Yoko Ioku is a Japanese scholar of aesthetics and an associate professor at Seijo University. She earned a doctorate in fine arts from Tokyo University of the Arts. Her research focuses on the history of ideas and the aesthetics of the German Enlightenment. In “Baumugāruten no Bigaku: Zuzō to Ninshiki no Shūjigaku” (『バウムガルテンの美学 図像と認識の修辞学』), she reexamines the work of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who established aesthetics as a philosophical discipline in the eighteenth century, through its relationship with rhetoric. In “Kindai Bigaku Nyūmon” (『近代美学入門』), she traces historical changes in ideas about artists, beauty, the sublime, and landscape to explain how modern views of art took shape. Her recent research also considers the relationship between reason and superstition in Enlightenment thought through topics such as divination, magic, and prophecy.
