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NICKOLAS PAPPAS, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience by porter,l james i, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 70, Issue 3, August 2012, Pages 323–326, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2012.01523_5.x
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porter, james i. The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience. Cambridge University Press, 2010, 607 + xvii pp., $145.00 cloth.
Aesthetics is not an exclusively modern subject, James Porter says; nor is art, understood as a category comprising distinct forms. Only a skewed reading of Greek and Roman antiquity permits such misimpressions. Equating ancient art theory with the works of Plato and Aristotle and their successors has encouraged scholars to consider ancient art forms separately, as those philosophers did, when in fact a rich tradition used common materialistic vocabularies for disparate arts.
The main claim in this book (henceforth Origins) concerns that vocabulary of matter. Letting Plato and Aristotle speak for antiquity has made the whole ancient world's discourse about art seem formalist. But another line of thinking was always at work despite their titanic influence: an orientation toward art that Porter sometimes calls “empiricist,” occasionally “phenomenalist” or “sensualist,” and reliably “materialist” (pp. 5, 7, 60).
