The Insistence of Art: Aesthetic Philosophy after Early Modernity

by Paul A. Kottman (Editor)

Overview

Philosophers working on aesthetics have paid considerable attention to art and artists of the early modern period. Yet early modern artistic practices scarcely figure in recent work on the emergence of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy over the course the eighteenth century. This book addresses that gap, elaborating the extent to which artworks and practices of the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries were accompanied by an immense range of discussions about the arts and their relation to one another.

Rather than take art as a stand-in for or reflection of some other historical event or social phenomenon, this book treats art as a phenomenon in itself. The contributors suggest ways in which artworks and practices of the early modern period make aesthetic experience central to philosophical reflection, while also showing art’s need for philosophy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823275731
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	04/03/2017
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Paul Kottman is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Love as Human Freedom(forthcoming), Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe, and A Politics of the Scene.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Paul A. Kottman

Victoria Kahn, Allegory, Poetic Theology and Enlightnment Aesthetics

Rachel Eisendrath, Object Lessons: Reification and Renaissance Epitaphic Poetry

Andrew Cutrofello, The Idea of Meaphysical Poetry

Kristin Gjesdal, Literature, Prejudice, Historicity: The Philosophical Significance of Herder's Shakespeare Studies

Paul A. Kottman, Reaching Conclusions: Art and Philosophy in Hegel and Shakespeare

Lydia Goehr, 'All Art Constantly Aspires to the Condition of Music' —Except the Art of Music: Reviewing the Contest of the Sister Arts

Maarten Delbeke, The Beauty of Architecture at the end of the 17th century between Paris, Greece, and Rome

Jon R. Snyder, Strokes of Wit: Theorizing Beauty in Baroque italy

Anthony J. Cascardi, Goya: Secularization and the Aesthetics of Belief

J.M. Bernstein, Remembering Isaac: On the Impossibility and Immorality of Faith

Editorial Reviews

This Hegelian approach... of showing the development of practices as philosophically relevant in themselves is perhaps a path that should be followed in future dialogues between philosophy and art.

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

The story that is so often told about the origins of aesthetics excludes the early modern period because, supposedly, its artworks remained dependent on religion, moral instruction, and other self-evidently authoritative cultural practices. The Insistence of Art resets that discussion by describing the freedom of art precisely in terms of its ability to solicit relations with what lies beyond it and thereby to call its own limits into question.

Renaissance Quarterly

A superb and timely collection—rigorous wide-ranging essays demonstrating some of the most compelling trends in their respective fields. It's the sort of collection that gives substance and urgency to interdisciplinary thinking.

Williams College - Christopher Pye

This collection on early modern aesthetics of doesn't just fill a gap: In its emphatic refusal to cordon off the Renaissance, and in its conviction that art is no passive mirror but a 'matrix through which social reality is established,' it is a welcome corrective. Dante and Ficino, Donne and Shakespeare, Bellori and Caravaggio, Goya and Pater—with Herder, Hegel, Paul de Man and Kierkeegard making memorable cameos—populate an early modernity that looks ahead to modernism.

University of Chicago - Andrei Pop

This collection on early modern aesthetics of doesn't just fill a gap: In its emphatic refusal to cordon off the Renaissance, and in its conviction that art is no passive mirror but a 'matrix through which social reality is established,' it is a welcome corrective. Dante and Ficino, Donne and Shakespeare, Bellori and Caravaggio, Goya and Pater—with Herder, Hegel, Paul de Man and Kierkeegard making memorable cameos—populate an early modernity that looks ahead to modernism.——Andrei Pop, University of Chicago

A superb and timely collection—rigorous wide-ranging essays demonstrating some of the most compelling trends in their respective fields. It's the sort of collection that gives substance and urgency to interdisciplinary thinking.——Christopher Pye, Williams College

From the Publisher