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Biography:
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803 was a German philosopher and literary critic whose
work constitutes an important contribution to the early development of German
Romanticism. As a part of that, he criticized that prevailing Englightenment idea that
the human faculty for reason was something which could operate separately from the human
passions and desires.
He applied these ideas and more to his work on aesthetics, arguing that there is no such thing as an "innate" faculty of taste and that there are not objective, eternal standards of beauty. Instead, according to Herder, historical, cultural and psychological factors are what create distinct aesthetic standards which change over time. Herder was, thus, an early critic of the ideas of "timelessness" in art, a cause later taken up in postmodernism.
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Related Resources:
What is Aesthetics?
In philosophy, aesthetics is the study of beauty and taste, whether in the form of the comic, the tragic or the sublime. Aesthetics has traditionally been part of other philosophical pursuits like the investigation of epistemology or ethics. However, it started to come into its own and become a more independent pursuit under Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who saw aesthetics as a unitary and self-sufficient type of human experience.What is Philosophy?
What is philosophy? Is there any point in studying philosophy, or is it a useless subject? What are the different branches of philosophy - what's the difference between aestheitcs and ethics? What's the difference between metaphysics and epistemology?
