- Art Criticism
Art criticism is the written discussion or evaluation of visual art. Art critics usually criticize art in the context of aesthetics or the theory of beauty. One of criticism's goals is the pursuit of a rational basis for art appreciation. Though critiques of art may have lasted as long as art itself, art criticism as a genre refers to a systematic study of art performed by scholars and dedicated students of art and art theory. - Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke (January 12, 1729 - July 9, 1797) was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist, and philosopher, who served for many years in the British House of Commons as a member of the Whig party. He is mainly remembered for his support of the American colonies in the dispute with King George III and Great Britain that led to the American Revolution and for his strong opposition to the French Revolution. - Arthur Danto
Arthur Coleman Danto (b. 1924) is an American art critic, professor and philosopher. Arthur C. Danto was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1924, and grew up in Detroit. After spending two years in the Army, Danto studied art and history at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) and then pursued graduate study in philosophy at Columbia University. From 1949 to 1950, Danto studied in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship under Maurice Merleau-Ponty, … - Leni Riefenstahl
Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl was a German film director, dancer and actress, and widely noted for her aesthetics and advances in film technique. Her most famous film was "Triumph des Willens", a documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg congress of the Nazi Party, which was used by the Third Reich as a powerful propaganda film. Because of Riefenstahl's social prominence in the Third Reich, including a personal acquaintance with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, … - Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who wrote influential works of literary and rhetorical theory and criticism. His works, dealing with a variety of subjects, have inspired groups of thinkers such as neo-Marxists, structuralists, and semioticians, who have all incorporated Bakhtinian ideas into theories of their own. - Nelson Goodman
Henry Nelson Goodman (7 August 1906, Somerville, Massachusetts - 25 November 1998, Needham, Massachusetts) was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism and aesthetics. - Stanley Cavell
Stanley Louis Cavell (born September 1, 1926) is an American philosopher. He is the Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. - Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce (February 25, 1866 - November 20, 1952) was an Italian critic, idealist philosopher, and politician. He wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy of history and aesthetics, and was a prominent liberal, although he opposed laissez-faire free trade. His influence on Antonio Gramsci is quite notable. - Kenneth Burke
Kenneth Burke (May 5 1897-November 19 1993) was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics. - John Hospers
John Hospers (born 9 June 1918) is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. Hospers earned advanced degrees from the University of Iowa and Columbia University and taught in the fields of philosophy and aesthetics. Early in his career he taught philosophy at Brooklyn College and at California State University, Los Angeles. Hospers' books include: "Meaning and Truth in the Arts" (1946), … - Clive Bell
Arthur Clive Heward Bell (September 16, 1881 - September 18, 1964) was an English Art critic, associated with the Bloomsbury group. - Richard Wollheim
Richard Arthur Wollheim (5 May, 1923 - 4 November, 2003) British philosopher noted for original work on mind and emotions, especially as related to the visual arts. The son of an actress and a theatre impressario, Richard Wollheim attended Westminster School, London and Balliol College, Oxford (1941-2, 1945-8), interrupted by active military service in World War II. After taking a first class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, he received an M.A. in 1949. - Richard Shusterman
Richard Shusterman is an American pragmatist philosopher, currently the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University. He is internationally known for his contributions to philosophical aesthetics. - George Dickie
George Dickie (born 1926 in Palmetto, Florida) is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at University of Illinois at Chicago and one of the most influential philosophers of art working in the analytical tradition. His institutional theory of art inspired both supporters who produced variations on the theory as well as detractors. One of his more influential works is "The Century of Taste," an inquiry into several eighteenth-century philosophers' treatments of the subject. - Abhinavagupta
Abhinavagupta (fl. c. 975 - 1025) was one of India's great literary critics and philosophers. He was born in Kashmir and he wrote on Shaivism, aesthetics, music, and a variety of other subjects. His two famous commentaries on poetry, drama, and dance, the Locana on the Dhvanyaloka and the Abhinavabharati on the Natyasastra engage with almost every important aspect of Indian aesthetics. In their book Santarasa (published by Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona, … - Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth (born January 31, 1945 Toledo, Ohio) is an influential American conceptual artist. Kosuth studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His work generally strives to explore the nature of art, focusing on ideas at the fringe of art rather than on producing art "per se". - Joseph Nechvatal
Joseph Nechvatal (born 1951) is a post-conceptual digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses. He started this work in 1986. - Susan Stewart
Susan Stewart is an American poet, university professor and literary critic born in 1952. She teaches the history of poetry, aesthetics, and the philosophy of literature, most recently at Princeton University. Recent works of criticism include "Poetry and the Fate of the Senses", (winner of the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism in 2003 from Phi Beta Kappa and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2004), … - Roman Ingarden
Roman Witold Ingarden, a Polish philosopher, working in the fields of phenomenology, ontology, and aesthetics. Before the second World War, Ingarden published his works mainly in German, and during WWII he switched to Polish, therefore his major works on ontology went largely unnoticed by the wider philosophical community. - Susie Bright
Susannah "Susie" Bright (also known as Susie Sexpert) (born March 25, 1958, Arlington, Virginia) is a writer, speaker, teacher, audio show host, performer, all on the subject of sexuality. She is one of the first writers/activists referred to as a sex-positive feminist. She has a weekly program entitled "In Bed with Susie Bright" distributed through audible.com, where she discusses a variety of social, freedom of speech and sex-related topics. - Ekkehard Ehlers
Ekkehard Ehlers is an electronic music artist. In addition to his solo career, he has recorded under the name Auch, and also with the duo Autopoesies and the group März. A BBC reviewer wrote of Ehlers music: "Ehlers' music toys with your perceptions a little, opening up a space to think" Ehlers became interested in aesthetic theory, particularly the work of Theodor Adorno, as a university student in Frankfurt. - Hugh Kenner
Hugh Kenner (January 7, 1923 - November 24, 2003), was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor. Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics. Kenner attributed his interest in literature to his poor hearing, caused by a bout of influenza during his childhood. Attending the University of Toronto, Kenner studied under Marshall McLuhan, who wrote the introduction to Kenner's first book "Paradox in Chesterton". - Monroe Beardsley
Monroe Curtis Beardsley (10 December 1915-September 1985) was an American philosopher of art. He is best known for his work in aesthetics as a champion of the instrumentalist theory of art and the concept of aesthetic experience. Beardsley was elected president of the American Society for Aesthetics in 1956. He also wrote an introductory text on aesthetics and edited a well-regarded survey anthology of philosophy. - G. H. Hardy
Professor Godfrey Harold Hardy FRS (February 7, 1877 - December 1, 1947) was a prominent English mathematician, known for his achievements in number theory and mathematical analysis. He was called "Harold" by a few close friends, and otherwise "G. H.". Non-mathematicians usually know him for "A Mathematician's Apology", his essay from 1940 on the aesthetics of mathematics. - Alexander Nehamas
Alexander Nehamas (born 1946) is a professor of philosophy and comparative literature at Princeton University. He works on Greek philosophy, aesthetics, Nietzsche, Foucault, and literary theory. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1967, and completed his doctorate on Predication in Plato's "Phaedo" under the direction of Gregory Vlastos at Princeton in 1971. - Richard Meltzer
Richard Meltzer (born May 11, 1945) was one of the earliest rock music critics. His first book was "The Aesthetics of Rock", which evolved out of his undergraduate studies in Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and graduate studies at Yale University. At school, he developed a reputation as something of a prankster, although his actions were closer to the spirit of performance art happenings promoted by one of his professors, Allan Kaprow, … - Nicholas Wolterstorff
Nicholas Wolterstorff (born January 21, 1932 in Bigelow, Minnesota) is the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, and Fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University. A prolific writer with wide-ranging philosophical and theological interests, he has written books on metaphysics, aesthetics, political philosophy, epistemology and theology and philosophy of religion. - Michael Oakeshott
Michael Joseph Oakeshott (11 December 1901 - 19 December 1990) was an English philosopher with particular interests in political thought, the philosophy of history, education, and religion, and aesthetics. He is now regarded as one of the significant conservative thinkers of the twentieth century - Bernard Bosanquet
Bernard Bosanquet (July 14, 1848, Alnwick, Northumberland, England - February 8, 1923, London) was an English philosopher and political theorist, and an influential figure on matters of political and social policy in late 19th and early 20th century Britain. His work influenced - but was later subject to criticism by - many thinkers, notably Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and William James. Bernard was the husband of Charity Organisation Society leader Helen Bosanquet. - Minor White
Minor Martin White was an American photographer born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. White earned a degree in Botany with a minor in English from the University of Minnesota in 1933. His first creative efforts were in poetry, as he took five years thereafter to complete a sequence of 100 sonnets while working as a waiter and bartender at the University Club. In 1938, White moved to Portland, Oregon. There he began his career in photography, first joining the Oregon Camera Club, … - Christopher Janaway
Christopher Janaway (BA, DPhil Oxon), is a philosopher and author. Before moving to Southampton in 2005, Chris Janaway taught at the University of Sydney and Birkbeck, University of London. His recent research has been on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and aesthetics. He is currently completing a book on Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals". - Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (July 17, 1714 - May 26, 1762) was a German philosopher. He was a follower of Leibniz and Christian Wolff, and gave the term "aesthetics" its modern meaning. Baumgarten was born in Berlin as the fifth of seven sons of the pietist pastor of the garrison, Jacob Baumgarten and his wife Rosina Elisabeth. Both his parents died early and he was taught by Martin Georg Christgau where he learned Hebrew and got interested in Latin Poetry. - Hermann von Helmholtz
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (August 31, 1821 - September 8, 1894) was a German physician and physicist. In the words of the 1911 Britannica, "his life from first to last was one of devotion to science, and he must be accounted, on intellectual grounds, as one of the foremost men of the 19th century." Helmholtz is notable in a number of areas of science. In physiology, he is known for his mathematics of the eye, theories of vision, … - Moritz Schlick
Moritz Schlick was a German philosopher and the founding father of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle. Schlick was born in Berlin to a wealthy family. He studied physics at Heidelberg, Lausanne, and, ultimately, the University of Berlin under Max Planck. In 1904, he completed his dissertation essay, "Über die Reflexion des Lichts in einer inhomogenen Schicht" ("On the Reflection of Light in a Non-Homogeneous Medium"). - Bill Martin
Bill Martin is a professor of Philosophy at DePaul University is best known for his work on Derrida, Sartre, Marxist theory, Aesthetics, and his critiques of Richard Rorty. Martin has written a few books on the subject of Prog Rock and bands like Yes. He also considers himself a Maoist; however rejects certain dogmatic princples of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. He has certain affinity to the work of the Revolutionary Communisty Party and its chairman, Bob Avakian. - Semir Zeki
Semir Zeki is Professor of Neurobiology at the University College, London. He joined the College's teaching staff in 1969 and has been a professor of neurobiology since 1981. He graduated from University College, London in 1964 and earned his Ph.D. in anatomy there in 1967. Zeki specializes in studying the organization of the primate visual brain and, more recently, in studying the relationship between brain activity and artistic appreciation and creativity. - Philodemus
Philodemus of Gadara (in Greek) (Gadara, Coele-Syria, c. 110 BCE-probably Herculaneum c. 40/35 BCE) was an Epicurean philosopher and poet who studied with Zeno of Sidon, head of the school in the Garden of Epicurus, outside Athens, before settling in Rome about 80 BCE. He was a follower of Zeno, but an innovative thinker in the area of aesthetics, in which conservative Epicureans had little to contribute. He was a friend of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, … - Cesare Ripa
Cesare Ripa was a 16th-century Italian aesthetician and author of the "Iconologia" (or in full : "Iconologia overo Descrittione Dell’imagini Universali cavate dall’Antichità et da altri luoghi") (Rome, 1593), an highly influential emblem book used by artists to give substance to qualities such as virtue, courage, wisdom, etc. The book was extremely influential in the 17th and 18th centuries, and was quoted extensively in various art forms. - Keith Lehrer
Keith Lehrer (born January 10, 1936) is the Regent's Professor emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Arizona with an affiliation with the University of Miami in Florida. He previously taught at the University of Rochester. Lehrer received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Brown University where he studied under Richard Taylor. His research interests include epistemology, free will, rational consensus, Thomas Reid and, recently, aesthetics. - Vicente Huidobro
Vicente García-Huidobro Fernández was a Chilean poet born to an aristocratic family. He was an exponent of the artistic movement called "Creacionismo" ("Creationism"), which held that a poet should bring life to the things he or she writes about, rather than just describe them. Huidobro was born into a wealthy family in Santiago. After spending his first years in Europe, he enrolled in a Jesuit secondary school in Santiago.
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