Art and Enlightenment: Scottish Aesthetics in the 18th Century

During the intellectual and cultural flowering of Scotland in the 18th century few subjects attracted as much interest among men of letters as aesthetics -- the study of art from the subjective perspective of human experience. All of the great philosophers of the age -- Hutcheson, Hume, Smith and Reid -- addressed themselves to aesthetic questions. Their inquiries revolved around a cluster of issues -- the nature of taste, beauty and the sublime, how qualitative differences operate upon the...