p Ivor Armstrong Richards (b. 1893), a famous English critic, aesthetician and semanticist, published, in 1921, together with C. K. Ogden and J. Wood, The Foundations of Aesthetics, which provided a classification of aesthetic theories and definitions of beauty (1). He became famous with his second book, co-authored in 1923 with Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning, which was to become a classic and best-seller of semantic philosophy in its neo-positivist variation.

p In The Meaning of Meaning the authors examined the relationship between words, things and thoughts, or emotions, regarding this as the primary theoretical problem of the science of symbols, and pointing out the strong influence of language both on our everyday lives and on the most abstract philosophical deliberations. The authors see the practical problem of symbolism as the elimination of the many errors in abstract arguments (both in philosophy and in aesthetics) as well in the process of communication, caused by deficient theories of language and incorrect views of this process. They maintain that a study of all these problems may also provide a basis for a scientific aesthetics. Richards’ main work on aesthetics is his book Principles of Literary Criticism (1925). Here he applies to art (and primarily literature) the basic principles of symbolism formulated in his previous work. In a third book. Science and Poetry (1926), Richards popularized one of the main ideas of this earlier work-that of the different ways language is used in science and poetry. These books, together with his Practical Criticism (1929), earned their author the status of one of the most influential aestheticians and literary critics of his time.

In his early works (The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, Science and Poetry) Richards’ aesthetic ideas developed in the mainstream of neo-positivist philosophy. The critical literature on Richards (Marx Black et al.) contains statements to the effect that in his later works he rejected the ideas of his earlier writings, and that Richards’ philosophy evolved towards a weakening of positivism and an approximation to idealism in the spirit of Plato and Kant. It is true that in such late works as Coleridge on Imagination we no longer encounter a number of traditional positivist terms such as “stimulus” and “reaction”, “impulse”, “ attitudes”, etc. Neither can there be any doubt that the author’s enthusiasm for positivism and its claims to solve all philosophical and aesthetic problems declined gradually over the years, but on the whole his views remained within the bounds of semantic idealism. Richards himself, in one of his later books, Speculative Instruments, comments on criticism of his ideas (particularly that of M. Black), writing that on rereading Principles of Literary Criticism he finds more ideas which anticipate his later views than ideas which need revision. “I changed my vocabulary and my metaphors somewhat ... to present much the same views again" (8, 53).