Aesthetics: Sources in the Eighteenth Century

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 eighteenth century. It was at that time that philosophers began to treat notions about creativity and our responses to it with the 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 collection gathers together many of the authors and works that tackled these questions in the eighteenth century. Foregoing the most well-known and easily accessible aesthetics texts, this set presents some of the rarest, less well-known but equally important works - books that made a substantial contribution when first published but which have since been neglected.

The authors include important eighteenth-century figures such as Daniel Webb, John Gilbert Cooper, and William Jackson. Readers familiar with the works of famous aestheticians such as Hume, Shaftesbury, Burke, and Home will find much to interest them in these writings and will gain valuable background information on the aesthetics debate.

--collects the less well-known 18th-century aesthetics texts
--includes very scarce titles, rarely found even in major libraries
--features neglected authors and titles that should be read alongside the better-known, already available, works
--extensive new general introduction plus notes on each author and text by John Valdimir Price, highly respected authority on eighteenth-century philosophy and co- editor of The Dictionary of 18th-Century British Philosophers (forthcoming, 1999)