Reassessing the Eclipse of Aesthetic Sense—Natural Theology and the History of Modern British Aesthetics

In this essay, I reconceptualise some of the most general coordinates of the history of modern British aesthetics. My central claim is that a renewed grasp of the relationship between aesthetic sense theory and natural theology fundamentally alters our narrative of British writing on aesthetics, beauty and art. I trace an intellectual genealogy stretching from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, considering, among others, the work of Walter Charleton, Francis Hutcheson, Kames, William Paley and Thomas Chalmers. I argue that these authors can be understood in terms of a common teleological architecture I designate the 'double teleological condition.' In turn, I explore how commonly relayed accounts of the ascendency of associationist thought over aesthetic sense have failed to adequately capture the later philosophical interest of aesthetic sense theory. There was no eclipse of aesthetic sense, which continued to assert a profoundly important and innovative role through the nineteenth century.