Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Editors' acknowledgments
- 1 Nature, fine arts, and aesthetics
- 2 Natural beauty without metaphysics
- 3 Trivial and serious in aesthetic appreciation of nature
- 4 The public prospect and the private view: the politics of taste in eighteenth-century Britain
- 5 Landscape in the cinema: the rhythms of the world and the camera
- 6 The touch of landscape
- 7 Desert and ice: ambivalent aesthetics
- 8 Gardens, earthworks, and environmental art
- 9 Comparing natural and artistic beauty
- 10 Appreciating art and appreciating nature
- 11 The aesthetics of art and nature
- 12 On being moved by nature: between religion and natural history
- Index
12 - On being moved by nature: between religion and natural history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Editors' acknowledgments
- 1 Nature, fine arts, and aesthetics
- 2 Natural beauty without metaphysics
- 3 Trivial and serious in aesthetic appreciation of nature
- 4 The public prospect and the private view: the politics of taste in eighteenth-century Britain
- 5 Landscape in the cinema: the rhythms of the world and the camera
- 6 The touch of landscape
- 7 Desert and ice: ambivalent aesthetics
- 8 Gardens, earthworks, and environmental art
- 9 Comparing natural and artistic beauty
- 10 Appreciating art and appreciating nature
- 11 The aesthetics of art and nature
- 12 On being moved by nature: between religion and natural history
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
For the last two and a half decades – perhaps spurred onwards by R. W. Hepburn's seminal, wonderfully sensitive and astute essay “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty” – philosophical interest in the aesthetic appreciation of nature has been gaining momentum. One of the most coherent, powerfully argued, thorough, and philosophically compelling theories to emerge from this evolving arena of debate has been developed over a series of articles by Allen Carlson. The sophistication of Carlson's approach – especially in terms of his careful style of argumentation – has raised the level of philosophical discussion concerning the aesthetic appreciation of nature immensely and it has taught us all what is at stake, logically and epistemologically, in advancing a theory of nature appreciation. Carlson has not only presented a bold theory of the aesthetic appreciation of nature; he has also refined a methodological framework and a set of constraints that every researcher in the field must address.
Stated summarily, Carlson's view of the appreciation of nature is that it is a matter of scientific understanding; that is, the correct or appropriate form that the appreciation of nature – properly so called – should take is a species of natural history; appreciating nature is a matter of understanding nature under the suitable scientific categories.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts , pp. 244 - 266Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993
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