Aesthetic Reconstructions: The Seminal Writings of Lessing, Kant and Schiller

1987. ix, 254pp. Previous owner's signature to FFEP. The book is in excellent condition with no other inscriptions, and all contents are tight and clean. "This book presents the central arguments of three of literature's classic texts, Lessing's "Laocoon", Kant's "Critique of Judgment" and Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man". It concentrates on Lessing's defence of medium-constrained canons of judgment, on Kant's search for a rational connection between our subjectively based evidence for aesthetic judgments and the actual content of those judgments, and on Schiller's anti-formalist account of beauty and its place in men's moral development. In each case exposition is conducted hand-in-hand with detailed and textually-based philosophical development and evaluation of its themes ".