How long does it take to read A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful?
A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke takes about 4 hours 24 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 24 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1757. 240 pages, about 66,000 words.
9 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 20 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 24 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 45 minutes |
The page count is the median across 36 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The "Philosophical Enquiry" is a study of the relationship between strong feelings and forms of art, that considers the inspired persuasiveness of certain kinds of writing alongside experience of the natural landscape, and is gradually being recognized as an important work of aesthetic theory. This eloquent and sometimes erotic book was long considered to be a piece of Burke's juvenilia, published when he was only 28. But it is a precursor of his later political writings, and clearly deals with a fashionable topic of intellectual preoccupation in the 18th-century. This work is also one of the first major works in European literature on the sublime, a subject that was later to fascinate thinkers from Kant and Coleridge in the 18th-century, to contemporary philosophers and literary critics. Adam Phillips has also edited Charles Lamb's "Selected Prose" and Walter Pater's "The Renaissance", as well as writing a study of his own entitled "Winnicott".
Subjects: Aesthetics, The Sublime, Esthetica, Het sublieme, Schoonheid, Sublime, the
