two competing descriptions of the viewer or spectator promoted two very different accounts of culture. The first was constructed on knowledge, on what one already knew, while the second was grounded in the eye itself. Though the first was most likely to lead to a socially (...) and politically elite form for visual culture, the second, it was held, would almost certainly end up in the chaos of the mob. But there was another route through these conflicting accounts of the visual that preserved the education of the eye while at the same time allowing the eye freedom to enter into the realm of culture. This third route, that of the sentimental look, is explored in a series of contexts: the gallery, the pleasure garden, the landscape park, and the country house. The Education of the Eye sets out to reclaim visual culture for the democracy of the eye and to explain how aesthetic contemplation may, once more, be open to all who have eyes to look. The book will interest historians of eighteenth-century British culture and historians of architecture, art, and landscape, as well as readers generally curious about the origins of our current visual culture. (shrink)

Hands are notoriously hard to draw. To compellingly capture their detail, proportion, and movement is generally considered a mark of an artist’s mastery of tech.

"Recent years have seen a growing interest among scholars of 18th-century German philosophy in the period between Wolff and Kant. This book challenges traditional interpretations of this period that focus largely on post-Leibnizian rationalism and, accordingly, on a depreciation of the contribution of the senses to knowledge about the world and the self. It addresses the divergent ways in which eighteenth-century German philosophers reconceived the notion and role of experience in their efforts to identify, defend, and contest (...) the contribution of foundational a priori principles and empirical data to the various branches of metaphysics, the natural sciences, and emerging disciplines such as psychology and aesthetics. The chapters are organized according to the four major schools that defined the various phases of German Enlightenment philosophy: Wolff and Wolffianism, Eclecticism and Populärphilosophie, the Berlin Academy, and Kant. Each chapter is devoted to one or more philosophers, several of whom are seriously under investigated or even unknown outside small circles of specialists. By framing the period in terms of the notion of experience, this book presents a more nuanced understanding of the German reception of British and French ideas and theories, dismisses the prevailing view that German philosophy was largely isolated from European debates, introduces a number of relatively unknown, but highly relevant philosophers and developments to non-specialized scholars, and contributes to a better understanding of the richness and complexity of the German Enlightenment"--. (shrink)

The description for this book, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, will be forthcoming.

Joseph Addison’s (1672--1719) essays in The Spectator occupy contradictory positions in the history of aesthetics. While they are generally considered central to the institution of aesthetics as a scholarly discipline, their reception has throughout history entailed a strong questioning of their philosophical and scholarly importance. In the following paper, I consider this dual feature as regards reception, and set out to clarify how this has come about. A re-examination of the arguments advanced by Addison makes clear that his role is (...) not that of a philosopher, but that of a public educator. As such he aims to raise the standard of general education of the British ‘middling orders’ in the early eighteenth century, and by using art for didactic purposes he seeks to contribute to the shaping of morally accomplished individuals. (shrink)

In every chapter of this dissertation---chapters which consider work by John Locke, Lord Shaftesbury, David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen and Sir Joshua Reynolds---I show that the appeal each of these authors makes to the "common sense" of the reader mounts a deeply persuasive appeal to a collective vision of how things ought to be. Within empiricist epistemology, moral philosophy, fiction, and the discourse of art and aesthetics, I find that by assuming a moral consensus that unites that (...) community of readers he or she addresses, each of these writers initiates the reader into such a consensus. A double moment underlies the ideal and description of a common sense: what enables the claim that one's judgment is commonsensical is the assumption that such a judgment would find general assent, general agreement. At the same time, judgments that make these claims model for the community the kind of judgments that ought to find agreement. The idea of community rests on the possibility that each and every agent is capable of an objective assent to its terms and conditions, and that, given this ability, each would arrive at the consensus which supports the community. ;One of the paradoxes of eighteenth-century British empiricist epistemology is that it suggests the clearest views are those offered through the arts. That is, the frame provided by the arts creates a space which abstracts from a common-sense view of things to things "as they really are"---which is, really, as they ought to be. I explain the much noted intensity of the interest in developing a discourse of the aesthetic in the eighteenth century, or the emphasis placed on the idea of a single "standard of taste," as a consequence of the impasse in Locke's empiricist epistemology on the matter of objective judgments. The ability of perceivers to share a clear view of facts and objects, the view of reason and common sense, predicates Locke's project, yet the very possibility of such a view becomes more and more remote as his Essay proceeds. The model of aesthetic judgment which developed in the wake of Locke's Essay prioritized detachment and disinterest, and therefore offered the possibility of a distanced, and therefore objective, point of view, the point of view invoked in the appeal to common sense. (shrink)

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)