Rob van Gerwen
Knowledge in Beauty. An Introduction to Modern Aesthetics

Amsterdam, Meppel, Boom.

255 pages, Paperback.

The book is in Dutch. Original title: Kennis in schoonheid. Een inleiding in de moderne esthetica.

Summary

Traditionally, aesthetics takes care of the problem of how to relate knowledge claims to aesthetic evaluations. But the autonomy of this very discipline itself seems to be at stake. It is even rumoured that the discipline is a mere rehash of epistemology in that it borrows its more interesting problems from this discipline. The discipline is rather young indeed, as it is called into existence at the end of the Seventeenth century only. Nevertheless, the resistance to aesthetics is as unconvincing as it is inappropriate. Even epistemology as we know it nowadays is a historical product of the very same period in philosophy: Enlightenment and modernism. Art and aesthetics as we nowadays conceive of the two, may each in their own way help us understand our ways of thinking, in just as convincing ways as epistemology may. The very aim of this book is to comprehend the relationships between beauty and knowledge. In doing so the most influential modern approaches to these matters pass in review; approaches of beauty, but also of knowledge, since it is hardly possible to treat the problems at issue without citing the relevant epistemological considerations.
Yet this does not mean that aesthetics is a slave of epistemology.

The investigations were supported by the Foundation for Philosophical Research (SWON), which is subsidized by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).