ABSTRACT
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Adam Smith did not develop a comprehensive theory of taste. He did not write extensively on or publish essays dealing with key questions of the time—for example, the nature of beauty, sublimity, tragedy, and aesthetic judgment—and his published work on philosophy and the arts is limited to his essays on the imitative arts and student notes from his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. However, in Smith’s other philosophical writings, aesthetic themes emerge which can extend our understanding of his views on the important aesthetic ideas of his day. This chapter explores The Theory of Moral Sentiments in order to draw out four themes which suggest an “aesthetic psychology” in his work: (1) the place of aesthetic concepts in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, (2) moral and aesthetic perception, (3) sympathetic attention and imagination, and (4) aesthetic communication.
