On Some Pitfalls of the English Edition and Translation of Bolzano’s Aesthetic Treatises

Abstract

This critical note examines Bernard Bolzano’s Essays on Beauty and the Arts, edited by Dominic McIver Lopes and translated by Adam Bresnahan. The book presents English translations of Bolzano’s ‘On the Concept of the Beautiful’ (1843) and ‘On the Classification of the Fine Arts’ (1849), supplemented by an extensive scholarly apparatus. This note focuses on Lopes’s interpretation of Bolzano’s aesthetic treatises, particularly addressing the insufficient historical contextualization. Additionally, some challenges and intricacies involved in translating Bolzano’s work into English are discussed.

Keywords

• bernard bolzano
• eighteenth-century aesthetics
• nineteenth-century aesthetics
• analytic aesthetics