Thomas Munro vs. the All American Blue Dishwasher

Abstract

Thomas Munro was one of the foremost enthusiasts of twentieth-century American philosophy for a new way of looking at how we study the arts and for defining the role of aesthetics in American education. He wrote prolifically on how aesthetics should be taught, the role of scientific aesthetics, and the interrelations of individual arts and how they fit into this new scientific aesthetics. In reading Munro's works, one is readily affected by the enthusiasm with which Munro writes. As far as he knew, he was developing a new way to approach aesthetic theory a new kind of theory that would be much more directly related to our actual experiences with aesthetic objects. But readers find themselves at a loss at the end of hundreds of pages of Munro's books and articles as they look in vain for any subsequent reference to Thomas Munro in the literature on philosophical aesthetics. Obviously, all did not go as Munro had planned. Munro played a highly influential role in the development of aesthetic discussion and scholarship in the American Society for Aesthetics and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Yet, while he is remembered for his role in the development of these important vehicles of aesthetics in the United States, his philosophical ideas do not seem to carry with them the same importance. In what follows, I will elucidate some of Munro's ideas about aesthetic naturalism and how aesthetics was to become a science, provide some possible explanations as to why the science of aesthetics never evolved as he suspected it would, give some historical context of Munro's influences, and finally explicate the results of two experiments in the fashion Munro wrote about, although never conducted himself.