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Art and Enlightenment: Scottish Aesthetics in the 18th Century

Library of Scottish Philosophy

Jonathan Friday, Editor

During the intellectual and cultural flowering of Scotland in the 18th century few subjects attracted as much interest among men of letters as aesthetics - the study of art from the subjective perspective of human experience. All of the great philosophers of the age - Hutcheson, Hume, Smith and Reid - addressed themselves to aesthetic questions. Their inquiries revolved around a cluster of issues: the nature of taste, beauty and the sublime, how qualitative differences operate upon the mind through the faculty of taste, and how aesthetic sensibility can be improved through education.

This volume brings together and provides contextual introductions to the most significant 18th century writing on the philosophy of art. From the pioneering study of beauty by Francis Hutcheson, through Hume's seminal essays on the standard of taste and tragedy, to the end of the tradition in Dugald Stewart, we are swept up in the debate about art and its value that fascinated the philosophers of enlightenment Scotland - and continues to do so to this day.

Table of Contents

  • Francis Hutcheson On the Influence of Custom and Fashion Upon Our Notions of Beauty and Deformity
  • George Turnbull A Treatise on Ancient Painting
  • David Hume
           Of Beauty and Deformity
          Of Contiguity, and Distance in Space and Time
          Of the Standard of Taste
          Of Tragedy
  • John Baillie An Essay on the Sublime
  • Alexander Gerard Of the Standard of Taste
  • Adam Smith The Influence of Custom Upon Notions of Beauty
  • Henry Home, Lord Kames
          Beauty
          The Standard of Taste
  • Thomas Reid Of Beauty
  • James Beattie Illustrations of Sublimity
  • Archibald Allison
          The Effect on the Imagination by Sublime and Beautiful Objects
          The Analysis of this Exercise of the Imagination
  • Dugald Stewart On the Beautiful

Jonathan Friday is Senior Lecturer in History and Theory of Art at the University of Kent.

· ISBN 0-907845-76-2 · Published July 2004 by Imprint Academic · Paperback · 212 pages · $25.90 ·

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Art and Enlightenment · $25.90

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