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Aesthetic Universals
Edited by Frédéric Lefrançois (Université Des Antilles)
About this topic
| Summary | Aesthetic universals are fundamental principles, patterns, or qualities that are considered to be universally appreciated or recognized across different cultures, time periods, and individuals. These universals encompass aspects of aesthetics, which pertains to the study of beauty, taste, and artistic expression. The concept of aesthetic universals suggests that there are certain features, themes, or characteristics that consistently evoke positive responses or aesthetic pleasure in people regardless of their cultural background or personal preferences. These universals can be observed in various forms of human creative expression, such as visual arts, music, literature, and architecture. They might include qualities like symmetry, balance, harmony, complexity, and emotional resonance, which tend to elicit favorable reactions from diverse audiences. Aesthetic universals are not confined to any specific medium or domain; they transcend these boundaries and reflect shared human cognitive and perceptual tendencies. The exploration of aesthetic universals is rooted in the intersection of multiple disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, and cultural studies. Researchers seek to understand whether these universal aesthetic preferences are a result of biological, evolutionary factors, or whether they emerge from culturally mediated experiences that have become ingrained over time. In essence, aesthetic universals provide insight into the common ground that exists within human perceptions of beauty and creativity, offering a bridge between the individual, cultural, and biological dimensions of aesthetic experiences. The concept of aesthetic universals has long intrigued scholars and researchers across various disciplines, ranging from philosophy and psychology to anthropology and art history. Aesthetic universals refer to the fundamental principles, patterns, and qualities that transcend cultural, historical, and individual differences, and are considered to be universally appreciated across diverse human societies. This notion raises significant questions about the underlying cognitive and evolutionary mechanisms that drive our shared aesthetic preferences. This section delves into the exploration of aesthetic universals by examining key theoretical perspectives, empirical studies, and cross-cultural investigations, shedding light on the intriguing interplay between biology, culture, and human perception in shaping our understanding of beauty and artistic expression. |
| Key works | McMahon 2020, Danto 2000, Dutton 2000, Eaton 2000, Hopkins & Riggle 2021, Schellekens 2009, Egan 2010 |
| Introductions | McMahon 2020, Danto 2000, Dutton 2000, Eaton 2000, Hopkins & Riggle 2021 |
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Contents
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- Analytic Aesthetics and the Dilemma of Timelessness .Derek Allan - manuscriptExplores the failure of analytic aesthetics to examine the question of the capacity of art to transcend time, and its own commitment – seldom explicitly acknowledged – to the assumption that this capacity functions through the traditional, but no longer viable, notion of timelessness inherited from Enlightenment aesthetics.
- Murdoch and Kant.Melissa Merritt - 2022 - In Mark Hopwood & Silvia Panizza (eds.), The Murdochian Mind. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 253-265.It has been insufficiently remarked that Murdoch deems “Kant’s ethical theory” to be “one of the most beautiful and exciting things in the whole of philosophy” in her 1959 essay “The Sublime and the Good”. Murdoch specifically has in mind the connection between Kant’s ethics and his theory of the sublime, which runs via the moral feeling of respect (Achtung). The chapter examines Murdoch’s interest in Kant on this point as a way to tease out the range of issues that (...)$250.00 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citation
Bookmark - Artistic Style as the Expression of Ideals.Robert Hopkins & Nick Riggle - 2021 - Philosophers' Imprint 21 (NO. 8):1-18.What is artistic style? In the literature one answer to this question has proved influential: the view that artistic style is the expression of personality. In what follows we elaborate upon and evaluatively compare the two most plausible versions of this view with a new proposal—that style is the expression of the artist’s ideals for her art. We proceed by comparing the views’ answers to certain questions we think a theory of individual artistic style should address: Are there limits on (...)
- Viscarra, Nietzsche: Las virtudes del genio y la comunicación de la “cultura superior”. Viscarra, Nietzsche. The virtues of genius and the communication of "superior culture".Osman Choque-Aliaga - 2020 - Journal de Comunicación Social 10 (10):147-165.Bolivian writer Victor Hugo Viscarra is a constant figure on whom a good number of readers have focused their attention. Review after review of his work has been appearing in the Bolivian press and, in that sense, readers have taken his writings with a blind acceptance omitting in such a way a position that goes beyond the literary frontier. The existence of any work on Viscarra’s role as a thinker, his views on politics, the customs of society itself or the (...)
- Beauty.Jennifer A. McMahon - 2020 - Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature.Literary beauty was once understood as intertwining sensations and ideas, and thus as providing subjective and objective reasons for literary appreciation. However, as theory and philosophy developed, the inevitable claims and counterclaims led to the view that subjective experience was not a reliable guide to literary merit. Literary theory then replaced aesthetics as did philosophy’s focus on literary truth. Along with the demise of the relevance of sensations, literary form also took a back seat. This suggested to some that either (...)
- Two Conceptions of Harmony in Ancient Western and Eastern Aesthetics: "Dialectic Harmony" and "Ambiguous Harmony".Tak Lap Yeung & Tak-lap Yeung - 2020 - Journal of East-West Thought 10 (2):65-82.In this paper, I argue that the different understandings of “harmony”, which are rooted in ancient Greek and Chinese thought, can be recapitulated in the name of “dialectic harmony” and “ambiguous harmony” regarding the representation of the beautiful. The different understandings of the concept of harmony lead to at least two kinds of aesthetic value as well as ideality – harmony in conciliation and harmony in diversity. Through an explication of the original meaning and relation between the concept of harmony (...)
- La estética y el arte a debate (II).José Ramón Fabelo Corzo & Mariana Romero Bello (eds.) - 2018 - Puebla, Pue., México: Colección La Fuente, BUAP.El presente libro recopila algunas de las mejores investigaciones presentadas en el “IX Coloquio Internacional de Estética y Arte” en La Habana en diciembre del 2015, redactadas ahora a modo de artículos. La estética y el arte a debate II está compuesto por 27 artículos y se encuentra dividido en cinco bloques que, de alguna manera, reflejan las temáticas centrales alrededor de las cuales giró el encuentro del 2015. Los bloques temáticos son: 1 Arte, estética y política, 2 Cine y (...)
- The Grace Machine: Of Turns, Wheels and Limbs.Lars Spuybroek - 2018 - Footprint 22 (Summer):7-32.Starting with a few simple questions about living well and where movement originates from this essay turns into a vast map of intricate relations revolving around the notion of grace. By developing the argument from a historical perspective it quickly becomes clear that grace relies on the specific qualities of figuration and how the figure appears in what is termed “the gap between habit and inhabitation.” This article is a shorter version of the introductory chapter to my “Grace and Gravity: (...)
- SEEKING PHILOSOPHY BY WORDS 1 ART and META-ART.Ulrich De Balbian - 2017 - Oxford: Academic Publishers.ABSTRACT -/- One increasingly reads about different aspects of the death of philosophy. One reason or cause being its institutionalization, as just another academic discipline, while research universities demand their tenured professionals to produve endless streams of really irrelevant publications, resulting in dealing with more detailed, microscopic issues and fabricated ‘problems’. The professionalization of philosophers created other problems of this socio-cultural practice. The dying out of philosophy is not only cased by external social and cultural factors, but also by internal (...)
- Issues of Contemporary Art and Aesthetics in Chinese Context.Eva Kit Wah Man - 2015 - Berlin: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.This book discusses how China’s transformations in the last century have shaped its arts and its philosophical aesthetics. For instance, how have political, economic and cultural changes shaped its aesthetic developments? Further, how have its long-standing beliefs and traditions clashed with modernizing desires and forces, and how have these changes materialized in artistic manifestations? In addition to answering these questions, this book also brings Chinese philosophical concepts on aesthetics into dialogue with those of the West, making an important contribution to (...)
- Play, Skill, and the Origins of Perceptual Art.Mohan Matthen - 2015 - British Journal of Aesthetics 55 (2):173-197.Art is universal across cultures. Yet, it is biologically expensive because of the energy expended and reduced vigilance. Why do humans make and contemplate it? This paper advances a thesis about the psychological origins of perceptual art. First, it delineates the aspects of art that need explaining: not just why it is attractive, but why fine execution and form—which have to do with how the attraction is achieved—matter over and above attractiveness. Second, it states certain constraints: we need to explain (...)
- La estética y el arte de regreso a la Academia.Bertha Laura Álvarez Sánchez & José Ramón Fabelo Corzo (eds.) - 2014 - Puebla, Pue., México: Colección La Fuente, BUAP.Los materiales que integran este libro provienen del II Encuentro de Egresados realizado en el verano de 2012 por la Maestría en Estética y Arte de la BUAP. Regresaban a su academia los que alguna vez fueron sus estudiantes. Venían con el propósito de reencontrarse con los avances investigativos de sus profesores y a traer ellos mismos los resultados de la continuidad de su trabajo de investigación. Algunos dejaron también en el encuentro una muestra de su arte. El ciclo de (...)
- Toward a Science of Criticism: Aesthetic Values, Human Nature, and the Standard of Taste.Collier Mark - 2014 - In Cognition, Literature, and History. Routledge. pp. 229-242.The aesthetic skeptic maintains that it is futile to dispute about taste. One and the same work of art might appear beautiful to one person but repellent to another, and we have no reason to prefer one or another of these conflicting verdicts. Hume argues that the skeptic, however, moves too quickly. The crucial question is whether qualified critics will agree on their evaluations. And the skeptic fails to provide sufficient evidence that their verdicts will diverge. We have reason to (...)
- Aesthetik und Pragmatismus. Zur funktionalen Relevanz einer nicht-diskursiven Formauffassung bei Cassirer, Langer und Krois.Martina Sauer - 2014 - Image. Zeitschrift für Interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft 20 (2):49-69.To what extend is there a relevance of aesthetics for life? By postulating a non-discursive and emotional relevance of forms Cassirer, Langer and Krois open the door for this idea. -/- Inwieweit spielt die Ästhetik im Leben eine Rolle? Indem sowohl Cassirer, Langer und Krois eine nicht-diskursive und emotionale Relevanz von Formen unterstellen, öffnen sie die Türen für diese Idee.
- Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art.Jennifer Doyle - 2013 - Durham: Duke University Press.In Hold It Against Me, Jennifer Doyle explores the relationship between difficulty and emotion in contemporary art, treating emotion as an artist's medium. She encourages readers to examine the ways in which works of art challenge how we experience not only the artist's feelings, but our own. Discussing performance art, painting, and photography, Doyle provides new perspectives on artists including Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Thomas Eakins, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz. Confronting the challenge of writing about difficult (...)
- What is Art ? A Philosophical Definition.Jakob Zaaiman - 2012 - Alldaynight.Info.Abstract: For art to be art it has to present the viewer with a distinctly out-of-the-ordinary perspective on everyday reality. Art is to be clearly differentiated from all forms of decorative craft, which are essentially concerned only with aesthetic experiences. Art is essentially about finding ways, through the manipulation and orchestration of presentational media – such as painting, sculpture, literature, film, and performance – to bring to life strange and unusual perceptions. All these media are quasi-theatrical and poetic in nature, (...)
- Confronting universalities: aesthetics and politics under the sign of globalisation.Mads Anders Baggesgaard & Jakob Ladegaard (eds.) - 2011 - Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.The universe is expanding, the world has gone global, and the US has launched a crusade to export the universal right to democracy to every part of the world. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the concept of universality is making a remarkable comeback in aesthetic and political theory. The meaning of the world, however, seems more contested than ever. Some denounce it as the ideological guise of particular interests, others as the conceptual equivalent of totalitarianism. But a (...)
- Disputing about Taste.Andy Egan - 2010 - In Ted Warfield & Richard Feldman (eds.), Disagreement. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 247-286.“There’s no disputing about taste.” That’s got a nice ring to it, but it’s not quite the ring of truth. While there’s definitely something right about the aphorism – there’s a reason why it is, after all, an aphorism, and why its utterance tends to produce so much nodding of heads and muttering of “just so” and “yes, quite” – it’s surprisingly difficult to put one’s finger on just what the truth in the neighborhood is, exactly. One thing that’s pretty (...)
- Taste and objectivity: The emergence of the concept of the aesthetic.Elisabeth Schellekens - 2009 - Philosophy Compass 4 (5):734-743.Can there be a philosophy of taste? This paper opens by raising some metaphilosophical questions about the study of taste – what it consists of and what method we should adopt in pursuing it. It is suggested that the best starting point for philosophising about taste is against the background of 18th-century epistemology and philosophy of mind, and the conceptual tools this new philosophical paradigm entails. The notion of aesthetic taste in particular, which emerges from a growing sense of dissatisfaction (...)
- Severing the Disjuncture between Cultural Studies and Aesthetics: New Ways to Engage Aesthetics in the Study of Social Networking Sites.Hiesun Cecilia Suhr - 2009 - Rhizomes 19 (1).
- The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition.Li Zehou - 2009 - Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition touches on all areas of artistic activity, including poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture, and the "art of living." Right government, the ideal human being, and the path to spiritual transcendence all come under the provenance of aesthetic thought. According to Li this was the case from early Confucian explanations of poetry as that which gives expression to intent, through Zhuangzi’s artistic depictions of the ideal personality who discerns the natural way of things and lives according to it, (...)
- Directions For A New Aestheticism.Jeffrey Petts - 2005 - Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 2 (1):20-31.The idea of a new aestheticism is now explicit in both philosophical aesthetics and cultural theory with the publication of Gary Iseminger's The Aesthetic Function of Art and an anthology of essays edited by John Joughin and Simon Malpas critiquing the anti-aestheticism of literary theory. Both are significant in marking a wider trend reacting to, broadly speaking, intellectualised and historicised accounts of art, refocusing on the idea of appreciation itself, and working away from the emphasis on ideology and disregard for (...)
- Aproximación teórica a la especificidad de los valores estéticos.José Ramón Fabelo Corzo - 2004 - Graffylia 4 (4):17-25.El artículo busca acercarse a la comprensión de los rasgos particulares de los valores estéticos, fundamentalmente en las obras de arte. Para ello parte de la premisa de que el valor estético no es en sí mismo un atributo del objeto artístico, ni el resultado exclusivo de la plasmación en él de cierto ideal estético. Para que un objeto sea portador de valor estético ha de funcionar precisamente como tal, lo cual presupone la presencia y participación de otros sujetos que (...)
- Beauty and Beautification.Arthur C. Danto - 2000 - In Peg Brand Weiser (ed.), Beauty Matters. Indiana University Press. pp. 65-83.Hegel has identified what I have preemptively designated a third aesthetic realm--in addition to natural beauty and artistic beauty--one greatly connected with human life . . . art applied to the enhancement of life . . . But the other border of what I shall designate the Third Realm is equally non-exclusionary, especially when we consider what Hegel singles out under the head of beautiful people--the kind of beauty possessed by Helen of Troy, say, which we must suppose a wonder (...)
- Aesthetic universals.Denis Dutton - 2000 - In Berys Nigel Gaut & Dominic Lopes (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. Routledge. pp. 203--214.
- Kantian and Contextual Beauty.Marcia M. Eaton - 2000 - In Peg Brand Weiser (ed.), Beauty Matters. Indiana University Press. pp. 27-36.To a great extent, Kant more than Tolstoy influenced twentieth-century aesthetics in Eurocentric cultures. Formalist theorists insisted that disinterested apprehension of directly perceivable properties (color, rhythm, meter, balance, proportion, etc.) distinguished aesthetic experiences from all others. Kant never won the day in many non-Eurocentric cultures, however. Native Americans, for example, continued to connect aesthetic activity directly to "interested" and functional objects and events. Decriptions of objects or events as "beautiful" in most African cultures never required distinguishing "What is it for?" (...)
- Foreword: Cutting Two Ways with Beauty.Eleanor Heartney - 2000 - In Peg Brand Weiser (ed.), Beauty Matters. Indiana University Press.Beauty is a contested category today because we both long for and fear its seductions. The essays in this volume interrogate beauty in all its complexity. But whether they construe it as friend or foe, they make it clear that beauty, and our preoccupation with it, cannot be wished away. deeply embedded in that inchoate matter from which our judgments of value are formed, beauty is inseparable from all that is best and worst in human experience.
- “Universals of colour” from a linguistic point of view.Anna Wierzbicka - 1999 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (4):724-725.Saunders and van Brakel's observation that “linguistic evidence provides no grounds for the universality of basic color categories” also applies to the concept of “colour” itself. The language of “seeing” is rooted in human experience, and its basic frame of reference is provided by the universal rhythm of “light” days and “dark” nights and by the fundamental and visually salient features of human environment: the sky, the sun, vegetation, fire, the sea, the naked earth.
- The Others In/Of Aristotle’s Poetics.Gene Fendt - 1997 - Journal of Philosophical Research 22:245-260.This paper aims at interpreting (primarily) the first six chapters of Aristotle’s Poetics in a way that dissolves many of the scholarly arguments conceming them. It shows that Aristotle frequently identifies the object of his inquiry by opposing it to what is other than it (in several different ways). As a result aporiai arise where there is only supposed to be illuminating exclusion of one sort or another. Two exemplary cases of this in chapters 1-6 are Aristotle’s account of mimesis (...)
- The Problem of Universals.Ernan McMullin - 1958 - Philosophical Studies (Dublin) 8:122-139.In a recent symposium a hardy, perennial topic has come once again to occupy the centre of the philosophical stage. The contemporary discussions of meaning and reference, of the philosophical relevance of logical categories, of the grounds for induction, all eventually come to focus upon what a mediaeval philosopher, were he to return, would immediately recognize—not without some quiet satisfaction—to be that complex cluster of difficulties he was wont to classify as “the problem of universals”. The participants in the symposium (...)
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