The history of aesthetics, like the histories of other sciences, may be treated in a two-fold manner: as the history of the men who created the field of study, or as the history of the questions that have been raised and resolved in the course of its pursuit. The earlier History of Aesthetics (3 volumes, 1960-68, English-language edition 1970-74) by the author of the present book was a history of men, of writers and artists who in centuries past have spoken up concerning beauty and art, form and crea tivity. The present book returns to the same subject, but treats it in a different way: as the history of aesthetic questions, concepts, theories. The matter of the two books, the previous and the present, is in part the same; but only in part: for the earlier book ended with the 17th century, while the present one brings the subject up to our own times. And from the 18th century to the 20th much happened in aesthetics; it was only in that period that aesthetics achieved recognition as a separate science, received a name of its own, and produced theories that early scholars and artists had never dreamed of.

Volume I: The development of aesthetics was one of the great accomplishments of eighteenth-century philosophy, as the classical conception of aesthetic experience as a form of knowledge came under pressure from increasing recognition of the emotional impact of art and from increasing emphasis on the value of freedom in the moral and political thought of the century. This opening volume of A History of Modern Aesthetics 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. 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 both the best-known and lesser-known aestheticians of modern times, focusing on Britain, France, and Germany in the eighteenth century; Germany and Britain in the nineteenth; and Germany, Britain, and the United States in the twentieth.

'The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics' has assembled 48 brand-new essays, making this a comprehensive guide available to the theory, application, history, and future of the field.

Among the ancients the fundamental theory of the beautiful was connected with the notions of rhythm, symmetry, harmony of parts; in short, with the general formula of unity in variety. Among the moderns we find that more emphasis is laid on the idea of significance, expressiveness, the utterance of all that life contains; in general, that is to say, on the conception of the characteristic. -from "Definition of Beauty" T.H. Green called him "the most gifted man of his generation." Certainly he was one of the most popular and most influential British idealists of the early 20th century, and an intellectual cousin of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. In this definitive work, first published in 1892, Bernard Bosanquet explores the realm of aesthetics-the philosophy of art-from a romantic, almost mystical perspective, discussing how the appreciation of art exposes the spirituality of humanity, and why it is a vital component to any metaphysical understanding of the universe. From the earliest Greek poetry and Latin comedy to very modern ideas about "ugly beauty" and the impact of science on art, Bosanquet will change the way you look at art. British scholar and philosopher BERNARD BOSANQUET (1848-1923) also wrote, among his many works, Logic, or the Morphology of Knowledge (1888), The Civilization of Christendom and Other Studies (1893), and Social and International Ideals: Being Studies in Patriotism (1917).

Since the 1990s, artists and art writers around the world have increasingly undermined the essentialism associated with notions of "critical practice." We can see this manifesting in the renewed relevance of what were previously considered "outsider" art practices, the emphasis on first-person accounts of identity over critical theory, and the proliferation of exhibitions that refuse to distinguish between art and the productions of culture more generally. How Folklore Shaped Modern Art: A Post-Critical History of Aesthetics underscores how the cultural traditions, belief systems and performed exchanges that were once integral to the folklore discipline are now central to contemporary art’s "post-critical turn." This shift is considered here as less a direct confrontation of critical procedures than a symptom of art’s inclusive ideals, overturning the historical separation of fine art from those "uncritical" forms located in material and commercial culture. In a global context, aesthetics is now just one of numerous traditions informing our encounters with visual culture today, symptomatic of the pull towards an impossibly pluralistic image of art that reflects the irreducible conditions of identity.