In his excellent (because informative, generous, yet critical) review, Nick Wiltsher writes:
Thus, though avowedly not a historian's history, this is still a history of sorts: an unabashed example of great-man historiography, and I emphasise the gendered term here. The 16 selected philosophers are all men, and the four-page index of names includes about a dozen women. It might be that all the significant thinkers in European aesthetics in the last 200 years were men. More likely, it might be that conceptualising a history of anything in terms of 'significant figures' leads us too easily into consideration of canonical males. This may seem a dreary complaint, but it is only dreary because it keeps being made, and it keeps being made because it is important. I am not at all accusing Wicks of sexism or misogyny; rather, the invitation is to consider the possibly deleterious effects of apparently innocent approaches, and the alternative effects a different approach might have yielded...Wicks is quite right to choose the philosophers who fit his thematic focus [i.e., "the socio-political uses to which art and aesthetic theory may be put"--ES], and the book is all the better for having such a focus. The problem comes where Wicks selects thinkers who do not obviously have a great deal to say on the theme, and tries to force them to say something about it....It is almost as if Wicks felt compelled to include chapters on these significant philosophers, and then further compelled to fit them to the theme. Again, he writes well about their ideas, but those ideas seem out of place. Conversely, some of the philosophers Wicks includes bear obvious relevance to his theme, but less obvious relevance to the subject of aesthetics."
It is, axiomatic, of course, that a canon and/or tradition formation generates a pattern of exclusion. And given the historical period covered, Wiltsher is right to suggest that a focus on "'significant figures' leads us too easily into consideration of canonical males." But even though the odds are against women, this particular gendered pattern of exclusion is not inevitable.
Susanne K. Langer's work would fit the official theme of the book under review: "the socio-political uses to which art and aesthetic theory may be put." So do De Beauvoir's aesthetics; maybe even more so. (I am inclined to read Virginia Woolf's aesthetics also in such a fashion.) Moreover Langer's work might even be said to speak to the (apparent) conclusion ""an art that emphasises trust." Just because Langer was born and worked Stateside, it does not follow her work is by definition not "European philosophy;" her work exhibits manifest debts to Cassirer, Whitehead, and Schopenhauer.
Of course, Langer does not fit well in any of the framing-narratives that Analytical and Continental philosophers and their historians tell themselves. I am not claiming that all of Langer's work holds up well in repeated reading; but it is still worth asking why she was once so popular and why she can be so easily excluded today even in a "significant figures" approach.
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