A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 3, The Twentieth Century

A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century.

Paul Guyer (Author)

9781108733830, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 September 2018

668 pages
23 x 15.2 x 4 cm, 0.97 kg

A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle's defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato's famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact - precisely what Plato criticized - and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. This set tells how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by aestheticians of modern times. This third volume shows how philosophers of art in Germany, Britain, and the United States continued the debate over cognitivist versus alternative approaches to aesthetic experience that was at the heart of the discipline in the previous two centuries, while responding to the intellectual challenges of their own times as well.

Part I. German Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century: 1. German aesthetics between the wars: Lukács and Heidegger
2. German aesthetics after World War II
Part II. Aesthetics in Britain until World War II: 3. Bloomsbury, Croce, and Bullough
4. First responses to Croce
5. Collingwood
Part III. American Aesthetics in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: 6. Santayana
7. The American reception of expression theory I: Parker to Greene
8. Dewey
9. The American reception of expression theory II: Cassirer and Langer
10. After Dewey and Cassirer
Part IV. Wittgenstein and After: Anglo-American Aesthetics in the Second Part of the Twentieth Century: 11. Wittgenstein
12. The first wave
13. The second wave.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy, from c 1900 - [HPCF]