Practical Aesthetics - Historical Genealogy and Theoretical Conclusion - Collection of Works by Young and Middle-aged Scholars

Author: Zhang Hui
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-09-01
Features: This book grasps practical aesthetics from a historicalist perspective, utilizing cutting-edge theories to examine it from macro and micro, comparative and contrastive viewpoints, presenting practical aesthetics as an aesthetic trend with logical coherence and historical specificity. It traces the historical origins of practical aesthetics, clarifies its developmental lineage, summarizes its fundamental viewpoints and overall characteristics, and offers critiques of its historical contributions and theoretical shortcomings.
Facing this aesthetic doctrine of practical aesthetics, we must also ask such questions: What is the socio-historical background of its emergence? How did its key figures form a lineage of inheritance and development? What is its theoretical core? What are its intellectual sources? As an aesthetic theory, what value orientations and interpretive validity does practical aesthetics possess? From the perspective of cutting-edge theories and other reference frameworks, what are its shortcomings? How did these shortcomings lead to the loss of its legitimacy? And so on.
In other words, by grasping it from four aspects—historical background, fundamental viewpoints, developmental lineage, and successes and failures—the content that a problem history of practical aesthetics should ideally contain can be clearly presented.