ABSTRACT
Aesthetics is conventionally regarded as originating in the middle of the eighteenth century with the publication of Baumgarten's Aesthetica; but its roots really reach back to classical Greece. The eighteenth century was a period which claimed that artistic freedom could be achieved by the separation of the artistic construction from alien social, religious and practical concerns—leaving the viewer free to engage in an unobstructed contemplation of the aesthetic object, as a disinterested observer capable of clarity and openness. The axioms of the Analytic tradition of aesthetics have been rendered inadequate by the direction which modern art has taken. And to hold that the duty of the philosophy of criticism is to establish the rationale of the product, its status and suitability, and judge the evidence invoked amounts to resting the philosophy of criticism on the same assumptions as the practice of this kind of criticism.
