Ricerc@Sapienza

Through a study of the text that perhaps best interpreted the
meaning of poetic Greek art from the Classic age – namely Aristotle’s
Poetics, which seems to give to the poetic art a «dialectical
» value – the article aims to highlight the differences between
the way in which antiquity looked at the question of poiesis,
closely associating it with a cognitive and practical dimension,
and the way in which modern aesthetics looked at it, separating
the dimension of art, beauty and sensibility, from knowledge and
the practical life.

As already the title wishes to underline, the subject of the article doesn’t concern a more or less convincing aesthetics of Augustine, but the question about the role that the philosophy of Augustine – and in particular his idea of truth as revelation, far from the classical paradigm of the adaequatio –, has had in the formation of Aesthetics. In fact, since Soliloquia and De mendacio, we see how Augustine contended with a concept of truth capable of taking into account the requests raised by the model of scriptural truth.