Monroe Curtis Beardsley (December 10, 1915 – September 18, 1985) was an American philosopher of art. He was born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and educated at Yale University (B.A. 1936, Ph.D. 1939), where he received the John Addison Porter Prize. He taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Mount Holyoke College and Yale University, but most of his career was spent at Swarthmore College (22 years) and Temple University (16 years). His wife and occasional coauthor, Elizabeth Lane Beardsley, was also a philosopher at Temple.

His work in aesthetics is best known for its championing of the instrumentalist theory of art and the concept of aesthetic experience. Beardsley was elected president of the American Society for Aesthetics in 1956. He also wrote an introductory text on aesthetics and edited a well-regarded survey anthology of philosophy.

Among literary critics, Beardsley is known for two essays written with W.K. Wimsatt, "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy," both key texts of New Criticism. His works also include: Practical Logic (1950), Aesthetics (1958), and Aesthetics: A Short History (1966). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976.^[1]

He and his wife were over-all series editors for Prentice-Hall's "Foundations of Philosophy," a series of textbooks on different fields within philosophy, written in most cases by leading scholars in those fields.

See also[edit]

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Beardsley's Aesthetics entry by Michael Wreen in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005-09-13
• Monroe C. Beardsley, "Postscript 1980-: Some Old Problems in New Perspectives," in Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, 1st ed., 1958; 2d ed., 1981.

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