Michel-Antoine Xhignesse – författare

This work is a translation of part of Memoires de l'Amerique Septentrionale, Ou La Suite Des Voyages de Mr. Le Baron de Lahontan (1703) by Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce de Lahontan. The dialogues are the result of conversations between Lahontan (1666–1716), a French officer of marines and Kondiaronk (c. 1649–1701), a Wendat chief. These Dialogues are important for at least two reasons. First, they provide a glimpse into the views on theology and political philosophy of the First Nations of the Eastern Woodlands during the seventeenth century. Moreover, unlike many of the accounts of these beliefs provided by Christian missionaries, the account is sympathetic: Lahontan's use of the word 'sauvage' was, as he writes in his preface, intended as complimentary, and we have reason to believe that he provided at least a reasonably accurate representation of the Wendat people's view of the world. Second, the Dialogues had a significant impact on European thinking about religion and political philosophy in the eighteenth century. They are the most important source of the myth of the noble savage, and they influenced the development of deism in Enlightenment Europe. The translation of the text is accompanied by a detailed Translators' Introduction which puts the Dialogues in context and traces their extensive influence. The Dialogues influenced Chateaubriand, Diderot, Leibniz, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. They likely influenced Rousseau, though no direct impact has been demonstrated.

Anne Le Fèvre Dacier (1645-1720) was the most important woman of letters of her time and Of the Causes of the Corruption of Taste is her most significant work. This book is one of the wellsprings of modern aesthetics. While Dacier was a classical philologist—not an aesthetician or philosopher of art—in several ways she anticipated and laid the groundwork for subsequent writers on the fine arts, including Batteux and Du Bos, both of whom cite her. Her views on art are at least as sophisticated and interesting as those found in contemporaries such as Addison and Shaftesbury or anyone in France. Dacier addresses topics that would become staples in the philosophy of art, in many cases long before other writers did. She contributed to the demise of the rationalist approach to art criticism and to the rise of the view that the beauties of art are apprehended by means of experience, a view which came to dominate eighteenth-century thinking about the arts.Dacier was one of the first eighteenth-century authors to emphasize that art is essentially the imitation of nature and belle nature. She raised questions about whether art can be a source of moral knowledge long before this became a widely discussed question in the philosophy of art. She richly deserves a prominent place in the early history of aesthetics. This volume is the first-ever translation of a work by Dacier into English. It includes a substantial introduction that not only examines her contributions to the philosophy of art but also traces her influence on the development of the subject through the eighteenth century.

Aesthetics: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments is a teaching-focused resource, which highlights the contributions that imaginative scenarios—paradoxes, puzzles, and thought experiments alike—have made to the development of contemporary analytic aesthetics. The book is divided into sections pertaining to art-making, ontology, aesthetic judgements, appreciation and interpretation, and ethics and value, and offers an accessible summary of ten debates falling under each section. Each entry also features a detailed annotated bibliography, making it an ideal companion for courses surveying a broad collection of topics and readings in aesthetics.Key Features: Uses a problem-centered approach to aesthetics (rather than author- or theory-centered) making the text more inviting to first-time students of the subject Offers stand-alone chapters, allowing students to quickly understand an issue and giving instructors flexibility in assigning readings to match the themes of the course Provides up-to-date, annotated bibliographies at the end of each entry, amounting to an extensive review of the literature on contemporary analytic aesthetics