Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface
- ‘Two Cultures’ Revisited
- Rational and Other Animals
- Vico and Metaphysical Hermeneutics
- Three Major Originators of the Concept of Verstehen: Vico, Herder, and Schleiermacher
- Weber's Ideal Types as Models in the Social Sciences
- Verstehen, Holism and Facism
- Interpretation in History: Collingwood and Historical Understanding
- The Meaning of the Hermeneutic Tradition in Contemporary Philosophy
- Science and Psychology
- To Mental Illness via a Rhyme for the Eye
- Can There be an Epistemology of Moods?
- Feeling and Cognition
- Believing in order to Understand
- Data and Theory in Aesthetics: Philosophical Understanding and Misunderstanding
- Anti-Meaning as Ideology: The Case of Deconstruction
- Perictione in Colophon
- Index of Names
Data and Theory in Aesthetics: Philosophical Understanding and Misunderstanding
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface
- ‘Two Cultures’ Revisited
- Rational and Other Animals
- Vico and Metaphysical Hermeneutics
- Three Major Originators of the Concept of Verstehen: Vico, Herder, and Schleiermacher
- Weber's Ideal Types as Models in the Social Sciences
- Verstehen, Holism and Facism
- Interpretation in History: Collingwood and Historical Understanding
- The Meaning of the Hermeneutic Tradition in Contemporary Philosophy
- Science and Psychology
- To Mental Illness via a Rhyme for the Eye
- Can There be an Epistemology of Moods?
- Feeling and Cognition
- Believing in order to Understand
- Data and Theory in Aesthetics: Philosophical Understanding and Misunderstanding
- Anti-Meaning as Ideology: The Case of Deconstruction
- Perictione in Colophon
- Index of Names
Summary
This paper has a twofold structure: both parts concern philosophy's understanding (or misunderstanding) of its data—in the area of aesthetics. The first part (I) considers aesthetics as philosophy of art: the second part (II) considers aesthetics as concerned also with the appreciation of nature.
(a) Philosophers who write aesthetic theories have tended to see the key concepts of their account of the aesthetic as grounded in their distinctive philosophical understanding of basic features of human nature and the human situation. If we ask, what are the ‘data’ on which their aesthetic theories are founded, we have to include their general philosophical vision as well as more specific and concrete components—works of art themselves, critical interpretations, and the aesthetic experiences to which works of art give rise. The philosophical contribution, on such a (traditional) view, remains a highly significant one: we are invited to see aesthetic theory not only as a detached, specialized, abstract selfcontained study that aims only at philosophical insight—but as having a normative relevance to, and potential impact upon, criticism and appreciation of the arts themselves at any time. The foundational key concept or cluster of concepts, that comprises the core of such a theory, such as Mimesis, Expression, Formal Unity, can be employed to commend, to deplore, to correct, trends in art.
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- Information
- Verstehen and Humane Understanding , pp. 235 - 252Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997