Aristotle
    Poetics (selections) 

    Poetics (selections, annotated)  RTF   PDF 

Pre-Enlightenment Aesthetics
     
     Vasari on Leonardo da Vinci (edited & annotated)  RTF   PDF 

     Art as Mimesis  (Dictionary of the History of Ideas)

18th Century French Aesthetics 
      Article by Jacques Morizot
      (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

18th Century British Aesthetics 
      Article by James Shelley
      (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Joseph Addison
     On the Pleasures of the Imagination
     (1712) 

Edmund Burke 
      "Of Taste" ~ Preface and Introduction (1759) 

David Hume
     "Of  the Standard of Taste"
     (complete text)  with Annotations 
     and Study Questions  

     Hume's Aesthetics 
     (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

18th Century German Aesthetics 
      Article by Paul Guyer
      (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Immanuel Kant  
     "Fine Art" in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment  
     (edited text) 

      "Fine Art" (edited & annotated)     RFT   PDF  

My introduction to the aesthetics of Hume and Kant 
     [click here]  

What is Modernism? 
     [click here]  

Romanticism
     Wordsworth's 
    "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" (1802)  

Walter Pater 
     Selections from The Renaissance 

Oscar Wilde
     The Decay of Lying  

     Preface to Dorian Gray  

Eduard Hanslick
     Hanslick's The Musically Beautiful
     (Chapters 1 & 2, edited/annotated)    RTF   PDF  

     Hanslick Outline 

     The Musically Beautiful (Preface & chapters 2 & 3)

Leo Tolstoy
    What is Art? (selections, edited/annotated)   RTF   PDF   

     Tolstoy What is Art? Outline  

Photography as Art: Alfred Stieglitz 
   "A Plea for Art Photography in America (edited)   RTF  PDF 

    "Pictorial Photography"  (edited & annotated)   RTF  PDF 

Edward Bullough 
     "Psychical Distance" (edited & annotated)   RTF   PDF  

      Mark Twain's observations on this topic   RTF  PDF  

Wassily Kandinsky
     Concerning the Spiritual in Art 
     (complete text)  

     On the Problem of Form  

A. C. Bradley 

      "Poetry for Poetry's Sake" (edited & annotated)   RTF   PDF 

Clive Bell
      Art, Chapter One (edited & annotated)   RTF   PDF 

      Art, Chapter One
      with Annotations and Study Questions 

      Art, Complete Text (Project Gutenburg)

Dewitt Parker: Aesthetic Experience as Structured Feeling
       The Principles of Aesthetics, Chapter V         Annotated:  RTF

John Dewey's Pragmatist Aesthetics 
       Article by Tom Leddy
      (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

T. S. Eliot
      "The Problem of Hamlet"   Annotated: RTF   PDF 
       "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Kafka's story: "A Hunger Artist" 
    [click here] 

R. G. Collingwood (Art as Imaginative Expression)
     Article by Gary Kemp
     (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Walter Benjamin 
     The Work of Art in the Age of 
     Mechanical Reproduction 

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
    The Culture Industry 

     Adorno's Aesthetics by Lambert Zuidervaart
     (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Monroe Beardsley 
      Article by Michael Wreen
      (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Feminist Aesthetics  
     Article by Carolyn Korsmeyer
     (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) 

Conceptual Art 
     Article by Elisabeth Schellekens
     (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)