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Aesthetics as a Normative Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2014

Gordon Graham
Gordon Graham*
Affiliation:
Princeton Theological Seminarygordon.graham@ptsem.edu
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Extract

It is well known that we owe the term ‘aesthetics’ in its philosophical sense to the 18th century German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten. The eighteenth century's interest in aesthetics, however, pre-dated the invention of the term. In 1725, Francis Hutcheson published an Inquiry into the Original of Our Idea of Beauty and Virtue. This may be said to be the first sustained and significant work in philosophical aesthetics as we now know it. Hutcheson's volume preceded Baumgarten's by 10 years, and within Scotland it inaugurated a series of philosophical writings on taste and beauty that continued for almost a century. Contributors included major philosophical figures like David Hume, Thomas Reid and Adam Smith, as well as influential figures less well known today such as Alexander Gerard, George Turnbull and Lord Kames.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 75: Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art , October 2014 , pp. 249 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2014 

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References

1 Hutcheson, Francis, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Idea of Beauty and Virtue, edited by Leidhold, Wolfgang (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008)Google Scholar

2 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by Norton, David fate and Norton, Mary J, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007)Google Scholar, 4

3 ‘Taste’ is included by Reid in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) rather than the corresponding volume on the ‘Active Powers’

4 Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Pure Reason, translated Smith, Norman Kemp, (London: Macmillan, 1929)Google Scholar, 66

5 Hume, David, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963)Google Scholar, 246

6 Ibid., 247

7 Ibid., 252

8 Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man edited by Brookes, Derek R., (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002)Google Scholar, 578

9 Ibid., 577

10 Ibid., 591–2

11 Davie, George E, A Passion for Ideas: Essays on the Scottish Enlightenment Vol. II, (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1994), 41–2Google Scholar

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14 Ibid., 90

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17 Op. cit., note 7, 596

18 Ibid.

19 Op. cit note 12, 210

20 Op.cit., note 7, 614

21 Op. cit., note 7, 601

22 Op. cit., note 7, 595

23 Danto, Arthur C, After the End of Art; Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, 216