Taste and Experience in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics

Dabney Townsend is retired as Executive Director of the American Society for Aesthetics and Professor of Philosophy at Georgia Southern University, USA. He is Editor of Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics and Classical Readings in Aesthetics.

• Introduction 1. The Empiricist Move in Aesthetics: Locke and Shaftesbury 2. Francis Hutcheson: The Sense of Taste 3. Hume: The Priority of Sentiment4. Associationism: David Hartley and Joseph Priestley 5. Theories of Taste6. Problems of Taste: The Tragic Paradox and a Standard of Taste7. Genius8. The Sublime: Baillie and Burke 9. The Picturesque10. Thomas Reid and the Theory of Taste 11. Archibald Alison: Experience and Expression 12. Dugald Stewart: Beauty and Taste Again ConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

The term 'aesthetics' was coined in eighteenth-century German, but without benefit of the name the discipline itself blossomed in eighteenth-century Britain. This is important, because as Dabney Townsend persuasively argues, it is a mistake to read Kant's conception of a distinct, 'disinterested' aesthetic experience back into eighteenth-century British aesthetics. The British, especially Scottish authors wrote under the influence of John Locke, and took a deeply empiricist approach to the variety of aesthetic experiences. Townsend's brilliant work builds upon a lifetime of exploration of this rich subject. He offers original readings of well-known philosophers such as Hutcheson, Hume, and Burke as well as lesser-known figures such as Kames and Priestley, and original approaches to such topics as taste, tragedy, genius, the sublime, the picturesque, and more. His attention to the different projects and conclusions of these philosophers is itself an illustration of the value of an empiricist approach to the history of philosophy.