Aesthetics, Ethics, Ideology

The course will examine aesthetic theories both in the context of
their relationship to the evolution of literary forms and tastes, and,
especially, in the context of larger debates over moral, political,
and epistemological authority.  Our focus will be on British thought
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this period,
ethical thought, by demonstrating the universal availability of moral
knowledge and the universal capacity for moral action, reflected an
impulse to avoid the political and social disorders that arise from
religious sectarianism. But this universalizing impulse, with its
democratic implications, often runs up against  the deeply held
conviction that a social  hierarchy marked by subordination and
deference is natural and necessary. The course will examine the
tensions between these conflicting ideological pressures, and will
treat the emergence of aesthetics as a byproduct of the attempts to
use ethical theory as a way to preserve the social order.

	A short preliminary paper and a longer term paper will be
required. Students taking the course to meet proseminar requirements
will do an in-class-presentation instead of a preliminary paper.

	Tentative Reading List
								
Hobbes, Leviathan and "Answer to Davenant."
	Cudworth, Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality
	Addison, "Pleasures of the Imagination" (Spectator Nos.
409-421)	
Mandeville, Fable of the Bees (selections)
Shaftesbury, Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit .
	Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty
and Virtue
Hume, A Treastise of Human Nature (excerpts); 	"The Standard of
Taste"
Johnson, Rasselas
	Burke, Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
	Sublime and Beautiful
Price, Review of Morals
Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France