I am grateful to the several anonymous reviewers whose advice the publisher sought on the new material to include in this expanded edition of a book that first appeared in 1997. I would like to take the opportunity, too, to reiterate my thanks to Peter Lamarque and Crispin Sartwell, the Advisory Editors for that first edition.

The very professional team at Wiley‐Blackwell have been a pleasure to work with. I am especially grateful to Deirdre Ilkson, the Commissioning Editor and Allison Kostka, the Project Editor. Finally, I want to thank my friend, the distinguished Maltese artist, Luciano Micallef, for once again providing a striking image for the cover of a book I have edited.

Aesthetic issues, as this volume of readings shows, have been discussed by philosophers, both Eastern and Western, since classical times. The term “aesthetics,” however, was only coined in the eighteenth century by the German philosopher, Alexander Baumgarten, whose main work, Aesthetica, was published in 1750. Deriving it from the Greek word aesthesis, Baumgarten understood by the term “the science of sensory knowledge” in general and it had no particular reference to the examination of taste, beauty and other concepts that we now think of as aesthetic ones.

It was still in Baumgarten’s sense that Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, used the term in the title of that part of the work, “Transcendental Aesthetic,” that addressed what Kant saw as the conditions – space and time – of all sensory experience. But it was Kant, too, who in his 1790 work, Critique of Judgement, did most to establish the now familiar use of the word. For in this immensely influential work, what Kant called aesthetic judgements were judgements of taste that registered, above all, the appreciation of beauty. A concern with beauty was central, five years later, to Friedrich Schiller’s letters on The Aesthetic Education of Man, while a few decades after this G.W.F. Hegel gave the title Aesthetics to his Berlin lectures on “the philosophy of fine art.”

This potted history of the term “aesthetics” is enough to indicate that the branch of philosophy to which it now refers is something of a hybrid. For Hegel and his followers, aesthetics is essentially the philosophy of art, while for Kant and those who follow him, it is first and foremost philosophical reflection on a range of attitudes and judgements involved in the appreciation of beauty and other aesthetic qualities. Plato’s question about the moral and political responsibility of artists and poets will belong to aesthetics on the Hegelian understanding of the subject, but not perhaps on the Kantian. Conversely, reflection on the beauty of natural phenomena will belong to the subject on Kant’s understanding but not, it seems, if aesthetics is the same as philosophy of art.

The difference between the two understandings is not a merely semantic one, for it reflects substantial disagreements. For Hegel, to use the same term for the study of the appreciation both of artworks and of nature would disguise fundamental differences between the two kinds of appreciation. For Kant, by contrast, distinctions between art and nature are secondary, for the same sort of pleasure may be taken both in a painting of flowers and in the flowers themselves.

That said, the differences between the two approaches should not be exaggerated and they do not render the label “Aesthetics” useless or even ambiguous. For one thing, works of art are clearly among the things that people aesthetically enjoy – so there is going be to a significant overlap between philosophy of art and reflection on aesthetic appreciation. Second, it is rarely obvious if a philosophical question about art is entirely independent of ones about appreciation – or vice‐versa. The question of whether art should be morally beneficial, for instance, cannot be settled without considering the debate between those who claim and those who deny that aesthetic enjoyment of something has nothing to do with its moral qualities. Equally, issues about the appreciation of natural environments will not be independent of art history if there is truth in the idea – espoused by theorists of “The Picturesque” and Oscar Wilde alike – that experience of art necessarily shapes people’s perceptions of nature. Third, many questions asked by aestheticians – including such favorites as “Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?” – are very general ones that encompass art and nature appreciation alike. Finally, whatever the eventual verdict on the dispute between Kant and Hegel, it is one that itself very much belongs to the subject matter of aesthetics. “‘Natural objects cannot be appreciated in the manner of works of art.’ Discuss.” is a question that often figures on aesthetics exam papers.

In this volume of readings – as in most philosophy departments – an accommodating, catholic attitude is adopted to the scope of aesthetics. Some of the selected texts, like Plato’s and Arthur Danto’s, discuss art but not aesthetic judgement. Others, like Plotinus’s and Kant’s, discuss beauty and appreciation, but not art. Several others, unsurprisingly, discuss all of these.

My account, in terms of the influences exerted by Kant and Hegel, of how the subject matter of aesthetics came to be understood is familiar and helps to explain the variety of issues covered. To say that this subject matter is the philosophy of art and reflection on aesthetic experience is not intended, though, as a sharp definition. It can only be as sharp as the notions of art and aesthetic experience themselves are – that is, not very. It might seem that such lack of clarity impugns the integrity of aesthetics, but this is not so. For one thing, attention to such fuzzy notions and the attempt to clarify them become an important part of the subject itself. Second, there are plenty of questions that can be raised in relation to art and aesthetic experience which do not presuppose that these are sharp, homogenous notions – questions about, say, music’s capacity to express feeling, or the respective responsibilities of artist and audience for the response to an art work.

When, as in this volume, the concern is not with contemporary journal literature but with classic texts that have shaped modern discussion, it is insufficient simply to demarcate, however crudely, the area of aesthetics. It is necessary, as well, to attend to why and how these earlier philosophers addressed issues in this area. In keeping with the general tenor of contemporary philosophy, today’s aestheticians tend to operate with a fine scalpel, working on specific problems – about, for example, representation or expression – without invading the large areas which surround them. But when great metaphysicians like Kant and Hegel discuss art or aesthetic judgement, it is very much the larger scene which concerns them. For Hegel, the main questions about art relate to its status, in relation to religion and philosophy, as a vehicle of truth, and its place and significance within the culture of a people. For Kant, aesthetic experience is important, first and foremost, for what it shows about the nature of human beings, their mental faculties, and their place in the universe. In this largeness of vision, not only Kant and Hegel, but many other philosophers represented in this volume, are engaged in a more ambitious enterprise than most contemporary aestheticians.

What will surely strike readers about many of the texts I have selected – from Plato and Hsun Tzu to Dewey and Heidegger – are the attempts their authors make to place art or aesthetic experience. By this, I mean the efforts made, inter alia, to explore the religious significance of art, to identify the role artworks play within the life of a community, to gauge whether aesthetic experience is “natural” or something which enables human beings to transcend their natural condition, and to measure the value of art against other values, notably those of morality. For example, it was Schiller’s ambition to show that “aesthetic play” is capable of harmonizing the cognitive and sensual aspects of our existence that are ordinarily in tragic conflict with one another. Again, A.K. Coomaraswamy argues, in keeping with Indian tradition, that aesthetic pleasure is indicative of the religious sense of a universe that is a beautiful whole.

Many of the texts manifest the conviction that art and aesthetic appreciation are at once profoundly important yet deeply puzzling – phenomena that really should not occur at all on familiar, “naturalistic” pictures of human evolution, and hence call for correspondingly deep explanation. That people should want to titivate and enjoy their surroundings is no great puzzle. But whatever the explanation of this desire, it does not go far in accounting for the passions and energies dedicated to the making and appreciation of works of art, whose connection with the practicalities and ornamentation of life is often remote. It explains even less the enormous significance that people in nearly every culture have attached to the making of artworks and to the capacity to appreciate not only these, but the forms of the natural world as well.

Hence the efforts, alluded to above, to explain or “place” the aesthetic by rooting it in some less puzzling, more obviously “natural,” dimension of life – the desire for order, say, as John Dewey suggests – or, alternatively, by construing it, like Clive Bell, as indicative of our not being purely “natural” creatures after all, but ones who also occupy a more exalted realm of which art and beauty offer us intimations. Hence, too, the attempts – by Plato, Mo Tzu, Walter Pater and Tolstoy, for instance ‐ to decide whether it is sensible to devote so much energy to art and its appreciation, and to assign them such importance, given the existence of moral and other pressing demands on our attention.

One should recognize, but not exaggerate, differences between aesthetics as practiced by the authors in this reader and as worked on by contemporary aestheticians. Not all of the latter, after all, are preoccupied with technical problems at the expense of a larger vision of human existence. And not all of the classic texts I have included are concerned with the relation of art and aesthetic experience to the human condition or the order of things. David Hume’s essay, for example, focuses on the subjectivity or otherwise of people’s aesthetic judgements. In several texts, moreover, issues which tend to preoccupy today’s aestheticians are not ignored, even if they are touched upon more lightly. For instance, Tolstoy is primarily interested in questioning the esteem in which art is held, but in the course of doing so offers a brief analysis of artistic expression with which every subsequent analysis has had to engage. Again, R.G. Collingwood – when distinguishing between art and craft and discussing the role of the imagination – proposes a view of the status of artworks, as being mental entities, that has prompted subsequent attention to such ontological questions as “What is a sonata? A score? Its performances? Or what?” Finally, included in this second edition of the volume are two articles from the 1960s – by Arthur Danto and R.W. Hepburn, on the concept of art and nature appreciation respectively – that set the agenda for discussion of these topics in the ensuing decades.

If some of the themes important to aestheticians of the past receive little attention today, this is no reason to ignore the earlier texts, for perhaps the themes in question deserve more attention. Indeed, in the twenty years since the first edition of this volume was published, renewed interest in certain topics once central to aesthetics is precisely what has taken place. During much of the twentieth century, that most famous of traditional aesthetic concepts – beauty – was largely ignored. “Beauty is dead,” declared the Dadaists, and certainly the creation of works of beauty was not the ambition of most of the best‐known artists of the period. Over the last few years, however, not only has beauty once more become a respectable aspiration of artists, but a cascade of books and articles on the concept have appeared. Similar remarks could be made about the concept of the sublime. Rarely discussed by philosophers since the time of Kant and Schopenhauer, it is once again a subject of attention, a main theme in the aesthetics of nature. Again, the idea – mooted by Herder in the eighteenth century and taken up by Martin Heidegger in the 1930s – that the identity of a people is partly forged by its paradigmatic works of art – is being revisited, too, by contemporary aestheticians and historians.

The present anthology differs from most by restricting the texts to ones that appeared no later than fifty years ago. Some of these texts are self‐selecting: it is impossible to imagine a volume meriting the title Classic Readings which did not include, for example, Plato on mimesis, Hume on taste and Kant on aesthetic judgement. But, in other cases, principles of selection have been at work, not just personal predilection.

First, and most obviously, each text needed to be a “classic” in the sense that it is both well‐known and an unquestioned influence on later writings. All the texts I have selected certainly pass that test, and if the Indian and East Asian pieces are not known to Western readers, they nevertheless enjoy “classic” status within their own traditions. This indicates a second principle: that the texts should not belong exclusively to the Western tradition. It is a matter for regret that few English‐language writers and anthologists show any recognition that reflection on art and beauty also took place east of Suez. The Chinese and Japanese traditions in aesthetics are rich and continuous, and I have included four texts belonging to them. The Indian tradition is less rich, perhaps, in this area of philosophy than in others, and I did not judge any of the texts from the classical era of Indian aesthetics suitable for inclusion. Partial amends are made by adding two chapters of a book by the influential twentieth‐century thinker, A.K Coomaraswamy, that expounds and develops this tradition.

Third, I have aimed for variety in both the topics addressed and the approaches adopted. There are many classic texts – by St. Augustine, Francis Hutcheson, and Friedrich Nietzsche, for example – that are not included on the ground that they would have too closely shadowed ones that are included. I have tried, as well, to ensure that each major art form is given its due, for of course the different forms give rise to their own distinctive problems. Thus, it is his remarks on music, not the visual arts, which have been chosen from Schopenhauer: otherwise this philosophically intriguing art would have been only scantily covered. (The two Chinese pieces on “music” are really about the arts in general.) Some of the texts, it’s worth noting, are by practitioners of one or more of the arts – the visual artists Leonardo da Vinci and Shih‐t’ao, for example, and the writers Oscar Wilde and Junichirō Tanizaki.

Finally, I have avoided texts that, however historically and philosophically significant, are so full of technicalities or obscure prose as to be inaccessible to non‐specialist readers. Some of the authors represented – Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, for example – are notoriously difficult, but fortunately they tend to be on their least offensive stylistic behavior when writing about aesthetics. While none of them is easy going, neither, with the guidance of a lecturer, are they beyond the reach of students new to the subject.

This volume aims to acquaint students with classic texts in the history of aesthetics. That it has a history, in the sense of not having sprung up over the last few years – in the manner, say, of the philosophy of artificial intelligence – is apparent from the very existence of those texts. Aesthetics is also historical in the more interesting sense of inviting cogent narratives of earlier theories and concepts being developed or disowned by later thinkers, and of traditions in which certain problems are seen to be central. Hence I often indicate, in my preambles to the texts, a given philosopher’s debt to or legacy to other philosophers. Sometimes the debt is obvious – Plotinus’s to Plato, for instance, or Schopenhauer’s to Kant. But even where it is less certain, it can be illuminating to read a text as if it were a reply to an earlier one or helped to shape a later perspective.

I referred just now to narratives in the plural, for there are some genuinely radical breaks in the history of aesthetics, moments when problems arise or ideas are generated that were foreign to previous times. The questions addressed by Hume and Kant about the subjectivity versus objectivity of taste could only have arisen in anything like the form they did after the burgeoning of science and “modern” philosophy in the seventeenth century. They are questions that did not, and could not have, taxed the Greek writers represented. Shih‐t’ao’s seventeenth‐century Quotes on Painting, directed as they are against a long and, as he saw it, exhausted tradition of painting, raises questions about the role of the artist that could not have been salient for those who founded and continued that tradition. The same is true of Arthur Danto’s seminal article, “The Artworld,” for it responds to a “crisis” in the understanding of art caused by avant‐garde gestures like those of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol.

There is, then, no single “grand narrative” of aesthetics, no continuous story to be told, from the beginnings of philosophy to the present, of the fate of a single set of issues and concepts. One might guess as much, to recall my earlier remarks, from the fact that “aesthetics” is a relatively recent coinage. For this indicates that it is only in the modern period that philosophers have thought of the many questions that can be raised about art, beauty, creativity, imagination, expression, and much else, as constituting even a relatively unified set of issues. Whether or not that thought is a compelling one is another matter. It can seem odd to us that that eminently artistic people, the Greeks, had no term remotely equivalent to our “art.” The nearest was techne, but this applied not only to the arts but to many other crafts and skills, including those of soldiering and horsemanship – as is the case, too, with Chinese and Japanese terms sometimes translated as “art.” Yet there are many writers today who find it perverse – the product of historical accident or, as Dewey suggests, of the bourgeoisie’s urge to separate its pleasures from those of the masses – that such disparate creations as The Ring of the Nibelungen, Hamlet, Guernica and a Persian carpet should all be included in a single category, art, from which rock songs, Mills & Boon novels, saucy postcards and “flying ducks” above the mantelpiece are excluded. For these writers, art is an artificial category and, therefore, so is the notion of the aesthetic. Their view, ironically, does not threaten the future of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy, for it is one that inevitably becomes part of the subject matter of aesthetics. “‘There is no such thing as the aesthetic.’ Discuss.” is another question you will find on aesthetics exam papers.

To judge from the number of writings appearing on aesthetics and the number of students signing up for aesthetics courses, the subject seems assured of a buoyant future – more so, indeed, than when the first edition of this volume appeared. Certainly it suffered neglect, at least in the English‐language world, for several decades in the twentieth century, falling victim to the emaciated conceptions of philosophy embraced by the logical positivists and the analysts of “ordinary language.” If aesthetic discourse, as the positivists held, is “cognitively meaningless” and merely “emotive,” or if the philosopher’s legitimate interest in it is confined merely to clarification, then aesthetics is not a subject to quicken the blood.

Such meager conceptions of philosophy at large, and of aesthetics in particular, are no longer entertained by many philosophers. One welcome result of this has been a renewed interest in the history of aesthetics, in the writings of people whose agenda was both very different from and much richer than anything allowed by the positivists and analysts. This renewed interest has been an important strand in the recovery of aesthetics from its Cinderella status and one which is served by the present volume.