Monroe Beardsley

Monroe Beardsley was an American philosopher of art who taught at Swarthmore College and Temple University. With the literary critic W. K. Wimsatt (1907–1975) he wrote 'The Intentional Fallacy', which argued that an author's intention is neither available nor desirable as a standard for interpreting or judging a literary work. His Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism became a foundational text of analytic aesthetics.

Key ideas

• The intentional fallacy: a work's meaning and value are to be found in the public work itself, not in the author's private intentions.
• Appeals to intention substitute a private, often inaccessible fact for public evidence of language and form.
• The affective fallacy: a work should not be judged by the emotional effects it produces in readers.
• Aesthetic value can be assessed through general features such as unity, complexity and intensity.

Major works

• The Intentional Fallacy (1946, with W. K. Wimsatt)
• The Affective Fallacy (1949, with W. K. Wimsatt)
• Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (1958)

In the conversation

• Reading group Reading group: Wimsatt and Beardsley, then Barthes, then Hirsch on who owns a text’s meaning Keisha Monroe · 6 replies
• Question My lecturer says the poet’s own explanation doesn’t count. Where does that idea come from? Kavya Menon · 4 replies