Abstract

By the close of the eighteenth century, many features of Western intellectual history had become incorporated into a coherent body of aesthetic doctrine that soon acquired the standing of tradition. "The three dogmas of aesthetics" is Allen Carlson's fitting designation of the main principles by which I have characterized this theory: that "art consists primarily of objects," that "these objects possess a special status," and that "they must be regarded in a unique way." Held against the practice and experience of the arts, each of these, I claim, is assumptive and misleading.'