Alison, Archibald (1757–1839)

Article Summary

Archibald Alison was born in Edinburgh but was educated at Baliol College Oxford and ordained in the Church of England. He returned to Edinburgh as an Anglican clergyman where he served until his death. In addition to his ecclesiastical writings, he published a collection of essays, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), the same year as Immanuel Kant’s Third Critique (see Kant, Immanuel (1784–1804)), but it became popular only after a second edition appeared in 1811. He abandoned the sense theories of earlier eighteenth-century aesthetic theory that been developed by Francis Hutcheson (1725), David Hume (1739, 1757), Alexander Gerard (1759, 1774) and others. Instead, he advanced an aesthetic theory based on imagination and expressive properties produced by association.