On The Development Of The Theories Of Taste In The History Of Western Aesthetics

'Taste' — one of the important categories in the development of western aesthetics — is closely related to people's ability to know and judge beauty. However, the concept of 'taste' hasn't been defined clearly and has always been used ambiguously in the field of aesthetics mainly because of its sensitivity. It maybe said that not any unified standard has been established since its generation, and this is what inspires the aestheticians in history to probe it enthusiastically. In the history of aesthetics' development, aestheticians and artistic critics belonging to different philosophical schools, with different artistic thoughts all hold their unique ideas on it. It's significant for the further study of modern taste and the vision extension on it to probe deeply into the concept 'taste' and make its theories systemized.This dissertation systematically sorts through the theories of western aesthetics and divides their development into three different phases of pre-aesthetics, aesthetics and post-aesthetics. In the first phase, closely related to human sense organs, taste is represented by the subject's sense of food, so having no taste of beauty, the concept of taste has negative effect on taste experience, this point is clearly stated in the theories of Plato and Aristotle. In aesthetics phase, many study schools of taste appeared and a lot of theories were produced, generally, there were empiricism taste, rationalism taste, sociology taste, expressionism taste, naturalism taste, so on and so forth, each indicating different philosophical ideas. The third phase should be sociological phase. Having been built on the positivism of Comte in the nineteenth century, and with the spreading and influence of Marxism its flourishing stage came in the twentieth century when many philosophers and sociologists gained inspiring achievements.Surveying the theories of taste from the sociological angle and combining the new findings of modern neurology and psychology, this dissertation points out that taste is neither a complete production of social construction nor a complete psychological...