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, utilizing 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 offering critiques of 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 context in which practical aesthetics emerged? How did its key figures form a lineage of inheritance and development? What is its theoretical core? What are its sources of thought? 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 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.