He defended the theory that imaginative association is the fundamental component in our experience of art, architecture, and nature, and is the true explanation of their value to us.įrancis Hutcheson was perhaps the first to place the problem of aesthetic judgment among the central questions of epistemology: How can we know that something is beautiful? What guides our judgment and what validates it? His answer was decidedly Empiricist in tone: aesthetic judgments are perceptual and take their authority from a sense that is common to all who make them. #MODERN AESTHETICS ELUCIDATE SERIES#Addison adopted this position in a series of influential essays, “The Pleasures of the Imagination” in The Spectator (1712). Following Locke, Shaftesbury laid much emphasis on the association of ideas as a fundamental component in aesthetic experience and the crucial bridge from the sphere of contemplation to the sphere of action. Taste is a kind of balanced discernment, whereby a person recognizes that which is congenial to his sentiments and therefore an object of pleasurable contemplation. As a naturalist, he believed that the fundamental principles of morals and taste could be established by due attention to human nature, our sentiments being so ordered that certain things naturally please us and are naturally conducive to our good ( Characteristiks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 1711). Shaftesbury, a follower of the political and educational philosopher John Locke, did more than any of his contemporaries to establish ethics and aesthetics as central areas of philosophical inquiry. In Britain the principal influences were the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and his disciples Francis Hutcheson and Joseph Addison. At that time, taste, imagination, natural beauty, and imitation came to be recognized as the central topics in aesthetics. It was not until the end of the 17th century that the distinctive concerns of modern aesthetics were established.
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