The genealogy of aesthetics
Is it body or spirit that makes us appreciate beauty and create art? Ekbert Faas argues that, with occasional exceptions, the mainstream of western thinking about beauty from Plato onwards has greatly overemphasised the spirit. Professor Faas attacks this consensus, and offers instead a radical new pro-sensualist aesthetics.
Print Book, English, 2002
[1st publ.] View all formats and editions
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002
XIII, 439 p. ; 24 cm
9780521811828, 0521811821
912227450
Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Plato's transvaluations of aesthetic values; 2. Proto-Nietzschean opponents to Plato; 3. Late Antiquity, Plotinus, and Augustine; 4. Augustine's Platonopolis; 5. The Middle Ages; 6. The Renaissance; 7. The Renaissance Academy, Ficino, Montaigne, and Shakespeare; 8. Hobbes and Shaftesbury; 9. Mandeville, Burke, Hume, and E. Darwin; 10. Kant's ethicoteleological aesthetics; 11. Kant's midlife conversion; 12. Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx; 13. Marx's Nietzschean moment; 14. Heidegger's 'destruction' of traditional aesthetics; 15. Heidegger contra Nietzsche; 16. Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida; 17. Différance, Freud, Nietzsche, and Artaud; 18. Derrida's mega-transcendentalist Mimesis; 19. Postmodern or Pre-Nietszschean? Derrida, Lyotard, and de Man; 20. The Postmodern revival of the aesthetic ideal; Afterword.
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