Adam Smith on Aesthetic Imagination and Scientific Enquiry

Bibliographic Data

ID4902495
AuthorsRachel Zuckert (Northwestern University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume64
Issue1
Pages49-65
Publication date2024-01-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe British Journal of Aesthetics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-0904 • E-ISSN: 1468-2842
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/aesthj/ayad023
OpenAlexW4384816829
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited14

In two posthumously published essays, 'History of Astronomy' and 'Of the Nature of that Imitation which takes place in what are called The Imitative Arts', Adam Smith suggests provocatively that philosophy is an 'art of imagination' and that we take the same 'very high intellectual pleasure' in appreciating systematic scientific theories and in listening to musical 'systems', i.e., complex works of non-programmatic instrumental music. In this paper, I reconstruct the view of imagination, as the cognitive faculty primarily responsible for perception and appreciation of such 'systems', that undergirds these claims, and argue that it is to be understood as aiming at ideal ends - in the first instance, at beauty or an order among variety (systematicity). Smith thus offers a distinctive view of aesthetic imagination, as neither freely playing nor imitative (two common views of imagination both in his time and ours) but rather as aiming at, and progressively realizing non-rational norms of order (again, at least in the first instance, an ideal of beauty

Active listening · Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Epistemology · Ideal (ethics · Imitation · Literature · Musical · Order (exchange · Perception · Pleasure · Sociology · The arts · Variety (cybernetics · Visual arts · Aesthetic Perception and Analysis · Communication · Computer Science · Multisensory perception and integration · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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