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Aesthetics
Art, beauty, and whether taste can be argued about.
- AestheticsThe philosophical study of beauty, art, and taste.Concepts
- AristotlePlato's most consequential student, who systematized philosophy, founded biology, invented Western formal logic, and gave virtue ethics its canonical form.FiguresClassical Greek
- Arthur SchopenhauerThe German philosopher whose World as Will and Representation developed the post-Kantian metaphysics of the irrational Will as ultimate reality, integrated Western philosophy with Buddhist and Hindu thought, and shaped Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Wagner, Tolstoy, Freud, and the broader European cultural engagement with pessimism and the unconscious.Figures19th Century
- BonaventureThe Italian Franciscan whose Augustinian-Neoplatonist synthesis was the major thirteenth-century theological alternative to Aquinas's Aristotelian framework, and whose Itinerarium Mentis in Deum is the canonical Franciscan mystical theology.FiguresMedieval
- Crisis of European SciencesHusserl's late masterpiece composed in the shadow of Nazi Germany that substantially develops the analysis of the life-world and treats the natural sciences as having lost contact with their grounding in pre-theoretical lived experience.Books
- Edmund HusserlThe Moravian-German philosopher who founded the phenomenological tradition, developed the method of bracketing (epoché) and transcendental phenomenology, and shaped twentieth-century continental philosophy more decisively than any other single figure.Figures20th Century
- Gilles DeleuzeThe French philosopher whose individual work on Nietzsche, Spinoza, Bergson, and difference, together with his collaboration with Felix Guattari on Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, produced one of the most distinctive bodies of late-twentieth-century continental philosophy.Figures20th Century
- Itinerarium Mentis in DeumBonaventure's 1259 short work organizing the six-stage ascent of the mind to God, modeled on the six-winged seraph that Francis of Assisi had seen at La Verna, and integrating Augustinian theology with the Franciscan contemplative tradition.Books
- Logical InvestigationsHusserl's two-volume 1900-1901 work that founded the phenomenological tradition by reversing his earlier psychologism and establishing the structures of meaning and conceptual content as the proper objects of a rigorous descriptive science.Books
- Theodor AdornoThe German philosopher, sociologist, and musicologist who co-authored the Dialectic of Enlightenment with Horkheimer, produced the canonical works of Frankfurt School critical theory in his own name (Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Theory, Minima Moralia), and shaped twentieth-century continental philosophy as the most substantial individual theorist of the first generation.Figures20th Century
- Walter BenjaminThe German-Jewish critic and philosopher whose essays on art, history, language, and Paris produced one of the most distinctive bodies of twentieth-century writing — a Frankfurt School affiliate whose work has shaped cultural studies, the philosophy of history, and the contemporary engagement with mass culture.Figures20th Century