Lockean Aesthetics

Abstract

This paper traces the influence of Lockean epistemology in early eighteenth-century British aesthetics. Locke has very limited references to aesthetic issues. Beginning with Francis Hutcheson, Locke's empiricism forms the basis for a theory of aesthetic experience. However, Hutcheson remains in some ways closer to his other acknowledged model, the Earl of Shaftesbury. Edmund Burke, on the other hand, while he also shows Locke's influence, remains fundamentally Aristotelian in a number of ways. Joseph Priestley presents a more clearly Lockean aesthetic, but Priestley's assimilatation of Locke's epistemology shows something of its limitations for aesthetics. One is led toward Hume's more radical epistemology.