Introduction to Aesthetics

This course is aimed to offer a brief introduction to the aesthetic theory and its history of development in the West and in China. There are three parts included in this course. Part one examines the fundamental categories in aesthetics, including aesthetic object and experience, aesthetic emotion, creation, interpretation and taste. Part two is a survey of the history of western aesthetic theory and examines the principal writers and their main positions, among those are Plato, Aristotle, the rationalists and empiricists in the time of European Enlightenment, and the romanticists. Part three focuses on the main ideas in the history of Chinese aesthetics, which includes the rites and music tradition, the Confucian humanism and its influence in the theory of arts, the Daoist-Confucian aesthetic view and the influence of Western aesthetics in the 20th century.