Aesthetic Inquiry Research Articles

Aesthetic Inquiry and Art's Body

Aesthetic Inquiry and Art's Body

BOOK REVIEWS

Journal Article BOOK REVIEWS Get access Aesthetic Inquiry. Essays on Art Criticism and the Philosophy of Art. Edited by MONROE C. BEARDSLEY and HERBERT M. SCHUELLER Dickenson Publishing Company. Belmont, California. 1967. pp. 305. HAROLD OSBORNE HAROLD OSBORNE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 7, Issue 4, October 1967, Pages 395–396, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/7.4.395 Published: 01 October 1967

What is a “Work of Art”?

This examination of the concept “work of art” has been prompted by the desire to find a starting point for aesthetic inquiry which, to begin with at any rate, will arouse no dispute. A claim for general agreement such as Clive Bell's: “The starting point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a pecular emotion”, is countered by I. A. Richards's “the phantom aesthetic state”, and any attempt to claim “beauty” as the central concept is straightway confused by the varied contexts in which “beauty” and “beautiful” may function. We hear much more often of a beautiful stroke in cricket than in painting, and many of our moral judgments have an aesthetic flavour. An action may be bold, dashing, mean, underhanded, unimaginative, cringing, fine, as well as right or wrong. Aesthetic adjectives and adverbs may occur in any context, and part of our job is to separate out the various uses and establish their inter-relationships,

The Discussion of Taste, from 1750 To 1770, and the New Trends in Literary Criticism

The attempts to define and to arrive at a standard of taste lie at the heart of the aesthetic inquiries that were being carried on in eighteenth-century England. That such inquiries, by examining certain fundamental assumptions of traditional æsthetics, exerted an influence on the theory and practice of literary criticism, is a commonplace. But why and how this influence was felt has not been explained. Its importance can be gauged by the fact that within a period of twenty years several of the ablest minds in England and Scotland, including Burke, Hume, Hogarth, Reynolds, Kames, and Gerard—most of them interested in literary criticism—were focussed upon the problem of taste. It was not a coincidence that in the years from 1750 to 1770, when the search for a standard of taste was at its height, the old assumptions of literary criticism were crumbling and the new “romantic” principles were being set forth, sometimes timidly and sometimes boldly, by the Wartons, Young, Hurd, Kames, and many others. The relation between these two phenomena is the subject of this study.