#000624
The Problems of Aesthetics
Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger
A substantial mid-century anthology that gathers the great arguments about beauty, art, and taste into one volume. Editors Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger assemble classic and modern essays, Croce on art as intuition, Maritain on defining art, and pieces on the psychology of art, the role of the critic, and the relation of art to science and morality, and frame them with their own introductions to each problem. Rather than push a single theory, the book lays out the field's recurring puzzles: What is a work of art? How do we judge it? What, if anything, does it mean? First published by Rinehart in 1953, it served for years as a standard university reader and remains a compact map of Western aesthetics for anyone who wants the primary voices in one place.
more…less ▴
The editors
Eliseo Vivas (1901–1993) was a Venezuelan-born American philosopher and critic who taught at Northwestern and became a notable conservative voice in mid-century intellectual life. Murray Krieger (1923–2000) went on to become one of the most influential American literary theorists of his generation, a champion of the poem as a self-contained verbal object. Together they were well placed to survey aesthetics as both philosophers and critics.
The book
The Problems of Aesthetics is a reader, not a treatise: its value lies in the selection and the framing. The editors organize the material around enduring questions, definition, expression, form, evaluation, and interpretation, and let major thinkers speak in their own words, from Croce and Maritain to twentieth-century analysts. The apparatus makes it usable as a course text.
How it has aged
The anthology reflects its moment: it leans on the New Criticism and Continental idealism that dominated mid-century, and gives less room to the sociological, feminist, and cognitive approaches that reshaped aesthetics later. As a snapshot of the questions as they stood around 1953, and as a source for hard-to-find primary essays, it holds up; as a current survey it is dated.
For more context
Pair with a modern anthology such as Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology (Cahn and Meskin) to see how the field's questions have shifted.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger
- Publisher
- Rinehart & Company
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1953
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Spirituality & Philosophy
- Location
- Colorado