British Idealist Aesthetics, Collingwood, Wollheim, And The Origins Of Analytic Aesthetics

Although Great Britain is the country of some of the earliest contributors to aesthetics as an independent philosophical discipline, from Lord Shaftesbury to Edmund Burke, and the country of John Ruskin, who was probably the greatest and most influential art critic of the 19 century, the subject attracted little interest in philosophical circles towards the turn of the twentieth century. Of course, one must distinguish here aesthetics as a philosophical discipline from art criticism, where the English made many important contributions at the beginning of the 20 century; one need only recall here the names of members of the Bloomsbury group such as Roger Fry or Clive Bell. As John Passmore once pointed out, the journal Mind published only a handful of papers in aesthetics over the twenty-eight years (1892-1920) of G. F. Stout’s editorship (Passmore 1976, 35). British philosophy was then divided between ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’. Within the ‘idealist’ school, which was then dominant, only four men were ever interested in aesthetics. Of these, John Alexander Smith, who was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics at Oxford (thus a predecessor of Collingwood, Ryle, and Strawson), did not publish his essays – they remain unpublished to this day – and another, his student Arthur Ritchie Lord moved to South Africa, and seems to have played only a very minor role. The other British Idealist Aesthetics 2