Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century British and German Aesthetics

Karl Axelsson is Senior Lecturer in Aesthetics at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. His most recent book is Political Aesthetics: Addison and Shaftesbury on Taste, Morals and Society (2019). Axelsson is also the Swedish translator of the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody (forthcoming).Camilla Flodin holds a PhD in Aesthetics from Uppsala University and is currently Lecturer and Research Fellow in Comparative Literature at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. She has published extensively on Adorno’s aesthetics and the art-nature relationship in German Romanticism and Idealism. Flodin is also a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Adorno (forthcoming).Mattias Pirholt is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. His most recent book publications include Grenzerfahrungen: Studien zu Goethes Ästhetik (2018) and Das Abenteuer des Gewöhnlichen: Alltag in der deutschsprachigen Literatur der Moderne (co-edited with Thorsten Carstensen, 2018).

• IntroductionKarl Axelsson, Camilla Flodin, and Mattias PirholtPart I: Aesthetic Concepts, Morality, and Society in the British Tradition1. The Evolution of Aesthetic Concepts 1700–1800Peter de Bolla2. Beauty, Nature, and Society in Shaftesbury’s The MoralistsKarl Axelsson3. Force Makes Right; or, Shaftesbury’s Moral-Aesthetic DynamicsNeil Saccamano 4. Civilization in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Subject for TasteMaria Semi5. Adam Smith’s Aesthetic PsychologyEmily Brady and Nicole HallPart II: British and German Liaisons6. Aesthetic Autonomy Is Not the Autonomy of ArtPaul Guyer7. From Spiritual Taste to Good Taste? Reflections on the Search for Aesthetic Theory’s Pietist RootsSimon Grote8. Is there a Middle Way? Mendelssohn on the Faculty of ApprobationAnne Pollok9. Germaine de Staël and the Politics of TasteKaren GreenPart III: Science and a New Model of Society Around 180010. Goethe’s Exploratory IdealismMattias Pirholt11. Physics as Art: Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s Construction ProjectsJocelyn Holland12. Hölderlin’s Higher EnlightenmentCamilla Flodin13. Rethinking Disinterestedness Through the Rise of Political EconomyNatalie Roxburgh