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