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“For those of us who want to know what philosophers have said about beauty and the arts, this book will be especially useful.”- <i>Philosophical Review</i>;<br /><br />“Beardsley’s book accomplishes to perfection what the writer intended. It illuminates an area of history from a certain perspective as was never done before. . . . The distinguishing feature of his book is a n excitement over everything I aesthetics that has to do with symbols, meanings, language, and modes of interpretation. And this excitement has brought to light facets of the history of the subject never noticed before, or at least, not so clearly.”- <i>Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism</i>
Before the publication of Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present there were three histories of aesthetics in English—Bosanquet's pioneering work, the second part of Croce's Aesthetic in the Ainsle translation, and the comprehensive volume by Gilbert and Kuhn. While each of these is interesting in its own ways, and together they cover a good deal of ground, none of them is very new. Thus none could take advantage of recent work on many important philosophers and periods and bring into a consideration of the past the best concepts and principles that have been developed by present-day philosophy.
In Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present the author seeks to bring these principles to the forefront in exploring the history of aesthetics.