Our love of art, writes John Barrow, is the end product of millions of years of evolution. How we react to a beautiful painting or symphony draws upon instincts laid down long before humans existed. Now, in this enhanced edition of the highly popular The Artful Universe, Barrow further explores the close ties between our aesthetic appreciation and the basic nature of the Universe. Barrow argues that the laws of the Universe have imprinted themselves upon our thoughts and actions in (...) subtle and unexpected ways. Why do we like certain types of art or music? What games and puzzles do we find challenging? Why do so many myths and legends have common elements? In this eclectic and entertaining survey, Barrow answers these questions and more as he explains how the landscape of the Universe has influenced the development of philosophy and mythology, and how millions of years of evolutionary history have fashioned our attraction to certain patterns of sound and color. Barrow casts the story of human creativity and thought in a fascinating light, considering such diverse topics as our instinct for language, the origins and uses of color in nature, why we divide time into intervals as we do, the sources of our appreciation of landscape painting, and whether computer-generated fractal art is really art. Drawing on a wide variety of examples, from the theological questions raised by St. Augustine and C.S. Lewis to the relationship between the pure math of Pythagoras and the music of the Beatles, The Artful Universe Expanded covers new ground and enters a wide-ranging debate about the meaning and significance of the links between art and science. (shrink)

Emily Brady provides a systematic account of aesthetics in relation to the natural environment, offering a critical understanding of what aesthetic appreciation ...

The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature I advance a view of the aesthetic value of nature that Glenn Parsons seeks to contest. Here I attempt to show three things. The first is that his critique of my view of the aesthetic value of a natural thing is malfounded. The second is that his proposed alternative, which is intended to vindicate the claim to objectivity of certain judgements of the aesthetic value of a natural thing, is unconvincing. And the third is that, (...) contrary to what he maintains, I am not committed to the alternative he proposes through an apparent tension in my position, for there is no such tension. (shrink)

The aesthetics of nature has over the last few decades become an intense focus of philosophical reflection, as it has been ever more widely recognised that it is not a mere appendage to the aesthetics of art. Everyone delights in the beauty of flowers, and some are thrilled by the immensity of mountains or of the night sky. But what is involved in serious aesthetic appreciation of the natural world? Malcolm Budd presents four interlinked studies in the aesthetics of nature, (...) approaching the subject from a variety of angles. As well as developing Budd's own original ideas, the book provides a comprehensive treatment of Kant's classic aesthetics of nature, and an encyclopaedic critical survey of recent literature on the subject. (shrink)

The aesthetics of nature has over the last few decades become an intense focus of philosophical reflection, as it has been ever more widely recognised that it is not a mere appendage to the aesthetics of art. Just as nature offers aesthetic experiences beyond the reach of art, so the aesthetics of nature raises issues not contained within the philosophy of art. -/- Malcolm Budd presents four interlinked essays addressing all the main problems about the aesthetics of nature. These include: (...) how the aesthetic appreciation of nature should be understood; the character of an aesthetic response to nature; what kinds of aesthetic experience nature affords and what kinds of aesthetic judgement it is amenable to; the aesthetic significance of intrusions by humanity into nature; whether aesthetic judgements about nature can be objectively true; the doctrine of positive aesthetics with respect to nature; the aesthetic significance of knowledge of nature and in particular whether scientific knowledge is necessary for serious aesthetic appreciation of nature; and the correct model for the appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature. -/- The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature also includes a comprehensive exposition and examination of the thoughts of the greatest philosopher to make a substantial contribution to the subject, Immanuel Kant, and an encyclopaedic critical survey of much of the most significant recent literature. Scholars and students of aesthetics will find valuable resources here, and much to think about. (shrink)

I begin by demonstrating the inadequacy of the idea that the aesthetic appreciation of nature should be understood as the appreciation of nature as if it were art. This leads to a consideration of three theses: (i) from the aesthetic point of view natural items should be appreciated under concepts of the natural things or phenomena they are, (ii) what aesthetic properties a natural item really possesses is determined by the right categories of nature to experience the item as falling (...) under, and (iii) (the doctrine of positive aesthetics with respect to nature) the natural world untouched by humanity is essentially aesthetically good. I indicate an unclarity in (i) and identify difficulties facing (ii). I distinguish various versions of (iii), reject certain of these, and fault a number of arguments in support of (iii). I conclude that the idea of the aesthetic value of a natural item is such that it endows the aesthetic appreciation of nature with a freedom and relativity denied to the appreciation of art and renders (iii) problematic. (shrink)

The paper asks whether gardens may be objects of ‘serious’ (in Ronald Hepburn's sense) and distinctive appreciation. Dismissive attitudes to the possibility of such appreciation, including Hegel's, are rejected, as is the view—Kant's, for example—that garden appreciation is ‘factorizable’ into the modes appropriate for artworks and ‘raw’ nature respectively. That view entails that there is nothing distinctive in garden appreciation. Attention then turns to the idea that it is the representational/symbolic capacities of gardens that render them objects of distinctive appreciation. (...) That idea is criticized, but a related one, appealing to more ‘penumbral’ semantic notions like evocation, is defended. It is argued, in particular, that gardens may distinctively evoke the ‘creative receptivity’, to cite Gabriel Marcel, of human beings. Gardens, more perhaps than any other artworks, vividly testify to the dependence of their makers on what is beyond human artifice and control. (shrink)

It might at first seem that the senses (the five traditionally recognized conduits of outer sense) would have very little to contribute to an investigation of Kant's aesthetics. Is not Kant's aesthetic theory based on a relation of the higher cognitive faculties? Much however can be revealed by asking to what degree sight is essential to aesthetic judgment (of beauty and the sublime) as Kant describes it in the 'Critique of Judgment.' Here the sublime receives particular attention.

In Landscape, Natural Beauty, and the Arts, a distinguished group of scholars probes the complex structure of aesthetic responses to nature. Each of the chapters refines and expands the terms of discussion, and together they enrich the debate with insights from art history, literary criticism, geography and philosophy. To explore the interrelation between our conceptions of nature, beauty and art, the contributors consider the social construction of nature, the determination of our appreciation by artistic media, and the duality of nature's (...) determining in gardening. Showing that natural beauty is impregnated with concepts derived from the arts and from particular accounts of nature, the volume occasions questions of the distinction and relation between art and nature generally, and culminates in a set of philosophical studies of the role of scientific understanding, engagement, and emotion in the aesthetic appreciation of nature. (shrink)

Back in 1983, I saw a movie called Koyaanisqatsi in an Amsterdam cinema. The film had no actors; in the leading parts were landscapes from all over the ...

Interdisciplinary perspectives on landscape, from the philosophical to the geographical, with an emphasis on the overarching concept of place.

Natural beauty has often been viewed as a somewhat vague and subjective matter. Even theorists who view disputes concerning the aesthetic value of artworks as involving correct and incorrect judgements have argued that, in many disputes concerning natural beauty, there are no correct or incorrect judgements. In this essay, I consider recent attempts to develop a more objectivist view of nature appreciation based on the role of scientific knowledge in such appreciation. In response to recent criticisms of this approach, I (...) argue that, when developed, it does provide a viable conception of objectivity for nature aesthetics. (shrink)

The distinction between organic and inorganic nature receives little attention in contemporary nature aesthetics. Traditionally, however, this distinction was considered to have important aesthetic ramifications. Nick Zangwill has recently suggested that aesthetic differences between organic and inorganic nature arise because natural functions are present only in organic nature (for example, in the parts of organisms). I argue for a different explanation: though inorganic nature too has natural functions, these are metaphysically distinct from those characteristic of organic nature. I defend the (...) claim that this difference in functions is aesthetically significant, and use it to justify a common intuition about the thesis of positive aesthetics for nature. (shrink)

"Man in the Landscape" was among the first books of a new genre that has elucidated the ideas, beliefs, and images that lie behind our modern destruction and ...

I defend moderate formalism about the aesthetics of nature. I argue that anti-formalists cannot account for the incongruousness of much natural beauty. This shows that some natural beauty is not kind-dependent. I then tackle several anti-formalist arguments that can be found in the writings of Ronald Hepburn, Allen Carlson, and Malcolm Budd.