AESTHETICS FROM CLASSICAL GREECE TO TEE PRESENT

by Monroe C. Beardsley ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Professor Beardsley is known for having written with William K. Wimsatt two ""The Intentional Fallacy, and ""The Affective Fallacy."" highly influential essays, Both came out in the Forties when the New Criticism was a flourishing enterprise, He has since produced a book on the problems of aesthetics as a philosophical disciplineS and now presents a short but extremely comprehensive history of aesthetics from antiquity to the present, covering music and art as well as literature. Professor Beardsley considers eleven periods, each rewarded with an appropriately sized chapter. Plato and Aristotle, of course, begin the proceedings, followed by Plotinus, Augustine and Aquinas, the Renaissance, Cartesian Rationalism, 18th century Empiricism, Kant and Idealism, the English and German Romantics, and finally, the 19th century concerns with art and society, and the 20th century interest in a variety of methodologies from the Marxist approach to phenomenology and existentialism. Professor Beardsley is remarkably well-read in his subject and touches upon just about every- thing in sight. Unfortunately he tends to crowd too much information in too short a space, and there are times when such compression results in a loss of meaning. Nevertheless, the book is a considerable achievement, thorough, objective, enlightening, and always the work of a dedicated scholar.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1965

Categories: NONFICTION