In search of the aesthetic

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 47, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 232-250

  Scruton, Roger ^a  

^a Institute for the Psychological Sciences   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149466291     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/aesthj/aym004     Document Type: Review

References (18)

1. Aesthetica (1750; part II, 1758); cf. also J. G. Hamanri, Aesthetica in nuce (1762)
2. Kant explicitly repudiates Baumgarten's use of the term 'aesthetic' at B36, though it is arguable that the First Critique contains an extended working out of the contrast made by Baumgarten, between the sensuous and the intellectual faculties. The influence of Baumgarten's coinage has been denounced by Robert Dixon, in The Baumgarten Corruption: From Sense to Nonsense in Art and Philosophy (London and East Haven, 1995)
3. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London, 1984)
4. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1990)
5. Some of the subtleties are introduced by G, A, Cohen in Karl Marx's Theory of History, a Defence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1978)
6. A version of the argument, expressed in other terms, can be found in Hans-Georg Gadamer, 'The Relevance of the Beautiful', in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1986)
7. F. N. Sibley, 'Aesthetic Concepts', Philosophical Review, vol. 68 (1959), pp. 421-450
8. 'Aesthetic and non-Aesthetic', Philosophical Review, vol. 74 (1965), pp. 135-159
9. For example, P. O, Kristeller, 'From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment', in Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, vol. III (Rome, 1993)
10. See Hilary Putnam, 'Is Semantics Possible?', in Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers vol. 2. (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1975)
11. The distinction here is not clearly drawn, and is also a matter of scholarly dispute among commentators. See The Critique of Judgement, trans. J, C. Meredith (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1952), p. 70
12. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. C. Barrett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), p. 13
13. Critique of Judgement, pp 165-166
14. I have argued for this application of aesthetic reasoning in The Aesthetics of Architecture (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1979)
15. The concept of the 'evolutionarily stable strategy' is developed in Maynard Smith's adaptation of game theory to cover competition at the genetic level. See Helena Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection, from Darwin to Today (Cambridge: Cambridge UP., 1991)
16. The argument of this paragraph is an application of the principle in animal ethology, known as Lloyd Morgan's Canon: see C. Lloyd Morgan, Habit and Instinct (London, 1896)
17. This is the thought behind the social contract, in both the Lockean and the Rawlsian versions. Contrast, however, the Adam Smith/Hayek view, that consensual orders emerge from choice, but are not the object of choice. A style in architecture is more like a 'spontaneous order' in Hayek's sense than it is like the planned order of the social contract. (See F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2 [London:, Routledge 1976].)
18. See, for example, the Abbé Batteux, Les beaux-arts reduits à un mêtne principe (1746), and the discussion in Kristeller, 'From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment'