Timothy M. Costelloe is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The College of William and Mary. In 2003 and 2006 he was a Humboldt Fellow at Maximilians-Universitat Munchen, Germany. He is author of Aesthetics and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume (2007) and editor of The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and his work has appeared in a variety of edited collections and scholarly journals.
Costelloe's fine book splendidly refutes the alleged 'dreariness' of aesthetics. Uniquely, it welds the reflections of both artists and philosophers into a single continuous narrative, incorporating figures as diverse as Wordsworth and Wittgenstein. - Gordon Graham, Princeton Theological Seminary Timothy Costelloe's The British Aesthetic Tradition does what no other book I can think of does with respect to the history of aesthetics: it constructs a plausible and reliable context for reading works by Shaftesbury or Kames, say, alongside works by Frank Sibley or Ludwig Wittgenstein - Although the book is aware of a wider tradition outside the borders of Anglophone writing on the arts, it turns out that Costelloe's close focus on the British tradition yields considerable rewards - This book is set to become standard reading for courses on aesthetics. - Peter de Bolla, University of Cambridge The British Aesthetic Tradition by Timothy Costelloe is an important new study of the development of the discipline of aesthetics in the English-speaking world, forging connections hitherto unacknowledged, such as the relation between the eighteenth-century philosophers of taste and the Romantics - Tracing the story of aesthetics through Wittgenstein, Costelloe has constructed a narrative that will be admired and debated for decades - A singular achievement. - Noel Carroll, The Graduate Center, City University of New York