Twentieth-Century Aesthetics

Aesthetics continued to be intensively cultivated in all the main schools of twentieth-century philosophy. The following survey emphasizes work that continues to be of interest at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It will focus first on the Anglo-American tradition, including continental work that has fed into it, and then will consider other work in the continental tradition.

Anglo-American Aesthetics

Naturalism, Organicism, Pragmatism

One main line of twentieth-century aesthetics begins with George Santayana's The Sense of Beauty of 1896. Santayana's book was a renewal of the empiricism and naturalism of the eighteenth century undertaken in opposition to the incorporation of aesthetics into speculative metaphysics by philosophers such as Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. Santayana held that beauty is "value positive, intrinsic, and objectified": a pleasurable emotion that is "pure gain" and that we regard as if it were a property of its...