Practical Aesthetics (Historical Genealogy and Theoretical Conclusion)

Author: Zhang Hui
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-09-01
Features: This book grasps practical aesthetics from a historicalist perspective, employing cutting-edge theories to examine it from macro and micro, comparative and contrastive viewpoints. It presents practical aesthetics as an aesthetic trend with logical coherence and historical specificity, tracing its historical origins, clarifying its developmental lineage, summarizing its fundamental viewpoints and overall characteristics, and commenting on its historical contributions and theoretical shortcomings. In the face of this aesthetic doctrine, we must also ask such questions: What is the social and historical background of the emergence of practical aesthetics? 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 orientation and interpretive validity does practical aesthetics possess? From the perspective of cutting-edge theories and other reference frameworks, what are the shortcomings of practical aesthetics? How did these shortcomings lead to the loss of its legitimacy? Etc. In other words, by grasping practical aesthetics from four aspects—historical background, fundamental viewpoints, developmental lineage, and successes and failures—the content that a problem-oriented history of practical aesthetics should encompass can be clearly presented.