Book description
No philosopher has held a higher opinion of art than Hegel, yet nor was
any so profoundly pessimistic about its prospects - despite living in
the German golden age of Goethe, Mozart and Schiller. For if the artists
of classical Greece could find the perfect fusion of content and form,
modernity faced complicating - and ultimately disabling - questions.
Christianity, with its code of unworldliness, had compromised the
immediacy of man's relationship with reality, and ironic detachment had
alienated him from his deepest feelings. Hegel's Introductory Lectures
on Aesthetics were delivered in Berlin in the 1820s and stand today as a
passionately argued work that challenged the ability of art to respond
to the modern world.
Hegel (1770-1831) is one of hte most important of modern
philosophers, due to his relation to Marx and the support his
philosophy seemed to offer to theories of nationalism and social
democracy, and his impact on a range of humanities. He is best known
for The Phenomenology of Spirit, The Science of Logic, The
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and The Philosophy of
Right, as well as his lectures, which were published posthumously by
his friends.
Bernard Bosanquet was a Fellow of University College, Oxford
teaching philosophy and ancient history. From 1903 to 1908 he held the
chair of moral philosophy at St Andrews. He died in 1923.
