商品詳細

Writings about art and creativity can be traced to the texts of classical antiquity, but aesthetics as a separate and systematic area of philosophy is almost wholly a product of the 18th century. It was at that time that philosophers began to treat notions about creativity and our responses to it with a kind of philosophical rigour found in epistemology and metaphysics. Eighteenth-century authors sought to define what poetry, literature, painting and sculpture were and to determine the links between the various forms of artistic expression. They questioned whether artistic sensitivity could be acquired or was innate, and asked how good taste was cultivated and maintained. This is a collection of the less well-known 18th-century aesthetics texts. The authors include Daniel Webb, John Gilbert Cooper, and William Jackson. Readers familiar with the works of famous aestheticians such as Hume, Shaftesbury, Burke, and Home should find something of interest in these writings, and also background on the aesthetics debate.