Values of beauty : historical essays in aesthetics / Paul Guyer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Guyer, Paul, 1948-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804.

Aesthetics--History.

Aesthetics.

History.

Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804--Aesthetics.

Kant, Immanuel.

Physical Description:

xxi, 359 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Summary:

In Values of Beauty, Paul Guyer discusses major ideas and figures in the history of aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. At the core of the book are Guyer's most recent essays on the epochal contribution of Immauel Kant. The book sets Kant's work in the context of predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, including David Hume, Alexander Gerard, Archibald Alison, Arthur Schopenhauer, and John Stuart Mill.

All of the essays emphasize the complexity rather than the isolation of our aesthetic experience of both nature and art, and the interconnection of aesthetic values such as beauty and sublimity on the one hand and prudential and moral values on the other.

Guyer asserts that the idea of the freedom of the imagination as the key to both artistic creation and aesthetic experience has been a common thread throughout the modern history of aesthetics, although the freedom of the imagination has been understood and connected to other forms of freedom in many different ways.

Contents:

The origins of modern aesthetics: 1711-1735

The standard of taste and the 'most ardent desire of society'

The harmony of the faculties revisited

Beauty and utility in eighteenth-century aesthetics

Free and adherent beauty: a modest proposal

Kant on the purity of the ugly

Beauty, freedom, and morality: Kant's lectures on anthropology and the development of his aesthetic theory

The ethical value of the aesthetic: Kant, Alison, and Santayana

The symbols of freedom in Kant's aesthetics

Exemplary originality: genius, individuality, and universality

Pleasure and knowledge in Schopenhauer's aesthetics

From Jupiter's eagle to Warhol's boxes: the concept of art from Kant to Danto

The value of a theory of beauty: Mary Mothersill's beauty restored.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 345-352) and index.

ISBN:

0521844908

0521606691

OCLC:

56799087

Publisher Number:

9780521844901

9780521606691