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Aestheticizing Society

Decisive Turns in the History of Philosophical Aesthetics

Aestheticizing Society cover

Aestheticizing Society

Decisive Turns in the History of Philosophical Aesthetics

Description

Aestheticizing Society makes a significant and original contribution to understanding the contemporary aesthetic turn. By examining its constituent layers through crucial stages in the history of philosophical aesthetics, Sverre Raffnsøe situates sensory experience and affective expression as ubiquitously present and decisive.

Moving through previous aesthetic turns including classical prescriptive poetics via Plato, Boileau, and Baumgarten, Raffnsøe highlights the beginnings of modern aesthetics in the relationship between aesthetic experience and expression, and traverses the golden age of aesthetics through Kant, Schiller, and Hegel. The notion of an absolute and autonomous art is explored alongside the development of aesthetic experience that invites the subject to transgress and renegotiate given reality.

What is unique about the current aesthetic moment, Raffnsøe argues, is that human beings now configure their own nature as they relate to an aestheticized society, revealing striking implications of the present aesthetic turn for self-comprehension, the formation of self-revelation and self-transformation.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. The Normative Poetic Approach and Classical Idealism

3. German Idealism: The Golden Age of Aesthetics and Aesthetic Autonomy

4. After Idealism and Absolute Autonomy

5. Truth and Art in the Thought of Heidegger and Adorno

6. Aesthetic Turns

Epilogue: Aesthetic Turns in the Representation of the Landscape

Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 10 Dec 2026
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Pages 320
ISBN 9781350270039
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations 21 illus
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

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