Karl Axelsson

As the Arctic Sea ice recedes and extinction threatens plants and wildlife, the discipline of environmental aesthetics grows ever more relevant. In response to global climate change, a new debate arises concerning our aesthetic and moral attitudes to nature. To better understand the ideas articulated in the aesthetic debate, we must trace them back to their eighteenth-century roots. To this purpose, Axelsson’s project studies the unprecedented but rarely analysed impact of central ideas formulated by the third Earl of Shaftesbury. In the early eighteenth century, Shaftesbury developed his notion of disinterestedness and a non-dominating stance to the beauty of nature, and this resonates strongly in current aesthetic discourse. Thus, the project will modify aesthetic paradigms of research by facilitating both a deeper historical understanding of Shaftesbury’s view and the origins of environmental aesthetics. It will also develop new knowledge in environmental aesthetics that is of urgent relevance with respect to global climate change. The project builds on the most recent environmental aesthetic theory together with Shaftesbury’s understudied corpus. It also considers writings by the Cambridge Platonists, whose leading figure Ralph Cudworth influenced Shaftesbury’s account of disinterestedness and nature.