SOURCE: Arregui, Jorge V., and Pablo Arnau. “Shaftesbury: Father or Critic of Modern Aesthetics?” British Journal of Aesthetics 34, no. 4 (October 1994): 350-62.

In the essay below, Arregui and Arnau view Shaftesbury not as the father of modern aesthetics, but as the first great critic of aesthetic modernity.

Shaftesbury is usually considered the father of modern aesthetics and, consequently, only those aspects of his thought specially relevant to later aesthetics—the disinterested attitude, the moral and aesthetic sense, and the sublime—are studied.¹ In this sense, Stolnitz has stressed his importance in engendering the central concept of modern aesthetics: the disinterested attitude.² For Stolnitz, this notion—which is the corner-stone of the independent status acquired by aesthetics in modernity—is specifically modern and has its origin in Shaftesbury's speculations.³

Stolnitz remarks that Shaftesbury is not really in accordance with the concept of aesthetic attitude to which he gave rise; that...