Rethinking the relationship between eighteenth-century Pietist traditions and Enlightenment thought and practice, _The Practices of Enlightenment_ unravels the complex and often neglected religious origins of modern secular discourse. Mapping surprising routes of exchange between the religious and aesthetic writings of the period and recentering concerns of authorship and audience, this book revitalizes scholarship on the Enlightenment. By engaging with three critical categories--aesthetics, authorship, and the public sphere--_The Practices of Enlightenment_ illuminates the relationship between religious and aesthetic modes (...) of reflective contemplation, autobiography and the hermeneutics of the self, and the discursive creation of the public sphere. Focusing largely on German intellectual life, this critical engagement also extends to France through Rousseau and to England through Shaftesbury. Rereading canonical works and lesser-known texts by Goethe, Lessing, and Herder, the book challenges common narratives recounting the rise of empiricist philosophy, the idea of the "sensible" individual, and the notion of the modern author as celebrity, bringing new perspective to the Enlightenment concepts of instinct, drive, genius, and the public sphere. (shrink)

Introductory essay / Peter Jones -- The usefulness of the arts and the humanities : the case of Descartes / Gábor Boros -- Roads of remembrance : the treatment of imagination and memory in Gerard's Essay on genius / Zsolt Komáromy -- Diderot's untimeliness / László Kisbali ; transl. Márton Dornbach -- Melody vs. harmony : Rousseau, or, The aesthetics of vowels / Mária Ludassy ; transl. Zsolt Komáromy -- Judgement and taste : from Shakespeare to Shaftesbury / Ferenc (...) Hörcher -- Lord Shaftesbury's "aesthetic freedom" / Endre Szécsényi -- Why one should imitate the Greeks : on Winckelmann / Sándor Radnóti ; transl. Márton Dornbach -- Beauty or beast, or, Monstrous regiments? : Robertson and Burke on women and the public scene / László Kontler -- The concept of nature and the theodicy problem in the Malebranche-Arnauld-Leibniz debate / Dániel Schmal -- Lessing's anti-candide : between reason and revelation / Krisztina Utasi ; transl. Márton Dornbach. (shrink)

Introduction We search for origins the way some cats chase their tails. After brief bursts of frenetic spinning, we think we have a grasp of our topic, ...

: This article charts the rise and fall of the Modern System of the Arts and the failure of the aesthetic theory of art to define membership in the so-called system, which, instead, I argue, is and has been, for a long time, merely a historically evolved collection. Rather than endorsing the continued attempt to define Art with a capital A in terms of aesthetic experience, I recommend alternative lines of research for contemporary philosophers of the arts.

This essay proposes a new focus for studies in the relationship between aesthetics and morality in the Enlightenment period. Recent research, especially by Paul Guyer, seems to have established that the traditional question of whether a genealogy for autonomous aesthetics can be traced attending to the concept of disinterestedness in the era can be answered with an unambiguous no. This, however, should only encourage further research into the nature of the way in which the connection between the (...) beautiful and the good was understood. It is argued here that with the gradual erosion of the humanist rhetorical understanding of history from the seventeenth century the specific content of the link between aesthetics and ethics undergoes a fundamental change, making it significantly more abstract and far less specific. (shrink)

When, in 1735, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten added a new discipline to the philosophical system, he not only founded modern aesthetics but also contributed to shaping the modern concept of art or 'fine art'. In The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment, Stefanie Buchenau offers a rich analysis and reconstruction of the origins of this new discipline in its wider context of German Enlightenment philosophy. Present-day scholars commonly regard Baumgarten's views as an imperfect prefiguration of Kantian (...) and post-Kantian aesthetics, but Buchenau argues that Baumgarten defended a consistent and original project which must be viewed in the context of the modern debate on the art of invention. Her book offers new perspectives on Kantian aesthetics and beauty in art and science. (shrink)

The prominent educator Harry S. Broudy defines enlightened cherishing as 'a love of objects and actions that by certain norms and standards are worthy of our ...

Reason and Sentiment Throughout the long history of philosophy there has appeared from time to time a certain dilemma which is both attractive and fatal. ...

Broad in its geographic scope and yet grounded in original archival research, this book situates the inception of modern aesthetic theory – the philosophical analysis of art and beauty - in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose. Simon Grote presents seminal aesthetic theories of the German and Scottish Enlightenments as outgrowths of a quintessentially Enlightenment project: the search for a natural 'foundation of morality' and a means of helping naturally self-interested human beings transcend their own (...) self-interest. This conclusion represents an important alternative to the standard history of aesthetics as a series of preludes to the achievements of Immanuel Kant, as well as a reinterpretation of several canonical figures in the German and Scottish Enlightenments. It also offers a foundation for a transnational history of the Enlightenment without the French philosophes at its centre, while solidly endorsing historians' growing reluctance to call the Enlightenment a secularising movement. (shrink)

During the intellectual and cultural flowering of Scotland in the 18th century few subjects attracted as much interest among men of letters as aesthetics - the study of art from the subjective perspective of human experience. All of the great philosophers of the age - Hutcheson, Hume, Smith and Reid - addressed themselves to aesthetic questions. Their inquiries revolved around a cluster of issues - the nature of taste, beauty and the sublime, how qualitative differences operate upon the mind (...) through the faculty of taste, and how aesthetic sensibility can be improved through education. This volume brings together and provides contextual introductions to the most significant 18th century writing on the philosophy of art. From the pioneering study of beauty by Francis Hutcheson, through Hume's seminal essays on the standard of taste and tragedy, to the end of the tradition in Dugald Stewart, we are swept up in the debate about art and its value that fascinated the philosophers of enlightenment Scotland - and continues to do so to this day. Jonathan Friday is Senior Lecturer in History and Theory of Art at the University of Kent. He has published on the philosophy of art and aesthetics, the history of philosophy and moral philosophy. (shrink)

Introduction Herder's status within German intellectual history has largely rested on the premise that he, along with his friend Johann Georg Hamann, ...

This article roots Kant’s concept of disinterestedness, as he uses it in the Critique of Judgment, in Aristotle’s notion of philia by establishing a path from ethics to aesthetics and back. In this way, the third Critique turns out to be one of the main sources for a new ideal of humanity: the ideal suitable for late Enlightenment. This article argues that Kant reaches this fruitful use of disinterestedness by giving to Aristotle’s concept of philia an aesthetic turn.

The Library of Scottish Philosophy: Volumes 1 – 6, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004 James Otteson , ed. Adam Smith: Selected Philosophical Writings, 247pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 184540-001-1 James Harris , ed. James Beattie: Selected Philosophical Writings, 204pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-711 David Boucher , ed. The Scottish Idealists: Selected Philosophical Writings, 201pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-72X Jonathan Friday , ed. Art and Enlightenment: Scottish Aesthetics in the 18th century, 212pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-762 Gordon Graham , ed. Scottish (...) Philosophy: Selected Writings 1690–1960, 253pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-746 Esther McIntosh , ed. John Macmurray: Selected Philosophical Writings, 198pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-738. (shrink)

The author states in his preface that he has not undertaken a history of aesthetic thought during the French Enlightenment, nor an intellectual history of French aesthetics, nor a synthesis of eighteenth-century French thought on aesthetics, nor a history of eighteenth-century French art. What he has attempted to do is to outline doctrines of French aesthetic thought during the eighteenth century. The term doctrine is perhaps not too strong here because some of these writers were rather doctrinaire (...) in their approach. Following an outline of their respective positions, the author then subjects their works to a logical analysis. More than two-thirds of the authors cited are relatively unknown: André, d'Argens, Batteux, Bonnet, Briseux, Chaussard, Crousaz, Mme. Dacier, Estère, de Jaucourt, de La Motte, di Marcenay de Ghuy, de Piles, Rollin, Taillason, Trublet. One should not be surprised to learn that few of these were professional philosophers. Others cited by Coleman are well-known eighteenth-century figures: d'Alembert, Condillac, Diderot, Dubos, Montesquieu and St. Evremond. The author explains that he undertook the book in order to fill a gap in the literature on the subject. It is an excellent beginning and the style in which it is written is often as witty and elegant as that of many of the authors he considers.—P. N. (shrink)

The Second Enlightenment is a deep reflection and an immanent transcendence of the first Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries). Although the great achievements of the first Enlightenment cannot be denied, its limits are increasingly being exposed. Among the many limitations of the Enlightenment, the suppression of beauty in general and natural beauty in particular is one of its main drawbacks, caused by its blind worship of reason and the domination of a modern mechanistic worldview. The suppression (...) of beauty and natural beauty has produced destructive consequences which are responsible for the ecological, social, and spiritual crisis facing us today. In order to prevent ecological catastrophes and create an ecological civilization, a second Enlightenment whose core concept is beauty is needed. The Second Enlightenment challenges us to rethink the value and importance of beauty and natural beauty, and regards beauty as the aim of the universe, as well as of ecological civilization. In this sense, the Second Enlightenment can be seen as an aesthetic Enlightenment which not only helps us to resist consumerism, guard spiritual dignity, nurture our souls, find a sense of belonging, and lead a poetic life, but also helps Chinese society to overcome a defiant attitude toward rural civilization and farmers, and eventually to remove the Great Wall between city and country. (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)

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment represents a turn toward experience, that is, toward the experiencing subject. Still the Enlightenment involves an aspiration toward objective truth in the ideals of the newly emerging sciences and in the experiments in democracy that were beginning to transform the political landscape of Europe and America. Immanuel Kant's towering philosophical achievement in his critical works helps to reformulate a meaning of objectivity that is congenial to the climate of inquiry and freedom in that remarkable century, (...) a meaning that is unburdened of the metaphysical commitments of many of his predecessors. Kant's revolution in philosophical thought gives us an objectivity that is crucially related to epistemic conditions rooted in subjectivity, a correlation between subjectivity and objectivity that carries over as well into his critical treatises concerned with ethics and aesthetics. This book of essays explores the tension between subjectivity and objectivity as it develops in the Enlightenment in Winkelmann, Hume, and Kant. The focus is upon aesthetic theories concerning the beautiful, the sublime, and the grotesque. The question by two of the authors as to whether aesthetic enjoyment of the blues is morally justified underscores an interest in these essays in the connection between aesthetics and ethics. This concern of the relation of aesthetics to judgments in cognition and in morality underlies an area of peculiar interest to Kant, and therefore to many of these essays. Finally the authors examine a turn toward the subjective in the Postmodern world of art and aesthetic theory, a turn that represents a relaxation of the original Enlightenment tension between subjectivity and objectivity. It also represents perhaps a grotesque turn toward the extreme of subjectivity in the realm of Postmodern theory, an extreme toward which at least one of the authors casts a critical eye. (shrink)

A review of Simon Grote's The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory cambridge university press. 2017. pp. 308. £75.00..

What is the relationship between contemporary intellectual culture and the European Enlightenment it claims to reject? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi revisits the arguments advanced in Horkheimer and Adorno's seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment. Cascardi argues against the view that postmodern culture has rejected Enlightenment beliefs and explores instead the continuities contemporary theory shares with Kant's failed ambition to bring the project of Enlightenment to completion. He explores the link between aesthetics and politics (...) in thinkers as diverse as Habermas, Derrida, Arendt, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Wittgenstein in order to reverse the tendency to see works of art simply in terms of the worldly practices among which they are situated. (shrink)

The author puts forward a set of assumptions and possible context for examining the connection between the concepts of enlightenment and taste. Kant?s definition of enlightenment is accepted, with special emphasis on the sphere of religion. Applying this criterion, we may discern a powerful and influential religious current stemming from strictly speaking Church circles that denies the systematic and historical significance of the opus of Dositej Obradovic, who in his time was a protagonist of the European enlightenment. (...) Such a revaluation has been accepted by the greater portion of the younger generation, which relies predominantly on the St. Sava Myth. With a change of worldview, undoubtedly, tastes change as well. The next section of the paper discusses the approach to taste of the Scottish philosopher David Hume representative of dispositional aesthetic. Finally it is argued that music as one of the arts, might be exemplary for appraising the condition of enlightenment in a society. U ovom radu autor je izlozio nekoliko pretpostavki, te moguci kontekst za ispitivanje veze izmedju pojmova prosvecenost i ukus. Prihvaceno je Kantovo odredjenje prosvecenosti, a s narocitim naglaskom na sferu religioznosti. Na osnovu takvog kriterijuma, moze se uociti da je u igri jedna vrlo snazna i uticajna verska struja - i to iz crkvenih krugova u najuzem smislu - koja porice sistematski i istorijski znacaj dela Dositeja Obradovica, svojevremeno protagoniste evropske prosvecenosti. Takvo prevrednovanje prihvatio je i veci deo mladje generacije insistirajuci prevashodno na Svetosavskom Predanju. S promenom pogleda na svet, nesumnjivo je da se menjaju i ukusi. Izlozeno je i shvatanje o ukusu skotskog filozofa Dejvida Hjuma, zatocnika dispozicionalne estetike. Kao jedna od umetnosti, muzika bi mogla biti egzemplarna za procenjivanje stanja prosvecenosti u nekom drustvu. (shrink)

This study of Herder's aesthetics is a welcome addition to the continued scholarly rehabilitation of Herder. Norton limits his study to the first fifteen years of Herder's intellectual activity, which he finds preoccupied with questions of aesthetics. Norton takes issue with much of what has been said and written about Herder's aesthetics.

The study of the processes and methods through which elements of Hegelian philosophy and aesthetics have been appropriated and adjusted to the needs of Marxist–Leninist criticism is essential for understanding Bolshevik–Marxist aesthetics in the process of its consolidation into an official doctrine in Soviet Russia. By looking at the career of the Bolshevik Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunačarskij, it is possible to discern the extent to which the process was forged by the unsanctioned presence of Goethe and (...) Hegel. The article traces their important contributions in the causes of sustaining revolutionary romanticism and its eventual overcoming in favor of the rationality and solemnity of socialist realism. (shrink)

The dissertation considers what is at stake when theoretical wonder ceases to be an originating affect for speculative thought and becomes, instead, a limiting concept for critical philosophy. It attempts to show that: wonder functions for its classical proponents in an entirely different context than that presupposed by the aesthetics of the sublime . This difference can be ascribed to the way in which the feeling of the sublime is operative in the overcoming of modern theodicy , whereas wonder (...) is an intimation of what Edward O. Wilson has recently called, the "consilient perspective" . Whereas, wonder suggests the beginnings of an overarching conceptual unity linking together mind and nature, the sublime, by contrast, is part of an ontology of freedom, in which our subjective capacity to withstand the blows of natural contingency without resorting to conceptual redescription or aesthetic totalization reveals the workings of an underlying "faculty of resistance." The resultant ambivalence of the sublime feeling is elucidated differently by Kant and Schiller, such that the former regards it as the cognitive lucidity resulting from the self-cancellation of the passions, whereas the latter views it as a function of the will, insofar as it suggests a subjective capacity to attend to things differently. Finally, it is suggested that the true source of sublimity in Kant and Schiller is the force of personality to lend unity and meaning to phenomena which would otherwise lack such. (shrink)

After Enlightenment: Hamann as Post-Secular Visionary is a comprehensive introduction to the life and works of eighteenth-century German philosopher, J. G. Hamann, the founding father of what has come to be known as Radical Orthodoxy. Provides a long-overdue, comprehensive introduction to Haman's fascinating life and controversial works, including his role as a friend and critic of Kant and some of the most renowned German intellectuals of the age Features substantial new translations of the most important passages from across Hamann's (...) writings, some of which have never been translated into English Examines Hamann's highly original views on a range of topics, including faith, reason, revelation, Christianity, biblical exegesis, Socrates, theological aesthetics, language, sexuality, religion, politics, and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity Presents Hamann as the 'founding father' of a distinctly post-modern, post-secular theology and, as such, as an alternative to the 'postmodern triumvirate' of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida Considers Hamann's work as a touchtone of modern Jewish-Christian dialogue, in view of debates with his friend Moses Mendelssohn Explores Hamann's role as the visionary founder of a 'metacritical' movement that radically calls into question the basic principles of modern secular reason, and thus reprises the debate between those defending Hamann's views and those labeling him the bête noir of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

The Enlightenment saw a critical engagement with the ancient idea that music carries certain powers - it heals and pacifies, civilizes and educates. Yet this interest in musical utility seems to conflict with larger notions of aesthetic autonomy that emerged at the same time. In Enlightenment Orpheus, Vanessa Agnew examines this apparent conflict, and provocatively questions the notion of an aesthetic-philosophical break between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Review of: Simon Grote, The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory: Religion and Morality in Enlightenment Germany and Scotland, Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Introduction: identity as phantasy in Enlightenment in France and Germany -- The man with too many qualities : the young herder between France and Germany -- The language of cultural identity : Diderot to Nietzsche -- Strange classicism : aesthetic vision in Winckelmann, Nietzsche, and Thomas Mann -- Classicism and gender transformation : David, Goethe, and Stal -- The French Revolution and the problem of time : Hegel to Marx.

How can aesthetic enquiry contribute to the study of visual culture? There seems to be little doubt that aesthetic theory ought to be of interest to the study of visual culture. For one thing, aesthetic vocabulary has far from vanished from contemporary debates on the nature of our visual experiences and its various shapes, a fact especially pertinent where dissatisfaction with vulgar value relativism prevails. Besides, the very question ubiquitous in the debates on visual culture of what is natural and (...) what is acquired in our visual experiences has been a topic in aesthetics at least since the Enlightenment. And last but not least, despite attempts to study visual culture without employing the concept of art, there is no prospect of this central subject of aesthetic theory ebbing away from visual studies. The essays compiled in this volume show a variety of points of intersection and involvement between aesthetics and visual studies; some consider the future of visual art, some the conditions and characteristics of contemporary visual aesthetic experience, while others take on the difficult question of the relation between visual representation and reality. What unites them is their authors' willingness to think about contemporary visual culture in the conceptual frame of aesthetics. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, art history, and cultural studies. (shrink)

The paper highlights analytic aesthetics’ unacknowledged assumption that art is timeless, a view it inherited from Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume and Kant, who in turn inherited it from the Renaissance. This view, I contend, is no longer tenable because it is at odds with our experience of the art of the past. Analytic aesthetics bypasses this dilemma because it confines its attention to topics such as the nature of aesthetic pleasure, whether the appreciation of art should (...) be disinterested and so on, which it partitions off from historical change and encases in a world where time stands still and where, by consequence, the temporal nature of art, including art’s capacity to transcend time, can be ignored. (shrink)

The Library of Scottish Philosophy: Volumes 1 – 6, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004 James Otteson , ed. Adam Smith: Selected Philosophical Writings, 247pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 184540-001-1 James Harris , ed. James Beattie: Selected Philosophical Writings, 204pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-711 David Boucher , ed. The Scottish Idealists: Selected Philosophical Writings, 201pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-72X Jonathan Friday , ed. Art and Enlightenment: Scottish Aesthetics in the 18th century, 212pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-762 Gordon Graham , ed. Scottish (...) Philosophy: Selected Writings 1690–1960, 253pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-746 Esther McIntosh , ed. John Macmurray: Selected Philosophical Writings, 198pp. Paperback £12.95. ISBN 0907845-738. (shrink)

This major collection of essays stands at the border of aesthetics and ethics and deals with charged issues of practical import: art and morality, the ethics of taste, and censorship. As such its potential interest is by no means confined to professional philosophers; it should also appeal to art historians and critics, literary theorists, and students of film. Prominent philosophers in both aesthetics and ethics tackle a wide array of issues. Some of the questions explored in the volume (...) include: Can art be morally enlightening and, if so, how? If a work of art is morally better does that make it better as art? Is morally deficient art to be shunned, or even censored? Do subjects of artworks have rights as to how they are represented? Do artists have duties as artists and duties as human beings, and if so, to whom? How much tension is there between the demands of art and the demands of life? (shrink)

What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain self-consciousness and construct our civilisation without language? Such were the questions at the basis of eighteenth-century debates on the joint evolution of language, mind, and culture. Language and Enlightenment highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. While focusing on the Berlin Academy under Frederick the Great, Avi Lifschitz situates the Berlin debates within a larger temporal and geographical (...) framework. He argues that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called 'Counter-Enlightenment'. -/- Enlightenment authors of different persuasions investigated whether speechless human beings could have developed their language and society on their own. Such inquiries usually pondered the difficult shift from natural signs like cries and gestures to the artificial, articulate words of human language. This transition from nature to artifice was mirrored in other domains of inquiry, such as the origins of social relations, inequality, the arts and the sciences. By examining a wide variety of authors - Leibniz, Wolff, Condillac, Rousseau, Michaelis, and Herder, among others - Language and Enlightenment emphasises the open and malleable character of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. The language debates demonstrate that German theories of culture and language were not merely a rejection of French ideas. New notions of the genius of language and its role in cognition were constructed through a complex interaction with cross-European currents, especially via the prize contests at the Berlin Academy. (shrink)