The Aesthetic Era
[I just found this on my computer... the date I last opened the file was apparently August 19, 2010. I think I remember that I wrote it for a class - perhaps a class on the philosophy of aesthetics, taught by Katie Terezakis - but if that's true, then it has to be at least a couple of years older - perhaps 2007? I'm not sure. Anyway, reading it now, it looks incomplete to me. Certainly, there are things I would have written differently today. But instead of adding to it, I'm just uploading it as a historical document of a person I used to be. This predates, by a few years, all of the writing I've done in the "Aesthetic Materialism" series, but it's on a similar topic, so I'll call it "Aesthetic Materialism 0" - kind of a prequel, if you will.] The Aesthetic Era As a hermeneutic device, with all of its itinerant dangers and foibles, one can divide the history of Western philosophy into three broad epochs, with much overlap and fr