The following study outlines the different aesthetic theories developed by Theodor. W. Adorno, Leo Löwenthal and Herbert Marcuse between 1931 and 1978, describing the work they undertook while members of the Frankfurt School (1931-1942) and relating this to their later writings. A brief explanation is also given of why - in the author's opinion - Walter Benjamin's work should not be included amongst that of the Frankfurt School. The thesis adopts a chronological approach based on immanent, textual analysis of primary source material including unpublished correspondence. The main point of comparison from which the different aesthetics are evaluated is the degree to which they accept the main social theory developed in the School by Max Horkheimer. It is argued that Horkheimer's work was in turn based on Friedrich Pollock's theory of state capitalism. One of the main arguments advanced here is that all the aesthetics constructed before and after 1942 were indeed influenced to a greater or lesser extent by Pollock's theory, an argument which challenges the dominant interpretations of Frankfurt School aesthetic theories which regard them as not being grounded in a theory of the base. The thesis shows that adopting Pollock's social theory created problems for the aesthetic theories and led to the emergence of two different aesthetics: Adorno's aesthetics of mimetic experience and Marcuse's political aesthetics. Löwenthal's essays are judged to form a literary sociology and not an aesthetics as such. The dissertation concludes with the attempt to recuperate Adorno's concept of mimesis as the basis for a Marxist aesthetics.

In 1946, Monroe C. Beardsley and W. K. Wimsatt published an article, “The Intentional Fallacy,” which objected to the critical practice of treating claims about an artist as claims about her work. Thus was inaugurated what today is known as the intentionalism debate. I begin by offering a certain conception of the debate—not quite a novel conception, for it corresponds more or less to what Beardsley and Wimsatt took themselves to be doing, but one which, in recent decades, has increasingly been supplanted by something very different. I argue for the priority of this original conception, which is concerned primarily with the language and norms of criticism, over the more recent conceptions which focus on analyses of meaning. I then propose a view which defends the artist’s relevance against the objections of Beardsley and Wimsatt, so understood. The interest of my view lies in its circumvention of what many have (incorrectly) thought essential to the position to which Beardsley and Wimsatt were objecting.

Due to the pressure to define a contemporary literature, 'High' modernism in English is often presented as a univocal canon of authors and works whose ideals have been identified and surpassed. This study attempts to re-emphasise the diversity of this writing by showing how crises in inherited authority were 'staged' by its aesthetics. The manner of this staging is examined in the writings and programmes of a selected group of authors while a focus is provided by the aesthetics of Ezra Pound. Pound's work is taken to be of especial interest because of the scope of his influence in establishing a 'modern' movement, the extremism of his writing's antagonism to authority, and the ambiguity of critical responses that the politics of his project continue to elicit. Chapter 1 examines the ways in which Pound promotes an 'aesthetics' of history and politics as the key to contemporary revolutionary change, and views his writing through a body of thinking which considers that the artwork, and not authority, might 'found' a modem culture. Chapter 2 treats Pound's metaphysics, showing how 'de-authorised' conceptions of religion, sexuality and language underpin this project. Chapter 3 deals with the writing of T. S. Eliot, and with the particular anti-aesthetics that inhabit his criticism and the draft of The Waste Land. Eliots project is shown to oppose Pound's by defining a desired authority against the power of art, an opposition that Pound's editing of The Waste Land effectively masks. Chapter 4 discusses the 'mass' aesthetics of James Joyce's Ulysses, and shows that the processes of self-interrogation that feature in this work realign the antipathy between art and authority in ways that militate against the ideals of a Poundian art of 'power'. Chapter 5 treats the work of D. H. Lawrence as a site where an empowered art and culture is both overtly promoted and intrinsically challenged. The proximity of Lawrence's programmatic modernism to Pound's is stressed, while an inbuilt antagonism to its own ideals is shown to sharply distinguish the dynamic trajectory of Lawrencean aesthetics from a Poundian art of self-authorisation. While establishing the antagonism between art and authority as a common focus for modernism, this study underlines differences and antipathies that emerge between the projects and texts under discussion, charting the diversity of responses to a commonly felt crisis. The study concludes with a discussion of Pound's post-war poetry, examining the fate of a writer who failed to extend into his own aesthetics the insights that modem crises in authority delivered.

This thesis presents and critically assesses the aesthetic theory of the contemporary German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, in particular his ideas of the intersection of philosophical aesthetics and contemporary culture. The three aspects of his ideas which frame this discussion and which I present in the first chapter are his project for reconfiguring aesthetics as a study of sensory perception, his characterisation of postmodern culture as aestheticised, and his conception of a new focus for aesthetics, the anaesthetic or imperceptible. Welsch's ideas intersect with several key issues in philosophical aesthetics which I outline in the second chapter, namely the status of the sensory and its relationship to the quality of indeterminacy, the subjective and cognitive nature of the aesthetic experience, the idea of the aesthetic as an epistemological ground that is in some way distinct from rational or conceptual knowledge, and finally the aesthetic characterised as an essentially modernist quality of defamiliarisation. The interlocutors here are Alexander Baumgarten, Kant and the Russian Formalists. This is followed in the third chapter by a more focussed discussion of Welsch's ideas on the sublime, a crucial aesthetic category which offers a theoretical background to his ideas on anaesthetics. Welsch reads the sublime as pivotal to the aesthetics of Adorno and the aesthetic thinking of Lyotard, and the main argument in this chapter compares the postmodern fascination with diversity or heterogeneity as values in themselves with a more ideologically informed conception of the cognitive and social function of modern and postmodern art as challenging existing modes of perception. I also read the limit experience of the sublime as a model for the modernist aesthetic of defamiliarisation. A critical discussion of Welsch's own variant of the sublime, the anaesthetic, follows in chapter four. The key issues here are the tensions between Welsch's disparate uses of the term, the ideological implications of each variant, and to what extent each allows a re-engagement of indeterminacy with everyday culture, or tends towards a more autonomous aesthetic. The final two chapters apply Welsch's ideas and the issues raised to examples of art, specifically drama, that operates at the limits of perception. The aim here is to assess whether Welsch's sensory terms offer the articulation of art and contemporary culture, or whether with some modifications they might. An overarching concern of the thesis is to distinguish between the transcendental significance of the aesthetic and its more marginal validity as cultural intervention.

The aim of this thesis is to give a thorough exposition of Santayana's philosophy of art, with a critical commentary using the methods of analytical aesthetics. The subject of the first chapter is the thesis that beauty is objectified pleasure. It is argued that Santayana's views suggest an insight defensible by analytic techniques. The second chapter is concerned to expend Santayana's insights into the role of the materials of a work of art. Chapters III and IV are a consideration of his views on form and expression, respectively. The subjects reviewed are the classification of forms, the sources of pleasure in form, the nature of form, the nature of expression, tragedy, comedy and the sublime. Chapter V is concerned with Santayana's views on the nature and relation of poetry and religion. An outline of an analytic theory of poetry is offered in criticism. Chapter VI deals with the presuppositions of the aesthetics of the Life of Reason period, and with Santayana's view of the nature of art as emergent from instinctive action. Chapter VII is concerned with his views on the aesthetics of music, architecture, the artistic uses of language, painting and sculpture. Neglected insights are stressed, e.g. his theory of the nature of representation. The eighth chapter sets out Santayana's doctrine of the relation of art and morality. Chapter IX deals with late papers and passages on aesthetics reflecting the philosophy of the Realms of Being. The subjects dealt with are: the spiritual life; alleged similarities of doctrine with Proust; his views on Cubism, caricature, and the Aesthetic movement; the varied meanings of the key predicates in aesthetic discourse; his revised formalistic theory of beauty, and scattered remarks in his final work, ‘Dominations and Powers'. The conclusion is that Santayana has far more to offer analytic aestheticians than is generally considered to be the case.

This dissertation defends an answer to the question: to what extent, if any, are aesthetic values in art objective? I defend what I call Moderate Aesthetic Objectivism, which can be summarised as follows. A work of art has a certain aesthetic value if and only if a human critic, in the circumstances ideal for the aesthetic experience of that work, would experience the work as having that aesthetic value. ‘Experience’ here is meant in a broad sense, encompassing imagination and understanding as well as perception. We should regard such a critic as someone who would detect the aesthetic value rather than make it the case that the work had that value. Experiencing a work as being aesthetically valuable in a certain way involves having an aesthetic experience which is itself valuable. Such an experience will be pleasurable, often in complex ways. Although critics in ideal circumstances for the aesthetic experience of a work detect aesthetic values rather than making it the case that the work has certain aesthetic values, the work only has those values because the resultant aesthetic experiences had by such critics are themselves valuable. The aesthetic values of a work are, however, realised by properties of the work which dispose it to cause such valuable aesthetic experiences for humans in the circumstances ideal for the aesthetic experience of the work. Those properties are what is aesthetically valuable in the work, and they are objective in the sense that their existence and character is independent of whether they are detected or responded to. This account therefore retains elements of both subjectivist and objectivist approaches to aesthetic value. It can, I argue, make sense of our conflicting intuitions about the objectivity or subjectivity of aesthetic values in art.

This thesis explores both the conceptual register and tropic play of sculpture as a fine art in some of the key writings of Plato, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. It serves to show how sculpture is both shaped by and reshapes in turn philosophy's explicit register of sculpture as an art form. The central argument within this thesis is that sculpture turns its back on philosophy as soon as philosophy casts sculpture out of its mould. Registering sculpture as a fine art within philosophy reveals that whilst specific examples of sculpture may appear to confirm the conceptual meanings ascribed to it by the philosophers Kant, Herder and Hegel, can equally show its unreliability and inconsistency as an art form. The title of this thesis The Philosophy of Sculpture: The Sculpture of Philosophy serves as a heading for an engagement with an explicit reading of sculpture as a fine ati and the sculptural as a trope. Therefore, the sculpture of philosophy is read as a heading for the presentation of sculpture as an object or art form in the writings of Kant, Herder and Hegel. The philosophy of sculpture appeals to an engagement with the use of the sculptural through the tropes of casting, moulding, sculpting, carving, modelling, shaping and forming in the writing of philosophy. This will show that there is something specifically philosophical about sculpture as a practice. Furthermore, the crossovers between these two approaches highlight the effects they give place to, particularly in the context of reading sculpture through a case study. Therefore, the latter half of this thesis engages with the ways in which the sculptural appears within architectural formations and explores an alternative reading of sculpture in relation to some of the themes generated out of a collaborative project between the philosopher Jacques Derrida and the architect Peter Eisenman.

My primary concern in this thesis is to develop a framework in which classical and modern dance can be analyzed and assessed in philosophical terms. This should not be understood as an endeavour to create a system of values according to which dance should be criticized. What is being attempted is to describe and characterize dance with the tools provided by different aesthetic theories. Moreover dance, and especially ballet (due to its more solid and concrete structure and form), is used as a test - βάσανος (vasanos) in Greek - to help discern the limitations of existing aesthetic theories. At the same time the different criteria that each theory puts forward to identify a work of art are related to the notion of movement, which is central to dance. This process not only enables us to distinguish the elements of this complex form of human action, but also becomes the starting point for the elaboration of a reconfiguration of aesthetic concepts that will enable a sophisticated analysis of the phenomenon of dance. The underlying question throughout is "What makes a particular movement sequence a piece of dance rather than, for example, a piece of gymnastics?" complemented by the question "What makes an everyday life movement a dance movement?" These issues are addressed by considering how the various aesthetic theories can help us make the above distinctions. The different forms of dance are correlated with the aesthetic theories presented. The first notion I consider in this context is mimesis with special reference to Jean-Georges Noverre's account of dance, which has its roots in Aristotle's Poetics. Secondly I consider the notion of beauty - its independence from such notions as 'purposiveness', its lack of 'interest' - as analysed in Kant's Critique of Judgment. The expressive element of dance is explored in the context of R.G. Collingwood's expressivism and John Maftin's inflection of it in relation to dance. Attention to movement leads directly to the notion of form, which is explored in dialogue with André Levinson and Margaret H'Doubler. The thesis concludes by sketching an outline of a new way of approaching, understanding and hence potentially even experiencing dance (as a viewer). Dance is a carrier of a multiplicity of meanings with various contents. In the majority of cases a dance performance seeks to communicate a message to an audience. It is being suggested that dance constitutes a type of language, a communicational system, which has mimetic, expressive and formal elements. The notion of language is understood in later Wittgenstein terms. It is argued that dance comprises a 'form of life.' The elements of this system are facial expressions, movements of hands and arms, shifting of the body; all these reveal to us the quality of experience and feelings of the moving persona. Dance should be understood and appreciated in this particular context.

The main idea of this thesis is to suggest a new type of reading on Aristotle&#039 / s Poetics. Commentators of Poetics tried to relate it to Aristotle&#039 / s ethical treatises. However, in this research, it will be argued that Poetics should be read under the light of Metaphysics. The interpretation proposed here is based on Aristotle&#039 / s understanding of ousia (substance). The ontological status of artifacts in Aristotle&#039 / s philosophy will be examined while inquiring the relationships between Poetics and Metaphysics. Consequently, I will argue that tragedy is an ousia and attemted to show that Aristotle&#039 / s ontological philosophy is applicable to Poetics. Becouse of the fact that Aristotle treats a tragedy as a partial independent being, I will argue in Aristotelian terms that a tragedy should be judged by its intrinsic values, rather than ethical or rhetorical merits.

In an age where the historical event is mediated increasingly through the still and moving image, new stress is placed on the archival image as surviving evidence of and performer of history. Lost Film Found Film asks what the scope is for re-intervention by artists who engage with the documentary archival. What is found in their reappropriation? What is lost in the remix? Through a discussion of key works by Jean-Luc Godard, Hito Steyerl, Harun Farocki, Jayce Salloum, Johan Grimonprez and Eyal Sivan, Lost Film Found Film offers a definition and a description of what I have called the Cinema of Aftermath. I define this as cinema that evolved in the aftermath of the Second World War, that deploys found footage film not only as a form of critique but also as a form of participation in wider historical and political events. I argue that the Cinema of Aftermath comments on politics and is also political. Central to its project is a questioning of the potency of the archival image in both its self-reflexive and wider cultural use. In three chapters, I explore how the Cinema of Aftermath recalibrates the meaning and renews the formal possibilities of the documentary, and analyse the performance of memory, truth and evidence by this aestheticisation of archival image.