One of the recommended books for my course. Does what it says on the cover.

I think this is one of the best "textbooks" I've read. The book was very well structured: Sheppard tells you exactly what she's going to cover, and how she's going to explain things, and then she does just that. There are some places where she raises an issue but says she won't be pursuing it, which reinforces the sense that she's got a particular plan in mind and is following it. This is the kind of style I hope to achieve in my essays.

Too many things in the book caught my attention for me to quote all of them, and I'll be coming back to the book for reference material no doubt. But some of the things I highlighted:

• on the aesthetic attitude: perhaps it's a kind of interest which we could direct to anything we pleased [p3]
• on watching a play: the spectator who simply does not care is not responding to the play as art at all. Yet something is equally wrong with the spectator who becomes too directly involved and reacts as though he were seeing a real murder enacted on the stage [p28]
• art may not be a craft at all but craft plays a considerable part of it. To appreciate Catullus' poetry to the full one needs to recognize his technical skill as well as to respond to the emotions he is expressing [p28]
• Despite the diversity of what counts as 'formal'...in every case relationships between features are involved. In visual arts the relationships may be between shapes or between colours; in music they may be between notes or between instruments; in literature they may be between metrical units, words, parts of a plot, or presentaton of a theme. In every case it is the ordering of the formal features which matters [p30]
• English has no term of general aesthetic commendation [p56]
• Attempts to define beauty in terms of particular non-aesthetic qualities are always open to counter-examples; suggested definitions are always both too narrow, in failing to include instances of beauty, and too wide, in failing to exclude instances which have the relevant non-aesthetic qualitites and yet are not beautiful [p63]
• good section on aesthetic attitude pp70-75 (too many bits highlighted to quote them all)
• perhaps aesthetic disputes are resolved by persuasion rather than rational argument and the apparent attempt to justify an aesthetic judgement is simply a method of persuation. [p87]
• When we try to understand and appreciate works of the past or works from a foreign culture we are often trying to put ourselves in the position of the original audience...To put ourselves in the position of the original audience we must find out all sorts of things about them [p96]
• Many philosophers recognize that there is something very odd about saying "Life's but a walking shadow" is metaphorically true, for what would it be for such a statement to be metaphorically false? [p120], followed by good discussion.

Completed : 25-Oct-2006