Customer Reviews

Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (Studies in the Humanities: No. 13)

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I am currently working on my own project in aesthetics and hope to teach a course next year. Beardsley's book is a great reference, though I would not use it for a text unless I provided supplements to the class. One needs to see and hear examples of the art being discussed. His discussion of the figures is excellent, yet for an introductory course, one may want to have original sources to read.
What Beardsley does so well is to present every important view in historical context so that the reader gets a good idea of not only what the different views on art are, but why they were developed.
While it may not be a great text, it is a great resource.

I disagree with the previous reviewer. Although it might be possible to write a book that covered only the Major figures in aesthetics--Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc--I found this book very useful in getting a grasp of what has been said in the field of aesthetics throughout history, particularly medieval aesthetics, upon which it is very difficult to find information. In some cases, I don't quite agree with Beardsley's interpretation, but again, this is best read as an introduction to more serious studies in Aesthetics. Ultimately, only the primary sources are going to give you an understanding of their contents.

I used this as a text for an undergraduate course in aesthetics. I would never use it again. Beardsley seems to not understand that one need not include EVERY detail regarding EVERY person who ever made a comment on some issue of aesthetics. The result is a confusing and cluttered read that drowns one in a myraid of loosely related facts. A bigger problem is: I'm not sure that anyone else tries to do what Beardsley does - present a survey, with analysis, of the history of western aesthetics.