The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory: Religion and Morality in Enlightenment Germany and Scotland

Description

Broad in its geographic scope and yet grounded in original archival research, this book situates the inception of modern aesthetic theory - the philosophical analysis of art and beauty - in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose. Simon Grote presents seminal aesthetic theories of the German and Scottish Enlightenments as outgrowths of a quintessentially Enlightenment project: the search for a natural 'foundation of morality' and a means of helping naturally self-interested human beings transcend their own self-interest. This conclusion represents an important alternative to the standard history of aesthetics as a series of preludes to the achievements of Immanuel Kant, as well as a reinterpretation of several canonical figures in the German and Scottish Enlightenments. It also offers a foundation for a transnational history of the Enlightenment without the French philosophes at its centre, while solidly endorsing historians' growing reluctance to call the Enlightenment a secularising movement.

Simon Grote is currently the Wellesley Faculty Assistant Professor of History at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, where he has taught since 2013. He previously spent three years at Princeton University's Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts after graduating with a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley (2010), an M.Phil. in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge (2006) and an A.B. from Harvard College, Massachusetts (2001).

'To be sure, Simon Grote's The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory is an erudite, elaborate, and mature scholarly work.' Endre Szecsenyi, The British Journal of Aesthetics