‘‘The Delight and Torment of the World’’ — Aesthetics and its History

[...]it lists the major authors of this new discipline including Baumgarten, Lord Kames, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller who have become inevitable figures of the subsequent series of the histories of aesthetics.2 Robert Zimmermann, later professor of philosophy in Vienna, wrote the first elaborated history of aesthetics in the middle of the nineteenth century (beginning with Socrates and presenting history as a ''historic-critical'' story that concludes into the author's own aesthetic theory published in a separate volume).3 Since then several influential narratives have been published. First of all, I would like to emphasize that Paul Guyer's three-volume history is a respectable enterprise; only a few scholars are capable of completing such a gigantic work.