Blackwell Reference Online

This second edition of A Companion to Aesthetics examines questions that were among the earliest discussed by ancient philosophers, such as the nature of beauty and the relation between morality and art, while also addressing a host of new issues prompted by recent developments in the arts and in philosophy, including coverage of non-Western art traditions and of everyday and environmental aesthetics. It also canvases debates regarding the nature of representation, the relation between art and truth, and the criteria for interpretation, which are among the most hotly discussed topics in contemporary philosophy.

In this extensively revised and updated edition, 168 alphabetically arranged articles provide comprehensive treatment of the main topics and writers in aesthetics. Major additions include historical overviews from the prehistoric to the present and a section on the individual arts. A Companion to Aesthetics will serve students of philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural studies – as well as the educated general reader – both as a work of reference and, with its many substantial essays, as a guide to the best thinking about the arts from the ancient Greeks to the dawn of the twenty-first century.