The A to Z of Aesthetics by Dabney Townsend

Author:Dabney Townsend
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2006-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

– J –

JAPANESE AESTHETICS. See CHINESE AND JAPANESE AESTHETICS.

JE NE SAIS QUOI. Je ne sais quoi literally means “I know not what.” It came to be used in place of an explanation in early modern aesthetics for that in a work of art that causes the pleasurable response of beauty. Causal explanation was the standard for both empiricist and rationalist theories of beauty and taste, but many writers, while acknowledging that there must be some cause, admitted that they did not know what it was and doubted that it could be discovered. Hence the cause was simply I know not what. The phrase may have been introduced by Nicholas Boileau in his philosophical poem L’art poétique (1674).

JOHNSON, SAMUEL (1709–1784). As a critic, poet, biographer, and the compiler of a famous dictionary, Samuel Johnson achieved the status of the leading English literary man of his age. The club that he formed with Joshua Reynolds included David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and Johnson’s eventual biographer, James Boswell. Johnson himself was immensely influential, but his writings contributed little directly to aesthetics. His taste was conservative and neoclassical but marked by extreme intelligence and a deeply felt personal melancholy that infected all of his writings. In his philosophical tale, Rassalas (1759), he provides an account of the imagination as a powerful force that can mislead as well as inform the mind. His significance for aesthetics is to be found more in his example and influence. Reynolds drew on Johnson’s views for his Discourses, which are among the best 18th-century treatments of painting, and Johnson himself exemplifies the new man of letters who lives by his pen.

JONES, INIGO (1573–1652). Inigo Jones was an important English architect who brought the neo-classical Renaissance style of Andrea Palladio to England in 1616 with his designs for the Queen’s House in Greenwich. Palladian architecture utilized motifs from classical architecture, particularly the frontal façade and columns. Jones’s adaptations were influential not just in moving English architecture away from Jacobean style but also in establishing neo-classical taste in all of the arts. In a sense, architecture led the other arts into a different aesthetic world in which classical models and Renaissance values of individuality and idealized beauty were to dominate for the next 250 years.

JUDGMENT. Aesthetic judgment becomes an issue when the subjectivity of aesthetic experience raises the question of whether and how normative statements about beauty or works of art can be more than matters of personal preference. Initially, the problem is approached on the model of other empirical claims in the new science of the 17th and 18th centuries. Propositions that describe secondary qualities, such as colors and tastes, can be tested even if their causal relations are not the same as the quality as experienced. So aesthetic judgments are modeled on sense theories, and internal senses, such as a sense of beauty, are sought. Aesthetic taste is a form of judgment in criticism and aesthetics that is supposed to work just as the external sense of taste works. The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.