Author: GERARD (Alexander):
Title: Essai sur le Gout, Augmente De trois Dissertations sur le meme sujet, Par M. de Voltaire, d'Alembert & de Montesquieu. Traduit sure le second Edition Angloise. Par M. AE*** [Marc Antoine Eidous].
Description: A Paris, Chez Delalain..., A Dijon, Chez la Veuve Coignad de la Pinelle...., 1766 FIRST FRENCH TRANSLATION. 12mo, 161 x 92 mms., pp. viii, 306 [307 - 320, Approbation], including half-title, contemporary lightly mottled sheepskin, red leather label, spine ornately gilt to a thistle motifp; some abrasions to covers, but a very good copy. Gerard's Essay on Taste was first published in 1764. The Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Sciences, Manufactures, and Agriculture awarded Gerard's work a gold medal for the best essay on taste in 1756; the work was first published in 1759, and David Hume supervised its publication. An extensive modern discussion of Gerard's book is that of George Dickie, in The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century (1996). He notes that Gerard identifies "thirteen characteristics as valuable in objects of taste - natural or artistic. They are novelty, quantity, simplicity, uniformity, variety, proportion, utility, color less hurtful to the eye, splendor of color, harmony, imitation, incongruity, and virtue." Finding two of these characteristics to be more or less identical, Dickie reduces them to twelves, adding "There are many, many different characteristics - aesthetic and otherwise - that contribute to the value that art and nature have for us from the point of view of taste, and, insofar as Gerard moves in the direction of identifying a larger number of such characteristics than Hutcheson does, his theory is an advance over Hutcheson's."

Keywords: aesthetics philosophy prose Scottish Enlightenment


See more books from our catalog: Aesthetics