The Genealogy of Aesthetics
The Genealogy of Aesthetics
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$86.00
USDIs it body or spirit that makes us appreciate beauty and create art? The distinguished Canadian critic Ekbert Faas argues that, with occasional exceptions like Montaigne and Mandeville, the mainstream of western thinking about beauty from Plato onwards has greatly overemphasized the spirit. This study redresses this imbalance, and offers a radical re-reading of thinkers like Plato, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida. Professor Faas attacks both the traditional and postmodern consensus, and offers a new pro-sensualist aesthetics, heavily influenced by Nietzsche, that draws on contemporary cognitive science.
- A profound polemic on a major subject, by a distinguished cultural critic
- Will annoy both traditionalist and postmodern thinkers in equal measure
- Strong linkages with cognitive science outside orthodox humanist channels
Reviews & endorsements
"Faas's ideas merit the serious attention of al scholars and teachers of the history of aesthetics. Recommended." Choice
Product details
September 2002Hardback
9780521811828
454 pages
236 × 160 × 34 mm
0.861kg
14 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1. Plato's transvaluations of aesthetic values
- 2. Proto-Nietzschean opponents to Plato
- 3. Late Antiquity, Plotinus, and Augustine
- 4. Augustine's Platonopolis
- 5. The Middle Ages
- 6. The Renaissance
- 7. The Renaissance Academy, Ficino, Montaigne, and Shakespeare
- 8. Hobbes and Shaftesbury
- 9. Mandeville, Burke, Hume, and E. Darwin
- 10. Kant's ethicoteleological aesthetics
- 11. Kant's midlife conversion
- 12. Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx
- 13. Marx's Nietzschean moment
- 14. Heidegger's 'destruction' of traditional aesthetics
- 15. Heidegger contra Nietzsche
- 16. Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida
- 17. Différance, Freud, Nietzsche, and Artaud
- 18. Derrida's mega-transcendentalist Mimesis
- 19. Postmodern or Pre-Nietszschean? Derrida, Lyotard, and de Man
- 20. The Postmodern revival of the aesthetic ideal
- Afterword.
