1st Edition

Artful Virtue: The Interplay of the Beautiful and the Good in the Scottish Enlightenment

By Leslie Ellen Brown Copyright 2015

    During the Scottish Enlightenment the relationship between aesthetics and ethics became deeply ingrained: beauty was the sensible manifestation of virtue; the fine arts represented the actions of a virtuous mind; to deeply understand artful and natural beauty was to identify with moral beauty; and the aesthetic experience was indispensable in making value judgments. This book reveals the history of how the Scots applied the vast landscape of moral philosophy to the specific territories of beauty - in nature, aesthetics and ethics - in the eighteenth century. The author explores a wide variety of sources, from academic lectures and institutional record, to more popular texts such as newspapers and pamphlets, to show how the idea that beauty and art made individuals and society more virtuous was elevated and understood in Scottish society.

    Introduction; Chapter 1 The Senses; Chapter 2 Virtue; Chapter 3 Beauty; Chapter 4 Sentiment; Chapter 5 Taste; Chapter 6 Experience; Chapter 7 Cultivation; Chapter 8 Traditions; Chapter 101 Afterword;

    Biography

    Leslie Ellen Brown is Professor Emerita of Music at Ripon College, USA. Her earliest publications were in the field of early eighteenth-century French opera, with her later work concentrating on eighteenth-century Scottish studies.

    "Brown’s book has been a long time in the making, and this has enabled her to read much more widely than many who have been concerned with the same themes... What emerges is a vision of human life that is strikingly comprehensive and coherent – enviably so when set against the contemporary world’s alternative in which scientific research, the arts, education, morality, and religion struggle to accommodate themselves within the constraints of a sharp distinction between the public and the private spheres." - Gordon Grahamm, Princeton Theological Seminary, Journal of Scottish Philosophy