He emphasises the power of the mind in beauty, and that is something that builds on Locke’s work on the complexity and productivity of the mind. Cooper makes claims which are unLockean, like suggesting innateness of our sense of beauty, but he also suggests that we think of that in terms of instinct. In addition to these biographical links, Shaftesbury’s philosophy developed from the empiricism of Locke. Shaftesbury’s grandfather, also named Anthony Ashley Cooper, was Locke’s patron and the philosophical Shaftesbury was Locke’s friend. Shaftesbury’s first book, Inquiry Concerning Merit (in Shaftesbury 1999), was published in an unauthorised form in 1699, just nine years after John Locke published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke 1975). Still, in general it is the philosophy of Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper) written in the last decade of the seventeenth century and the first decade of the eighteenth century, which is usually taken as the historical starting point for a form of aesthetic inquiry, which leads into Kant’s aesthetics, and the discipline of philosophical aesthetics as it is now known. (From work in progress on the philosophy of literary judgement)Įstablishing a starting point for the aesthetic tradition of the eighteenth-century is inevitably difficult, as every starting point has a precedent.
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