Political Aesthetics: Addison and Shaftesbury on Taste, Morals and Society: Political Aesthetics: Addison and Shaftesbury on Taste, Morals and Society KARL AXELSSON london: bloomsbury academic. 2019. pp. 280. £85.00 (HBK).

Endre Szécsényi* (Corresponding Author)

*Corresponding author for this work

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Abstract

Karl Axelsson’s new book belongs to that stream of recent publications which strive to re-interpret and re-evaluate the pre-Kantian period of modern aesthetics. It also challenges and criticizes those, mostly Kantian, conceptions and teleological schemes of interpretation which have been elaborated in Alfred Baeumler’s and Ernst Cassirer’s seminal books of the 1920s and 1930s and applied even in the most recent modern history by Paul Guyer. Axelsson concentrates on two early eighteenth-century British authors of utmost importance, Joseph Addison and The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, who were contemporaries but, to my knowledge, never mentioned each other in their published writings. To various extent, both have been widely acknowledged as crucial figures of the nascent field of aesthetics, thus one can find the innovation of Axelsson’s enterprise not in the selection, but in his effort to re-consider their achievements under the catch phrase ‘political aesthetics’
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)602–605
Number of pages4
JournalBritish Journal of Aesthetics
Volume61
Issue number4
Early online date17 May 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Oct 2021

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