Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste
Συγγραφέας: Archibald Alison
Πρώτη Έκδοση: 1790
For good reason, Archibald Alison’s 1790 Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste is chiefly re¬membered as the occasion of the so-called triumph of association in cightccnth-ccntury British aes¬thetics. Some earlier taste theorists had appealed to associationist psychology, but they did so pri¬marily to help explain away the obvious diversity of responses to almost any object of taste: private emotional associations with an object, they sug¬gested, often corrupt the process by which individ¬uals arrive at judgments of beauty, thereby giving rise to the apparent diversity of tastes. Other taste theorists—those among Alison’s mid-century pre¬decessors. especially—had discovered some addi¬tional uses for associationist psychology. Alison, however, dramatically expands the role of that psychology in taste theory by arguing that gen¬uine aesthetic experience (the “emotion of taste”) just is the experience of a special sort of “train” of emotional associations with an object. As one commentator puts it, Alison's essays “are solely dedicated to the task of persuading his readers that the associationist psychology is the only source of taste."
