Aesthetic Reconstructions

This book presents the central arguments of three of literature's classic texts, Lessing's "Laocoon", Kant's "Critique of Judgment" and Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man". It concentrates on Lessing's defence of medium-constrained canons of judgment, on Kant's search for a rational connection between our subjectively based evidence for aesthetic judgments and the actual content of those judgments, and on Schiller's anti-formalist account of beauty and its place in men's moral development. In each case exposition is conducted hand-in-hand with detailed and textually-based philosophical development and evaluation of its themes. The aim of the book is to enable students of aesthetics to get as much out of the subject's canonical texts as they have to offer, to perceive them in the most generous light possible and to demonstrate how detailed scrutiny of classic texts may assist the development of their readers' own views about issues with which they themselves will be engaged quite apart from any concern they may have with the history of ideas.