Art, Beauty And Imitation. An Outline Of Aesthetics

This book is a historical introduction to the main topics of aesthetics. It presents some ideas of main philosophers which are a constitutive part of the contemporary experience of works of art and beauty. Our ideas about art and beauty indeed are not only our individual and personal conceptions, but they come from a millenarian tradition, even if we are not aware of it. This book deals with some philosophical questions related to our experience of artworks: what has art to do with truth? What does art have to do with moral? Are works of art imitations of reality? The comprehension of the great philosophers of the past is intended to develop the critical skills of the reader, and supply him with conceptual tools so that he can understand questions regarding his actual experience of works of art and the current trends of culture. Paolo Euron teaches in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Turin. He has written several books; on aesthetics and romantic philosophy: Artifice of Eternity (Bologna, 2002), Transcendental Poetry (Turin, 2003) and on modern philosophy: Nietzsche’s Birth of Truth (Rome, 2005), Hegel’s Earliest System-Programme of the German Idealism (Turin, 2007). He obtained his PhD in Aesthetics at the University of Bologna. He has done research in Germany at the Universities of Stuttgart and Tübingen and at Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach and in England at the Warburg Institute, London. He has been a visiting scholar at the Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok.