The aim of this dissertation is to rewrite the early history of modern aesthetic theory.

The early eighteenth century is widely recognized as having been marked by innovations in thinking about art, beauty, and sense perception by a large group of well-known and lesser-known authors in many parts of Europe, among the most important of whom were Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) in England, Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) in Ireland and Scotland, and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-62) in Brandenburg-Prussia. But no significant, historically-informed, comparative study of the emergence of aesthetic theory as a pan-European phenomenon has ever been undertaken. Rather, historians of aesthetic theory have long tended to summarize the eighteenth century as a series of preludes to the achievements of Immanuel Kant in his 1790 Critique of Judgment. Narratives of this type are not necessarily false, but they almost invariably obscure the contemporary significance of the treatises they regard as "aesthetic" and the purposes of those treatises' authors. Nor have they tended to take account of the theological and philosophical contexts crucial to explaining why aesthetic theories arose.

As an alternative, I present the early history of aesthetic theory as part of the histories of moral philosophy, natural law, and theology, by analyzing discussions and controversies surrounding the work of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Baumgarten, and the little-known William Cleghorn (1719-54), a Scottish follower of Shaftesbury. I argue that their aesthetic theories should be seen as a multi-generational effort to solve a problem about what they called the "foundation of morality." They developed their aesthetic theories as challenges to the idea, espoused by their critics among contemporary natural law theorists and Lutheran and Presbyterian theologians, that the human will is naturally radically corrupt, and that moral behavior must therefore be understood as merely an expression of educated selfishness, and they sought to explain how cultivating the powers of the human soul associated with sensation, through the contemplation of beauty, including in well-made works of art and literature, is an essential part of moral education and allows naturally self-interested human beings to transcend their own self-interest. From an historical perspective, in other words, the origins of modern aesthetic theory should be sought in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century challenges to the Augustinian legacy of early modern Protestantism, in the long history of reactions to the natural law theories of Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf (among others), and in the characteristically eighteenth-century search for a morally sound basis of a cohesive, flourishing society.