The History of European Aesthetics : Judging Beauty, Ugliness and the Sublime

First published in Spanish in 1988, David Estrada-Herrero's monumental survey of European aesthetics is translated into English for the first time.

Moving across two thousand years of thought and arriving in the 20th century where concepts of ugliness dominate, the story begins in ancient Greece with reflections on beauty by Homer, Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus. Asking what causes changes in taste and judgement, Estrada introduces the traditional aesthetic ideas which went on to shape theories and concepts.

He follows the enormous influence early reflections have had on later philosophers including Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Leonardo da Vinci, Cooper, Addison, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Diderot, Baumgarten, Ingarden, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche.

Discussing popular and lesser-known aestheticians, a new history of aesthetics is brought to life as Collingwood, Hanslick, Heidegger, Croce, Adorno, Bosanquet appear alongside Bell, Benjamin, Hartmann, Rosenkranz, Morawski, Tatarkiewicz, Arnheim Dewey, Beardsley, Gombrich, Hamilton, Osborne, Otto, Malevich and Langer. Throughout Estrada focuses on the two basic fundamentals of aesthetics. Organizing his history into 'The Nature of the Work of Art' and 'Aesthetic Judgment' allows him to cover major subjects such as the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the relation of the aesthetic to the artistic, the functions of art, the distinctions between art and craft, tekhne and art and emotion.

His encyclopedic history of aesthetics plots a fascinating journey from the definition of art to the abstract heights of defining judgment, following the route mapped out by the great 18th-century German aesthetician Alexander Baumgarten.

For anyone looking to understand the origins of the beautiful, the ugly and the sublime, here is the place to start.