The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics

The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aestheticsaims to provide teachers and students with a new perspective on the history and present of aesthetic theory. It contains a comprehensive survey of the field of aesthetics, with selections drawn from ancient, medieval, renaissance, modern, and contemporary sources. It provides readers with a radically new perspective on the genesis and development of aesthetic theory by including an expanded section on early modern aesthetics. TheAnthologylikewise pays special attention to the interdisciplinary nature of aesthetics, reconstructing some of the dialogues in literary theory and art criticism that gave rise to philosophy's more systematic efforts. It introduces readers to contemporary debates by including a number of thinkers not yet anthologized. It contextualizes these positions by situating them in terms of the history to which they are responding. In short,The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aestheticsbrings course materials up-to-date with the state of the discipline.

General IntroductionAcknowledgementsI. Introduction to Ancient Aesthetics1. Plato, Republic2. Aristotle, Poetics 3. Plotinus, Enneads4. Longinus, On the SublimeII. Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Aesthetics5. Augustine, The Confessions6. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica8. Petrarch, On the Nature of Poetry9. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and ArchitectsIII. Introduction to Early Modern Aesthetics10. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, The Art of Poetry11. Jean-Baptiste DuBos, Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting12. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue13. Johann Christoph Gottsched, Critical Poetics14. Charles Batteux, The Fine Arts15. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetics16. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful17. David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste18. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön19. Moses Mendelssohn, On the main principle of the fine arts and sciencesIV. Introduction to Modern Aesthetics20. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment21. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man22. Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, Oldest Programme For a System of German Idealism23. F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism24. Novalis, Miscellaneous Observations and Logical Fragments25. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art26. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation27. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy28. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power as Art29. Charles Baudelaire, "The Dandy," from The Painter of Modern Life30. Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art 31. Meyer Schapiro, The Still Life as Personal Object32. Paul Valéry, The Idea of Art 33. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility34. Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch35. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension36. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind V. Introduction to Contemporary Aesthetics37. Michel Foucault, This is not a Pipe38. Jacques Derrida, Restitutions39. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Image-the Distinct40. Cornel West, The New Politics of Cultural Difference41. Jean-François Lyotard, The Sublime and the Avant-Garde 42. Arthur Danto, Three Decades After the End of Art43. Alexander Nehamas, An Essay on Beauty and Judgment44. Christine Battersby, The Male Gift45. Rita Felski, Why Feminsim Doesn't Need an Aesthetic (And Why It Can't Ignore Aesthetics)46. Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema47. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Percept, Affect, and Concept48. Alain Badiou, Art and Philosophy49. Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes