ABSTRACT
In the history of thought it is almost always pointless to ascribe even an approximate date to the beginning of any movement or enterprise, both because antecedents can always be found and because such movements and enterprises are not easily individuated. But, with such an acknowledgement and allowing ourselves the licence of including 1699, the year of publication of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue, in the eighteenth century, we may reasonably ascribe the beginnings of aesthetics as we know the discipline today to British philosophers of the eighteenth century, most notably to Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Reid. It was these philosophers who first systematically discussed such questions as what in the twentieth century might be called the analysis of aesthetic judgements and the criteria of aesthetic excellence, though they would more likely have framed their questions as being concerned with the definition of beauty and of the standard of taste. Our modern discussions of aesthetics are no doubt in many ways different from but are surely continuous with theirs to a degree far greater than with any earlier work.
