ABSTRACT

In the eighteenth century, the rise of the philosophic issues that came to form modern aesthetics is a complex movement as one might expect from the broad involvement of critics, artists, philosophers, connoisseurs, and dilettantes of all kinds. It is intimately connected to the new empiricist philosophy of Locke and Newton, but older scholastic modes of expression provide the conceptual framework. Moreover, the terms of the contemporary debates are set by divisions that are different and are understood differently from our modernist understanding of the same issues. We can often detect our own interests, but the contemporary expression of them is couched in terms current to the times. Among the dominant influences in that respect are divisions between classicists and modernists, between rationalist followers of Descartes and/or Leibniz and the followers of Newton and Locke, and between commercially motivated authors and critics and the talented polite learning of the nobility. The central debates are about the relation of poetry to painting and music, the development and judgments of taste, the characteristics of beauty and its uses, and critical issues concerning rules of composition, presentation, and status. The result is a decidedly messy but rich mixture.