This book, first published in 2002, is a systematic critical overview of German aesthetics from 1750 to the present. It begins with the work of Baumgarten and covers all the major writers on German aesthetics that follow, including Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer and Adorno. The book offers a clear and non-technical exposition of ideas, placing these in a wider philosophical context where necessary. Such is the importance of German aesthetics that the market for this book will extend (...) far beyond the domain of philosophy to such fields as literary studies, fine art and music. (shrink)

(2011). Diotima's Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 353-355.

A philosophical study of the concept of _Heimat, home and homeland, is still lacking. This article examines Gadamer's linguistification of Heidegger's concept of _Heimat that includes moments of both regional identification and language. Gadamer eliminates the references to a home-land and, thus, rids the concept of unwanted associations with National-Socialist propaganda of blood and soil. Yet a merely linguistic notion of _Heimat offers not enough potential for identification in an age of world civilization. The essay suggests to resort to Schelling's (...) notion of an _Unvordenkliches as the ground of both poetic speech and the customs of a polity as _Heimat. (shrink)

The way a society speaks about its different groups and sub-groups determines its general behavior toward them. Discriminated minorities oftentimes suffer from humiliating descriptions, and part of their project to change societal attitudes will evolve around the attempt to redescribe themselves in terms more acceptable to them. ;Advancing from these considerations, I examine the rhetoric of the emerging discourse of homosexuality between 1880 and 1920. During this time period the homosexual was invented as a new personality type, a being almost (...) totally determined in all of his expressions by his sexual desire. Different professions like law, medicine, sociology, psychiatry, literature, and philosophy attempted to define this novel species. And they all converged in one aspect, namely in their rhetorical attitude. The writings of people like Nietzsche, Krafft-Ebing, Proust, Symonds, Gide, and Mann share the common feature of diagnosing a vital and important difference between the homosexual person and her heterosexual fellow citizen. This rhetoric of emphasizing the dividing features between desires I call maximalism. The invention of the homosexual as a person occurred under the reign of maximalizing ways of writing. It was, however, widely disputed where exactly the relevant difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals was to be located, whether in anatomico-biological variations, in an overabundance or lack of masculine determinants, in psychological dispositions, or an exceeding portion of courage, intelligence, and creativity. Equally problematic was the valuation of this difference. But one thing was easily agreed upon: the description of the homosexual had to follow a maximalizing pattern. ;I trace this pattern from its first precursory appearance in the Marquis de Sade to its breakdown in the psychoanalytic texts by Sigmund Freud. The shattering of this mode of thinking, though, has not been final, since in some of the rhetoric of "Queer Studies" it has reemerged. Family resemblances often appear most striking when one looks back past the parents. Our contemporaries bear their grandparents' smile. (shrink)

Ausgehend von Gadarners Begriff der Mimesis als Ordnung, dem er an Plato und Aristoteles vorbei auf die Pythagoräer zurückgreift, bietet der Aufsatz einige Argumente für die Reintegration von ästhetischem und moralischem Diskurs, indem er die Autonomieästhetik mittels eines sozialen und psychologischen Ordnungskonzepts infrage stellt. Vorgeschlagen wird eine Grenzziehung zur sozial inakzeptablen Kunst, in der ein Normenbruch nicht repräsentiert, sondern ausagiert wird, sowie zur psychohygienisch inakzeptablen Kunst, in der das Lustgefühl im Zusammenspiel der mentalen Fakultäten durch den Unwillen der Einbildungskraft, zu (...) einem normenverletzenden und repulsiven Material zurückzukehren, ausgehebelt wird. (shrink)