Abstract

The present book contains purportedly independent studies of three classics in the history of aesthetics: Lessing's Laocoön, Kant's Critique of Judgment, and Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Savile's commentary attempts to grasp, clarify, and enrich each work's central aesthetic thesis. Savile has a consummate command of art historical materials, but here the art historian takes a back seat to the textual interpreter. The reason for this is Savile's belief that these texts are in need of philosophical reconstruction. The texts present "genuine philosophical challenge[s]," since "the arguments... have to be laboriously retrieved from materials that are for the most part to hand but only dimly visible".