The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics

The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics aims to provide teachers and students with a new perspective on the history and present of aesthetic theory.  It contains a comprehensive survey of the field of aesthetics, with selections drawn from ancient, medieval, renaissance, modern, and contemporary sources. It provides readers with a radically new perspective on the genesis and development of aesthetic theory by including an expanded section on early modern aesthetics. The Anthology likewise pays special attention to the interdisciplinary nature of aesthetics, reconstructing some of the dialogues in literary theory and art criticism that gave rise to philosophy's more systematic efforts. It introduces readers to contemporary debates by including a number of thinkers not yet anthologized. It contextualizes these positions by situating them in terms of the history to which they are responding. In short, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics brings course materials up-to-date with the state of the discipline.

Table of Contents:
General Introduction Acknowledgements I. Introduction to Ancient Aesthetics 1. Plato, Republic 2. Aristotle, Poetics 3. Plotinus, Enneads 4. Longinus, On the Sublime II. Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Aesthetics 5. Augustine, The Confessions 6. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names 7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 8. Petrarch, On the Nature of Poetry 9. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects III. Introduction to Early Modern Aesthetics 10. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, The Art of Poetry 11. Jean-Baptiste DuBos, Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting 12. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue 13. Johann Christoph Gottsched, Critical Poetics 14. Charles Batteux, The Fine Arts 15. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetics 16. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 17. David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste 18. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön 19. Moses Mendelssohn, On the main principle of the fine arts and sciences IV. Introduction to Modern Aesthetics 20. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment 21. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man 22. Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, Oldest Programme For a System of German Idealism 23. F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism 24. Novalis, Miscellaneous Observations and Logical Fragments 25. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art 26. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power as Art 29. Charles Baudelaire, "The Dandy," from The Painter of Modern Life 30. Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art 31. Meyer Schapiro, The Still Life as Personal Object 32. Paul Valéry, The Idea of Art 33. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility 34. Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch 35. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension 36. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind V. Introduction to Contemporary Aesthetics 37. Michel Foucault, This is not a Pipe 38. Jacques Derrida, Restitutions 39. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Image-the Distinct 40. Cornel West, The New Politics of Cultural Difference 41. Jean-François Lyotard, The Sublime and the Avant-Garde 42. Arthur Danto, Three Decades After the End of Art 43. Alexander Nehamas, An Essay on Beauty and Judgment 44. Christine Battersby, The Male Gift 45. Rita Felski, Why Feminsim Doesn't Need an Aesthetic (And Why It Can't Ignore Aesthetics) 46. Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 47. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Percept, Affect, and Concept 48. Alain Badiou, Art and Philosophy 49. Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes

About the Author :
Joseph J. Tanke is based at the University of Hawaii. He has published and lectured extensively on issues in Continental philosophy, with a special emphasis on aesthetics and politics, as well as the works of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière. Professor Tanke was recently named to the editorial board of Philosophy and Social Criticism, and his essays are currently being translated into two other languages. In addition to having studied philosophy in both the United States and Europe, Joseph holds a degree in art history and has worked for several art institutions. Colin McQuillan is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee, USA. He has studied at the Univerzita Karlova in Prague, Czech Republic and the Martin-Luther-Universität in Halle (Saale), Germany, in addition to conducting archival research in Marburg, Göttingen, and Berlin, Germany. 

Review :
…the anthology is valuable; it not only presents a captivating account of the history of aesthetics, but also, as promised by the editors, ‘redraws the picture of aesthetics’ so that a richer landscape emerges. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general readers.