ARCHIBALD

ALISON
ARCHIBALD
ALISON
• Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and educated
at Glasgow and Balliol College, Oxford.

• Ordained in the Church of England and

held positions in both England and
Scotland.
EARLY LIFE
• Married a daughter of John Gregory, a professor of
philosophy and medicine at Aberdeen and an associate
of Thomas Reid in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society.

•
CAREER
Preached at the Cowgate Chapel in
Edinburgh from 1800 until his death.
PUBLISHED
WORKS
• Published a volume of sermons,
but is known primarily for his
"Essays on the Nature and Principles
of Taste," published in 1790 and
reissued in 1810.
 Theory of
•
Taste
Regards beauty and sublimity as essentially emotional,
hedonic experiences.

• Beauty is a form of pleasure found in the mind, not in

objects.

• Accepts a faculty psychology that is essentially

associative.

• Separates the emotions of taste from other kinds of

pleasure.
• First theorist to clearly appeal to a separate aesthetic
pleasure.

• Argues that the ideas required to produce the emotions

of taste must be complex.

• Rejects the view that taste is an effect of an internal

sense or that some single principle produces the emotions of
taste.

• Believes that the emotion of taste is a product of an

active mind.
 Theory of
Imagination
• Moves away from earlier eighteenth-century theories of
imagination as a faculty that recombines preexisting ideas into new,
artificial images.

• Emphasizes the ability of imagination to detect resemblances,

"trains of imagery," and expressive signs.
 Theory of
Imagination
• Imagination is an active, associative faculty.

• The peculiar pleasure that it produces arises from the activity

of the mind itself.
 Criticism and Taste

• Draws the conclusion that criticism is incompatible with

the emotion of taste.
• Taste ceases to be a form of critical judgment.
• Acknowledges that an active imagination does not
necessarily produce good taste.
Romantic Theses

• Matter is not beautiful in itself but derives its beauty from the
expression of mind.

• Qualities of matter that are productive of beauty or sublimity are either

themselves immediately expressive of mental qualities or powers or signs of
mental qualities.
 Theory of the Arts

• Theory of imitation, not a theory of artistic creation or genius.

• Natural beauty provides the paradigm for beauty in the arts.
• Imagination and expression are given a new scope.
• Artistic imitation is an active, not a passive mental operation.
 Epistemological
Requirements
• Does not go far in formulating the epistemological
requirements of his theory.

• Takes for granted a theory of natural signs and a theory of

association that is rapidly losing its grounding in the theory of ideas
developed by John Locke and Hume.
 Epistemological
Requirements
• Produces some obscurity about what aesthetic qualities in
objects are, a good deal of rhetorical excess, and an avoidance of
the problems that exist for a theory of taste in which taste is no
longer a form of judgment.