The Genealogy of AestheticsIs 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 overemphasised the spirit. The Genealogy of Aesthetics 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. |
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Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Platos transvaluation of aesthetic values | 15 |
ProtoNietzschean opponents to Plato | 28 |
Late antiquity Plotinus and Augustine | 40 |
Augustines Platonopolis | 52 |
The Middle Ages | 64 |
The Renaissance | 75 |
The Renaissance Academy Ficino Montaigne and Shakespeare | 93 |
Marxs Nietzschean moment | 182 |
Contents | 196 |
Heideggers destruction of traditional aesthetics | 199 |
Heidegger contra Nietzsche | 214 |
Heidegger Nietzsche and Derrida | 229 |
Différance Freud Nietzsche and Artaud | 241 |
Derridas megatranscendentalist mimēsis | 257 |
Postmodern or preNietzschean? Derrida Lyotard | 272 |
Hobbes and Shaftesbury | 110 |
Mandeville Burke Hume and Erasmus Darwin | 121 |
Kants ethicoteleological aesthetics | 138 |
Kants midlife conversion | 155 |
Hegel Feuerbach and Marx | 169 |
The postmodern revival of the aesthetic ideal | 286 |
Notes | 318 |
| 388 | |
| 413 | |
Common terms and phrases
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Bibliographic information
| Title | The Genealogy of Aesthetics |
| Authors | Ekbert Faas, Ekbert (York University Faas, Toronto) |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, 2002 |
| ISBN | 0521811821, 9780521811828 |
| Length | 439 pages |
| Subjects | › › History / Social History Juvenile Nonfiction / History / General Literary Criticism / General Philosophy / Aesthetics Philosophy / History & Surveys / General Political Science / History & Theory Psychology / General |
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