The Works of Walter Pater

Walter Pater (1839–94) was the foremost Victorian writer on art and on aesthetic experience. He brought his extensive knowledge of the history of art to bear on the new problem of how to explain the very personal affective response to beauty, and raised this into a central concern of aesthetic and philosophical thought. His ideas still shape modern assumptions about how art plays on our feelings and intellectual responses. This edition of Pater's complete works was published in 1900–1 in a limited edition of 775 copies. It comprises eight volumes with an additional volume of critical essays first published in The Guardian. These lectures on Plato were a product of Pater's teaching at the University of Oxford, but underwent several rounds of revision before being published in 1893. Pater analyses several aspects of Plato's thought, his relationship with Socrates, and his major works.