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In "Eighteenth Century British Aesthetics", editor Dabney Townsend has brought together the work of such well-known writers as John Dryden, Joshua Reynolds, David Hume, and Samuel Johnson with the more obscure works of aestheticians such as Uvedale Price, Daniel Webb, John Baillie, and James Harris, whose work is difficult to find, but is nonetheless important, informative, and interesting. These twenty-two selections, accompanied by Dabney Townsend's historical essay on the development of eighteenth century aesthetics, make the history of aesthetics accessible to both students and specialists alike.
Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain investigates the gendered, eroticized, and xenophobic ways in which the controversies in the 1760s surrounding the political figure John Wilkes (1725-97) legitimated some men as political subjects, while forcefully excluding others on the basis of their perceived effeminacy or foreignness. However, this book is not a literary analysis of the Wilkes affair in the 1760s, nor is it a linear account of Wilkes’s political career. Instead, Effeminate Years examines the cultural crisis of effeminacy that made Wilkes’s politicking so appealing. The central theoretical problem that this study addresses is the argument about what is and is not political: where does individual autonomy begin and end? Addressing this question, Kavanagh traces the shaping influence of the discourse of effeminacy in the literature that was generated by Wilkes’s legal and sexual scandals, while, at the same time, he also reads Wilkes’s spectacular drumming up of support as a timely exploitation of the broader cultural crisis of effeminacy during the mid century in Britain. The book begins with the scandals and agitations surrounding Wilkes, and ends with readings of Edmund Burke’s (1729-1797) earliest political writings, which envisage political community—a vision, that Kavanagh argues, is influenced by Wilkes and the effeminate years of the 1760s. Throughout, Kavanagh shows how interlocutors in the political and cultural debates of the mid-eighteenth-century period in Britain, such as Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) and Arthur Murphy (1727-1805), attempt to resolve the problem of effeminate excess. In part, the resolution for Wilkes and Charles Churchill (1731-1764) was to shunt effeminacy onto the sexually non-normative. On the other hand, Burke, in his aesthetic theorization of the beautiful privileges the socially constitutive affects of feeling effeminate. Through an analysis of poetry, fiction, social and economic pamphlets, aesthetic treatises, journalism and correspondences, placed within the latest queer historiography, Kavanagh demonstrates that the mid-century effeminacy crisis served to re-conceive male heterosexuality as the very mark of political legitimacy. Overall, Effeminate Years explores the development of modern ideas of masculinity and the political subject, which are still the basis of debate and argument in our own time.
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.
In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world.
What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain self-consciousness and construct our civilization 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.
Ape to Apollo is the first book to follow the development in the eighteenth century of the idea of race as it shaped and was shaped by the idea of aesthetics. Twelve full-color illustrations and sixty-five black-and-white illustrations from publications and artists of the day allow the reader to see eighteenth-century concepts of race translated into images. Human "varieties" are marked in such illustrations by exaggerated differences, with emphases on variations from the European ideal and on the characteristics that allegedly divided the races. In surveying the idea of human variety before "race" was introduced by Linneaus as a scientific category, David Bindman considers the work of many German and British thinkers, including J. F. Blumenbach, Georg and Johann Reinhold Forster, and Immanuel Kant, as well as Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon and Pieter Camper. Bindman believes that such representations, and the theories that supported them, helped give rise to the racism of the modern era. He writes, "It may be objected that some features of modern racism predate the Enlightenment, and already existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; certainly there was deep prejudice, but that, I would argue, is not the same as racism, which must have as a foundation a theory of race to justify the exercise of prejudice."
This new study of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory situates it in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose.
Early Modern Aesthetics is a concise and accessible guide to the history of aesthetics in the early modern period. J. Colin McQuillan shows how philosophers concerned with art and beauty positioned themselves with respect to the ancients and the moderns, how they thought the arts were to be distinguished and classified, the principles they proposed for art and literary criticism, and how they made aesthetics a part of philosophy in the eighteenth century. The book explores the controversies that arose among philosophers with different views on these issues, their relation to the philosophy, science, and art, and their legacy for contemporary aesthetics.
Can a person be morally beautiful? Can a character trait, such as honesty, be beautiful and sneakiness ugly or disgusting? Or are such expressions merely metaphorical? Talk of moral beauty has been commonplace since antiquity; and especially 18th-century philosophers used the notion. Yet, a literal meaning quickly leads to Moral judgements based on mere physical appearance, as physiognomists such as Lavater have endorsed. This book assesses influential 18th-century theories of moral beauty and proposes two conditions for a safe literal conception of moral beauty that not only helps justify many moral judgements based on aesthetic Quality but also shows how beauty and moral virtue can be based on the same principles. First, we need an account of why moral beauty and non-moral physical beauty are distinct kinds of beauty; and second, we need an account of how moral beauty can be expressive of moral virtue without identifying the one with the other. The reasons why Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Reid only meet the first condition and why Kant and Schiller meet both conditions are extremely illuminating for current debates on the interactions between aesthetics and moral theory.
This is an abridged, paperback edition of Peter le Huray and James Day's invaluable anthology of writings concerned with the role of music in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century aesthetics. This volume retains all the most important and significant items from the original hardcover edition. Over fifty writers are represented here, including such major figures as Rousseau, Kant, Schlegel, Schopenhauer and Hegel, and the useful introductions and biographical details of the original are also retained. The aesthetic literature of the period is profuse but this carefully edited volume offers a balanced selection which illuminates the ways people experienced music and how they came to an understanding in particular of the new music of their day.