Aesthetic concepts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcia Eaton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Psychological Responses ◽  
Aesthetic Properties ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Aesthetic Concepts ◽  
Meaningful Role

Aesthetic concepts are the concepts associated with the terms that pick out aesthetic properties referred to in descriptions and evaluations of experiences involving artistic and aesthetic objects and events. The questions (epistemological, psychological, logical and metaphysical) that have been raised about these properties are analogous to those raised about the concepts. In the eighteenth century, philosophers such as Edmund Burke and David Hume attempted to explain aesthetic concepts such as beauty empirically, by connecting them with physical and psychological responses that typify individuals’ experiences of different kinds of objects and events. Thus they sought a basis for an objectivity of personal reactions. Immanuel Kant insisted that aesthetic concepts are essentially subjective (rooted in personal feelings of pleasure and pain), but argued that they have a kind of objectivity on the grounds that, at the purely aesthetic level, feelings of pleasure and pain are universal responses. In the twentieth century, philosophers have sometimes returned to a Humean analysis of aesthetic concepts via the human faculty of taste, and have extended this psychological account to try to establish an epistemological or logical uniqueness for aesthetic concepts. Many have argued that although there are no aesthetic laws (for example, ‘All roses are beautiful,’ or ‘If a symphony has four movements and is constructed according to rules of Baroque harmony, it will be pleasing’) aesthetic concepts none the less play a meaningful role in discussion and disputation. Others have argued that aesthetic concepts are not essentially distinguishable from other types of concepts. Recently theorists have been interested in ways that aesthetic concepts are context-dependent – constructed out of social mores and practices, for example. Their theories often deny that aesthetic concepts can be universal. For example, not only is there no guarantee that the term ‘harmony’ will have the same meaning in different cultures: it may not be used at all.

The Hobbesian Hypothesis in Eighteenth-Century Political Theory

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Widerquist ◽  
Grant S. McCall
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Property System

This chapter shows how “the Hobbesian hypothesis” (the claim that everyone is better off in a state society with a private property system than they could reasonably expect to be in any society without either of those institutions) appeared in Eighteenth-Century political theory. It shows how disagreement about the truth of the hypothesis produced virtually no debate. David Hume, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, and others asserted its supposedly obvious truth without providing evidence. Lord Shaftesbury, the Baron de Montesquieu, and Thomas Paine voiced scepticism but also provided little evidence. Others, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau talked about similar issues without clearly taking a position on the hypothesis.

HAYDN’S MELANCHOLY VOICE: LOST DIALECTICS IN HIS LATE CHAMBER MUSIC AND ENGLISH SONGS

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
NANCY NOVEMBER
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Chamber Music ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Chamber Works ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Francisco Goya

AbstractFrom the nineteenth century onwards the stereotype of Haydn as cheerful and jesting has dominated the reception of his music. This study contributes to the recent scholarship that broadens this view, with a new approach: I set works by Haydn in the context of eighteenth-century ideas about melancholy, those of Edmund Burke, Francisco Goya, Henry Home (Lord Kames), Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Zimmermann. Their conceptions of melancholy were dialectical, involving the interplay of such elements as pleasure and pain, freedom and fettering, and self-reflection and absorption. I consider the relevance of these dialectics to Haydn’s English songs, his dramatic cantata Arianna a Naxos and two late chamber works. Musical melancholy arises, I argue, when the protagonist of a work – be it the vocal character in a song or the ‘composer’s voice’ in an instrumental work – exhibits an ironic distance from his or her own pain. The musical dialectics in these works prompt listeners, for their part, to take a step back to contemplate the borders and limits of emotional experience and communication.

Artistic taste

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Taste Buds ◽  
Natural Objects ◽  
Aesthetic Properties ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Objective Property ◽  
Constituent Elements

Taste has been variously understood as (1) the capacity to take pleasure in certain artistic and natural objects, (2) the capacity to identify the constituent elements in such objects, and (3) the capacity to discern certain special properties. Taste in sense (1) has been a topic since the early eighteenth century, culminating in the work of Hume and Kant. This conception of taste is annexed to the idea that ‘beauty’ or ‘artistic excellence’ is not itself an objective property of things, but that it is recorded in judgments of beauty as a report of a certain kind of pleasure felt by the judge in the presence of these things. Taste in sense (2), which is an analogue of the notion of taste as the ability to discriminate with the tongue and taste buds, has also been a topic since the eighteenth century, articulated perhaps most clearly by Hume. A connection between sense (1) and sense (2) is intended by eighteenth-century authors, but the connection has not been formulated clearly. Taste in sense (3) is a conception originating in the mid-twentieth century, notably in the work of Frank Sibley. It is primarily the idea that beauty, elegance, gracefulness and other properties – collectively called ‘aesthetic properties’ – require a special capacity for their discernment, although these are truly objective properties located in the objects being judged.

‘Utility’ and the ‘Utility Principle’: Hume, Smith, Bentham, Mill

Utilitas ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas G. Long
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Liberal Tradition

David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are often viewed as contributors to or participants in a common tradition of thought roughly characterized as ‘the liberal tradition’ or the tradition of ‘bourgeois ideology’. This view, however useful it may be for polemical or proselytizing purposes, is in some important respects historiographically unsound. This is not to deny the importance of asking what twentieth-century liberals or conservatives might find in the works of, say, David Hume to support their respective ideological persuasions. It is only to insist that attempts to use selected arguments, or parts of arguments, from great eighteenth-century thinkers to shore up twentieth-century programmatic political positions must be categorically distinguished from attempts to understand what Hume, Smith, Bentham or Mill actually meant, or could imaginably have meant, to say.

The National Tale

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Connolly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
National Cultures ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
British State

This chapter focuses on the national tale. The designation ‘national tale’ was first used in the early years of the nineteenth century by Irish and Scottish novelists who sought, in the context of a centralizing British state, to draw attention to the cultural specificity of the worlds represented within their fictions. National tales more generally display a self-reflexive interest in genres that belong to both private and public worlds: biography, letters, diaries, and anecdotes all address a wider culture of politicized emotions that crosses the four nations. To this extent, the national tale builds on developments in eighteenth-century aesthetics pioneered by such Irish and Scottish thinkers as Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, which connected private responses to universal standards. The language used by these theorists to imagine embodied emotions becomes, in the novels, a way of writing about oppressed national cultures.

Philosophy of religion in the twentieth century

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Dual Role ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Religious Issues

This chapter discusses the philosophy of religion during the twentieth century. The influence of Immanuel Kant and David Hume on the discussion of theological and religious issues by philosophers is examined in the first section. The dual role of philosophy and the main forms of interaction between philosophy and theology are discussed in the next section. The chapter also examines three main themes: the nature and significance of religious experience, the attempts in the twentieth century to deal with some of the links between religion and reason, and the interaction between religious and moral beliefs.

RACIAL STEREOTYPING OF HOMO SAPIENS AFRICANUS: A REVIEW OF ITS MYTH AND IMPACT ON DEVELOPMENTAL CAPACITY

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Oppong
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Supporting Evidence ◽  
White People ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Initial Errors ◽  
Developmental Capacity ◽  
Lower Intelligence

Generally, negatives stereotypes have been shown to have negative impact on performance members of a social group that is the target of the stereotype (Schmader, Johns and Forbes 2008; Steele and Aronson, 1995). It is against the background of this evidence that this paper argues that the negative stereotypes of perceived lower intelligence held against Africans has similar impact on the general development of the continent. This paper seeks to challenge this stereotype by tracing the source of this negative stereotype to David Hume and Immanuel Kant and showing the initial errors they committed which have influenced social science knowledge about race relations. Hume and Kant argue that Africans are naturally inferior to white or are less intelligent and support their thesis with their contrived evidence that there has never been any civilized nation other than those developed by white people nor any African scholars of eminence. Drawing on Anton Wilhelm Amo’s negligence-ignorance thesis, this paper shows the Hume-Kantian argument and the supporting evidence to be fallacious. 

The Gallic Singularity and the Royal Mistress

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Marie Antoinette ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Realm

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.

Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Third ◽  
Opium War ◽  
The Subject

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.

Moral canals: trust and social capital in the work of Hume, Smith and Genovesi

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigino Bruni ◽  
Robert Sugden
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Economic Agents ◽  
Trading Partners ◽  
History Of

It is a truism that a market economy cannot function without trust. We must be able to rely on other people to respect our property rights, and on our trading partners to keep their promises. The theory of economics is incomplete unless it can explain why economic agents often trust one another, and why that trust is often repaid. There is a long history of work in economics and philosophy which tries to explain the kinds of reasoning that people use when they engage in practices of trust: this work develops theories of trust. A related tradition in economics, sociology and political science investigates the kinds of social institution that reproduce whatever habits, dispositions or modes of reasoning are involved in acts of trust: this work develops theories of social capital. A recurring question in these literatures is whether a society which organizes its economic life through markets is capable of reproducing the trust on which those markets depend. In this paper, we look at these themes in relation to the writings of three eighteenth-century philosopher-economists: David Hume, Adam Smith, and Antonio Genovesi.

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