A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 1, The Eighteenth Century

A History of Modern Aesthetics focuses on the ideas that aesthetic experience is important because it is a form of cognition, because of its emotional impact, and because of the sheer pleasure of the free play of our mental powers triggered by works of art and nature. The work focuses on both the best-known and lesser-known aestheticians of modern times.

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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 book tells how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by aestheticians of modern times. This first volume recounts how philosophers in Britain, France, and Germany developed these new approaches and searched for ways to combine them with the cognitivism of traditional aesthetics.