Beauty

If everything in the universe is material, how can master painters create images of nature which enable us to see, to know, beauty more perfect than can ever exist in reality? What materially real thing does the master painter access to portray on canvas? The work of the 18th century French philosopher Denis Diderot responds to this conundrum. Diderot’s answer pulls from his rich scientific thought coupled with the unique form of art criticism he develops. In both cases the role (...) of genius is shown to be key to great leaps forward, marvellous creation and understanding. My project opens with a bit of historical context and then involves a study of a selection of works of Diderot and Diderot scholars in order to more precisely draw out the connections he uncovers and the conclusion he reaches. Diderot’s interdisciplinary path leads through nature, art and science by way of genius and knowledge in this, our purely and beautifully material world. The ideas are as significant today as they were nearly three centuries ago. Diderot’s own genius inspires. This project reflects the intellectual contagion of his enthusiasm. -/- (This is my MA thesis, in French, from the University of British Columbia in 2020; it is available via the UBC Circle website.). (shrink)

Paradigmatic aesthetic properties include beauty, elegance, gracefulness, harmony, balance, loveliness, prettiness, handsomeness, and unity, as well as their negative counterparts, for example, ugliness, clumsiness and disunity. The book investigates the nature, reality, and structure(s) of these properties. It also focuses on special cases such as rightness of architectural proportion, musical beauty, functional beauty, and the aesthetic properties that are responsible for our interest in ‘painful art’ (horror and tragedy). [Manuscript is currently undergoing revision.].

What is the folk concept of art? Does it track any of the major definitions of art philosophers have proposed? In two preregistered experiments (N=888) focusing on two types of artworks (paintings and musical works), we manipulate three potential features of artworks: intentional creation, the possession of aesthetic value, and institutional recognition. This allows us to investigate whether the folk concept of art fits an essentialist definition drawing on one or more of the manipulated factors, or whether it might be (...) a disjunctive or cluster concept. The results suggest that none of the three manipulated properties are necessary for an object to be art, though some, even by themselves, suffice. The folk concept of art might thus well be a cluster concept instead of an essentialist concept. (shrink)

As aesthetic beings, we are receptive to and engaged with the sensuous phenomena of life while also knowing that we are targets of others’ awareness: we are both aesthetic agents and aesthetic objects. Our psychological health, our standing within our communities, and our overall wellbeing can be profoundly affected by our aesthetic surroundings and by whether and how we receive aesthetic recognition from others. When our embodied selves and our cultural products are valued, and when we have rich opportunities for (...) aesthetic experience and for the exercise of aesthetic agency, the aesthetic can foster and sustain wellbeing and help to make our lives worthwhile. But when we are subjected to aesthetic blight, restriction of our aesthetic agency, and aesthetic devaluing of our embodied selves and our communities’ cultural products, the aesthetic can do great harm: such aesthetic maneuvers play a significant role in oppression and social hierarchy related to race, gender, fatness, and disability. This essay explores the notions of aesthetic objects and aesthetic agents, their relations with each other, and the unique affordances of persons’ status as simultaneously aesthetic objects and aesthetic agents. It examines the prospects for bodily aesthetic experience to promote wellbeing and, at the end, considers how the aesthetic might play a role in establishing forms of mutual vulnerability and recognition to combat oppressive social hierarchies. (shrink)

In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), Friedrich Schiller draws a striking connection between aesthetic value and individual and political freedom, claiming that, “it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” However, contemporary ways of thinking about freedom and aesthetic value make it difficult to see what the connection could be. Through a careful reconstruction of the Letters, we argue that Schiller’s theory of aesthetic value serves as the key to understanding not only (...) his view of aesthetic engagement, but also his distinctive account of individual and political freedom. More specifically, we show that Schiller defends a non-hedonic, action-oriented, communitarian theory of aesthetic value and a theory of freedom that makes the aesthetic not just supererogatory but fundamental for any fully autonomous life. Although we have lost touch with this way of thinking about aesthetic value and freedom, we submit that it is illuminating for contemporary thinking about both. (shrink)

Balthasar impiega in tutta la sua Trilogia fattori fondamentali del pensiero di Platone: il bello, l’eros e l’analogia entis che chiama “Selbstbewegung” ignorando completamente la dottrina dei principi primi che la Scuola di Tübingen ha ricostruito grazie alle testimonianze dei suoi allievi nell’Accademia antica. Per parte sua, la Scuola di Tübingen esclude sistematicamente dall’indagine l’eros e la definizione di psychè del Fedro come “ciò che si muove sempre” e “muove sé stesso”. Non si occupa affatto del bello, perché lo assimila (...) senz’altro all’idea del bene. Propongo perciò una ricerca più filologica in cui espongo il Platone di Balthasar e quello della Scuola di Tübingen e una parte più storico-sistematica in cui delineo il divenire dell’estetica drammatica. Infine, propongo una soluzione del paradosso che ho identificato. La presenza di Platone nell’opera di Balthasar non è stata ancora riconosciuta. Solo due saggi ne parlano, ma sono problematici: in realtà si tratterebbe di Plotino, che sarebbe il vero compimento della filosofia greca. Non viene però preso in considerazione il fatto che Balthasar critica Plotino. (shrink)

This chapter is a rethinking of my earlier “The Ages of Beauty” which investigated Charles Hartshorne’s Diagram of Aesthetic Values. The argument is placed in a long history of beauty being considered as the middle between extremes. It slowly develops into a structure not merely of aesthetic experience but of existence itself, making it a competitor of Heidegger’s fourfold.

In this paper, I offer a new interpretation of Margaret Cavendish’s remarks on beauty. According to it, Cavendish takes beauty to be a real, response-independent quality of objects. In this sense, Cavendish is an aesthetic realist. This position, which remains constant throughout her philosophical writings, contrasts with the non-realist views that were soon after to dominate philosophical reflections on matters of taste in the early modern period. It also, I argue, contrasts with the realism of Cavendish’s contemporary, Henry More. While (...) there are passages in Cavendish’s work that might seem to count against my reading—specifically, passages on disagreement in aesthetic judgement, on the power of beauty to elicit the passions, and on our inability to specify the nature of beauty—I show that, when situated against the background of Cavendish’s broader metaphysical and epistemological views, those passages in fact support the realist interpretation. (shrink)

The culturally pervasive tendency to identify aspects of the body as aesthetically imperfect harms individuals and scaffolds injustice related to disability, race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities, and fatness. But abandoning the notion of imperfection may not respect people’s reasonable understandings of their own bodies. I examine the prospects for a practice of aesthetic assessment grounded in a notion of the body’s function. I argue that functional aesthetic assessment, to be respectful, requires understanding the body’s functions as complex, malleable, and determined by (...) the projects and interests of the person whose body it is. Aesthetically relevant functions, on this account, are determined neither by the body’s status as organism nor by cultural assumptions about how bodies should function or be used. (shrink)

It is a noteworthy disanalogy between contemporary ethics and aesthetics that the fitting-attitude account of value, so prominent in contemporary ethics, sees comparatively little play in aesthetics. The aim of this paper is to articulate what a systematic fitting-attitude-style framework for understanding aesthetic value might look like. In the bulk of the paper, I sketch possible fitting-attitude-style accounts of three central aesthetic values – the beautiful, the sublime, and the powerful – so that the general form of the framework come (...) through. (shrink)

Which traits are beautiful? And is their beauty perceptual? It is argued that moral virtues are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain emotion— ecstasy—and that compassion tends to be more beautiful than fair-mindedness because it tends to give rise to this emotion to a greater extent. It is then argued, on the basis that emotions are best thought of as a special, evaluative, kind of perception, that this argument suggests that moral virtues (...) are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain kind of evaluative perceptual experience. (shrink)

I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and (...) ugliness sits opposed to beauty across a neutral midpoint (the argument from proposed intensions). And third, ugliness and disgustingness function in the same way in both giving rise to representations of contamination (the argument from the law of contagion). In making these arguments, I show why prominent objections to the thesis do not succeed, cast light on some of the artistic functions of ugliness, and, in addition, demonstrate why a dispositional account of disgustingness is correct, and present a novel problem for warrant-based accounts of disgustingness (the ‘too many reasons’ problem). (shrink)

I argue that the main existing accounts of the relationship between the beauty of environmental entities and their moral standing are mistaken in important ways. Beauty does not, as has been suggested by optimists, confer intrinsic moral standing. Nor is it the case, as has been suggested by pessimists, that beauty at best provides an anthropocentric source of moral standing that is commensurate with other sources of pleasure. I present arguments and evidence that show that the appreciation of beauty tends (...) to cause a transformational state of mind that is more valuable than mere pleasure, but that leads us to falsely represent beautiful entities as being sentient and, in turn, as having intrinsic moral standing. To this extent, beauty is not, then, a source of intrinsic moral standing; it’s a source of a more important anthropocentric value than has hitherto been acknowledged. (shrink)

The paper aims at connecting the concepts of beauty and possession, traditionally coupled with the male gaze, with eros as felt by women, by homosexuals, and by those who do not identify with a defined gender. First, I will outline the concepts of beauty and possession according to “male thinking”, well formulated by Freud, Plato, Levinas, and Sartre. I will show that, in Western tradition, beauty is seen from a masculine perspective, as a set of charms arousing the subject and (...) stimulating his will to possess. The erotic relationship is consequently considered in a dualistic way: the subject is masculine and active, and desires his “object”, who can be either a man or a woman. However, the mentioned authors also highlight a crucial point: desire is doomed to be unfulfilled, because the transcendence of the other person is ungraspable. I will argue that, despite the latter point, such authors bring forward a reductionist view of eros and relationships between genders. I will suggest a solution to this reductionism, taking inspiration from the concepts of gender performativity, theorized by Butler, and queer orientation, developed by Ahmed. I will also propose to rely on Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the flesh, especially as it concerns its features of reversibility and divergence, in order to give account of every gender identity, including non-binary ones. The concepts of beauty and possession, together with the impossibility to grasp the transcendence of the other person, will not be rejected, but reconfigured through a different way of conceiving subjectivity. (shrink)

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 (...) literature communicated truth like any other literal form of communication or it was a mere diversion: a springboard to harmless reverie or daydreaming. Neither response satisfactorily captured what was distinctive about literature: the love readers can have for literary texts and the edification or insight claimed of works within each culture’s respective catalogue of classics. However, a concept of literary beauty has again become viable due to developments in theories of pleasure and imagination. If the defining aspect of literature is the imaginative engagement it occasions, and if this imagining is constrained by plausibility and endorsed as effective relative to our goals, ideals, and interests, then literature is not reduced to either mere fact or wish fulfillment. An account of literary beauty is available which defines literature accordingly and explains how subjective and objective reasons for appreciation intertwine to evoke pleasure and insight. (shrink)

Is aesthetics only about art that is beautiful as conventionally understood? If not, what purpose does art that may not be so serve?

This book defends Aestheticism- the claim that everything is aesthetically valuable and that a life lived in pursuit of aesthetic value can be a particularly good one. Furthermore, in distilling aesthetic qualities, artists have a special role to play in teaching us to recognize values; a critical component of virtue. I ground my account upon an analysis of aesthetic value as ‘objectified final value’, which is underwritten by an original psychological claim that all aesthetic values are distal versions of practical (...) values. This is followed by systematic accounts of beauty, sublimity, comedy, drama, and tragedy, as well as appendix entries on the cute, the cool, the kitsch, the uncanny, the horrific, the erotic, and the furious. (shrink)

In this article, robust evidence is provided showing that an individual’s moral character can contribute to the aesthetic quality of their appearance, as well as being beautiful or ugly itself. It is argued that this evidence supports two main conclusions. First, moral beauty and ugliness reside on the inside, and beauty and ugliness are not perception-dependent as a result; and, second, aesthetic perception is affected by moral information, and thus moral beauty and ugliness are on the outside as well.

In this paper, we present an abductive argument for the existence of God from the experience of awe at natural beauty. If God’s creative work is a viable explanation for why we experience awe at natural beauty, and there is no satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the origins of such experiences, then we have defeasible evidence that God exists. To evaluate the argument's tenability, we assess the merits of the two main naturalistic frameworks that can be marshaled to answer the question (...) of why human beings experience awe at natural beauty, Wilson's biophilia hypothesis, and Keltner and Haidt's prototype approach to awe. We show shortcomings of both accounts in explaining the relevant experiences and argue that the reliance of these accounts on an adaptationist reading of our aesthetic appreciation of nature entails a commitment to questionable hidden premises: that affordances themselves can figure in the subject's perceptual experience, and that experiences of awe have adaptive value. We maintain that the argument's “empirical” premise is tenable and conclude with directions for future research regarding the argument's “theological” premise. (shrink)

The article presents Hanslick’s aesthetic formalism as the starting point of the contemporary aesthetics of music. His book, written in the 19th century, is considered contemporary because it still proves to be influential and fruitful in the contemporary theoretical circles, especially in the modern analytic aesthetics of music, where it is widely cited and discussed. The article positions Hanslick’s book in relation to his nearest predecessors Kant and Herbart, and to the neighbouring area where the formalistic view appeared, namely in (...) Fidler’s visual formalism in fine arts. It is shown that by being the first piece of writing to attempt to systematically and comprehensively determine the essence and the content of music, and the criteria for evaluation of musical worth, Hanslick’s book sets the foundation for a rigorous examination of the aesthetics of music, and also breaks off with the widely ingrained preconceptions of music, which were in themselves an obstacle to establishing the aesthetics of music as a scientific discipline. (shrink)

Examines the birth of art-as-beauty in Western art and the concomitant birth of the idea of art itself. Also discusses the death of art-as-beauty from Manet onward and certain implications for aesthetics (the philosophy of art). Includes relevant reproductions. (The essay is a longer version of my paper "The Birth and Death of Beauty in Western Art" also listed on PhilPapers.).

Nietzsche suggests that part of what it is to experience something as beautiful is to experience it as beneficial in the highest degree. He defends this claim by suggesting that it alone captures the experience of beauty typical of artists. I argue that this is best understood as pointing to an explanatory argument: Nietzsche takes his view to make sense of an effect beautiful objects have on artists. This effect is, I suggest, gratitude. Beautiful objects inspire feelings of gratitude within (...) artists, moving them to create works of art celebrating those objects as a form of thanksgiving. Insofar as gratitude is typically generated by objects viewed as beneficial, Nietzsche’s view of beauty is well-positioned to explain this effect. (shrink)

In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller draws a striking connection between aesthetic value and individual and political freedom, claiming that, ‘it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom’. However, contemporary ways of thinking about freedom and aesthetic value make it difficult to see what the connection could be. Through a careful reconstruction of the Letters, we argue that Schiller’s theory of aesthetic value serves as the key to understanding not only his (...) view of aesthetic engagement, but also his distinctive account of individual and political freedom. In Part I, we develop a reconstruction of Schiller's view that aesthetic value is the only path to individual freedom and in Part II we analyze how Schiller connects aesthetic value to political freedom. In the end, we show that Schiller defends a non-hedonic, action-oriented, communitarian theory of aesthetic value and a theory of freedom that makes the aesthetic not just supererogatory but fundamental for any fully autonomous life. Although we have lost touch with this way of thinking about aesthetic value and freedom, we submit that it is illuminating for contemporary thinking about both. (shrink)

I offer a set of sufficient conditions for beauty, drawing on Parsons and Carlson’s account of ‘functional beauty’. First, I argue that their account is flawed, whilst falling short of...

The fourth of eight chapters from my recently published book "Grace and Gravity: Architectures of the Figure." The argumentation builds on terminology introduced in the first three chapters, the most important being the phased structure of the figure: prefiguration, figuration, and transfiguration. Also, the earlier developed interdependence of movement and standstill, which we find both in beauty and in grace, is here expanded in the relationship between the mineral, animal, and vegetable.

A pdf sample that contains the cover, contents page, preface and the back cover with endorsements and blurb.

There has been no shortage of readers who take Nietzsche as educator (cf., for a by no means exhaustive list: Allen, 2017; Aviram, 1991; Bell, 2007; Cooper 1983; Fairfield, 2017; Fitzsimons, 2007;...

One of the oldest platitudes about beauty is that it is pleasant to perceive or experience. In this article, I take this platitude at face value and try to explain why experiences of beauty are seemingly always accompanied by pleasure. Unlike explanations that have been offered in the past, the explanation proposed is designed to suit a “realist” view on which beauty is an irreducibly evaluative property, that is, a value. In a nutshell, the explanation is that experiences of beauty (...) are experiences in which it appears that something is beautiful, and that such experiences are identical to experiences of aesthetic pleasure. (shrink)

Benoit B. Mandelbrot, when discussing the global appeal of fractal patterns and designs, draws upon examples from across numerous world cultures. What may be missed in Mandelbrot's presentation is Immanuel Kant’s precedence in recognizing this sort of widespread beauty in art and nature, fractals avant la lettre. More importantly, the idea of the fractal may itself assist the aesthetic attitude which Kantian beauty requires. In addition, from a Kantian perspective, fractal patterns may offer a source for a sense of community (...) with humanity. I close with an excursus on the more sombre note of Kantian sublimity which fractals can also present. (shrink)

I first show how one might argue for a mind-independent conception of beauty and artistic merit. I then discuss whether this makes aesthetic judgements suitable to undermine skeptical worries about the existence of mind-independent moral value and categorical reasons.

The notion of beauty has been and continues to be one of the main concerns of aesthetics and art theory. Traditionally, the centrality of beauty in the experience of art was widely accepted and beauty was considered one of the key values in aesthetics. In recent debate, however, the significance of the notion of beauty has been discussed controversially. Especially in the second half of the twentieth century, the role of beauty was strongly challenged both by artists and in philosophy (...) and theory of art. Beauty was no longer a central value, but just one aesthetic feature among many others. In recent years, however, the notion of beauty has been re-evaluated, some even speak of a “comeback of beauty”. Against this background it is one of the main tasks and challenges of contemporary aesthetics to develop a more profound understanding of the nature of beauty, its different forms and dimensions, and its place in art theory and practice – and in human life. In the contributions to this volume, leading scholars in the field explore the significance of the notion of beauty, its key aspects, and its relevance in various aesthetic disciplines. The questions addressed in the volume can be summarized in the following three headings: What is beauty? What is beautiful? How does the value of beauty relate to other aesthetical values? The volume contains a selection of invited contributions, including: María José Alcaraz León, Hanne Appelqvist, Allen Carlson, Noël Carroll, Stephen Davies, Richard Eldridge, John Gibson, Peter Lamarque, Catrin Misselhorn, Otto Neumaier, Elisabeth Schellekens, Maria Elisabeth Reicher-Marek, Sonia Sedivy, Davide dal Sasso, and Lisa Kathrin Schmalzried -/- . (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that an aesthetics of exemplarity could be a useful component of projects of moral self-cultivation. Using some in Linda Zagzebski's exemplarism, I describe a distinctive, aesthetically-inflected mode of admiration called moral attraction whose object is the inner beauty of a persn - the expression of the 'inner' virtues or excellences of character of a person in 'outer' forms of bodily comportment that are experienced, by others, as beautiful. I then argue that certain (...) moral traditions deploy inner beauty within their practices of moral self-cultivation - a good example being Confucianism. Advocates of exemplarist moral education should therefore take seriously the ways that an aesthetics of exemplarity can play roles within projects of moral self-cultivation. (shrink)

Can a basic sensory property like a bare colour or tone be beautiful? Some, like Kant, say no. But Heidegger suggests, plausibly, that colours ‘glow’ and tones ‘sing’ in artworks. These claims can be productively synthesized: ‘glowing’ colours are not beautiful; but they are sensory forces—not mere ‘matter’, contra Kant—with real aesthetic impact. To the extent that it inheres in sensible properties, beauty is plausibly restricted to structures of sensory force. Kant correspondingly misrepresents the relation of beautiful wholes to their (...) parts. Beautiful form is not extrinsic to sensory force. Sensible beauty is just the holistic impact of agonistically-interacting sensory forces. When sensory forces interact hierarchically, their collective impact is closer to the sublime, in quality if not degree. The simplest sensory experience of sublimity is just the impact of radically intensified sensory forces, similar in kind if not degree to the individual ‘singing’ tones in a beautiful melody. (shrink)

The notion of beauty has endured a troublesome history over the last few decades. While for centuries beauty has been considered one of the central values of art, there have also been times when it seemed old-fashioned to even mention the term. The present volume aims to explore the nature of beauty and to shed light its place in contemporary philosphy and art practice.

£ British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] unique and sprawling collection of sixteen essays explores a wide range of perspectives on the human body and how it is embodied, lived, viewed, perceived, and constructed by ourselves and by others in both positive and harmful ways. The book’s contributors include philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and artists, as well as scholars who focus on (...) law, culture, and on Africana, race, gender, sexuality, and disability studies. In addition, the authors represent a diverse group of scholars whose personal and societal experiences are also part of the discussion. Centred in philosophical aesthetics, this book moves into and explores fields of everyday and somatic experience, evolutionary psychology, art, ethics, personal identity, and socio-political status and treatment. It shows how bodies are... (shrink)

within western philosophy, there is a long and rich tradition of treating the beautiful and the good as closely related and mutually reinforcing.1 Different models of the relation have been proposed. An ‘identity’ model can be seen in Plato’s identification of the beautiful and the good in the Symposium and perhaps in the Greek notion of kalokagathia.2 Yet, according to Plato’s Republic, the form of the good illuminates, and differs from, the forms of beauty and truth: “both knowledge and truth (...) are beautiful things, but the good is other and more beautiful than they,”3 suggesting that beauty is a mode of the good. Likewise, according to Plotinus’s chronologically first treatise, “On... (shrink)

My observations here are meant to address a current lacuna in discussions of Kant's aesthetics, namely the beauty of poetry. There are, I admit, numerous treatments of poetry considered in the light of Kant's aesthetic theory, but what may not be noticed is that in discussions of poetry and Kant's aesthetics, the topic of poetic beauty only rarely comes up. This virtual silence on the beauty of poetry is surprising, given that the beautiful is obviously one of the two foundational (...) aesthetic categories in Kant's aesthetics. This silence stands out all the more given that Kant himself explicitly mentions that poems can be beautiful and furthermore declares poetry to be the highest form of fine art. Why, then, is the beauty of poetry almost never discussed in relation to Kant's aesthetics? Ultimately, I will be arguing that this silence on the beauty of poetry is a motivated one, albeit an unintentionally motivated one, namely because Kant's conception of free beauty militates against its being applied to poetry. In other words, this lacuna in discussions of Kant's aesthetics rests on a lacuna in the field of products of fine art to which the Kantian conception of free beauty can be applied. It seems that this lacuna has been overlooked in the literature principally because Kant himself overlooks it; in addition, interpreters of Kant may well independently overlook it for the same reasons that Kant apparently did. Johann Gottfried Karl Christian Kiesewetter's book, Immanuel Kant's Critik der Urtheilskraft für Uneingeweihte (1804), serves to bring the discussion into higher focus. (shrink)

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Immanuel Kant argues that when we form a judgment of taste, the representation goes together with a demand that we require others to share. Some commentators note that the aesthetic feeling in a judgment of taste and its expectant universality seems to display a normative necessity in the explicit judgment itself, and that the expression of this normative component is sometimes stated as a claim to which everyone ought to conform. In this (...) paper, I argue that the normative component of taste and its concomitant demand should not be interpreted too strongly as an actual expectation, but rather as only a conceivable possibility. Toward this end, I examine several passages for the declaration of taste to call into view certain caveats which suggest that Kant’s description of an intersubjective demand arising concomitantly with a judgment of taste functions only as an “analogical ought,” i. e., that the demand of taste is expressed as if the satisfaction I feel in a judgment of taste can possibly demand universal assent. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough formative of modern value theory, the moral beauty view—which states that moral virtue is beautiful and moral vice is ugly—is now mostly neglected by philosophers. The two contemporary defences of the view mostly capitalize on its intuitive attractiveness, but to little avail: such considerations hardly convince sceptics of what is nowadays a rather unpopular view. Historically, the view was supported by thought experiments; and although these greatly increase its plausibility, they also raise empirical questions, which they leave unanswered. Here, (...) I offer a novel defence of the moral beauty view, capitalizing on empirical evidence and arguing via an inference to the best explanation. (shrink)

If artworks and their aesthetic properties stand in constitutive relationships to historical context and circumstances, so that some understanding of relevant facts is involved in responding to a work, what becomes of the intuitive view that we see artworks and at least some of their aesthetic properties? This question is raised by arguments in both aesthetics and art history for the historical nature of works of art. The paper argues that the answer needs to take philosophy of perception into account. (...) The principal development that has shaped philosophy of perception in the last thirty years—explaining perceptual experience in terms of contents that represent that such-and-such is the case—is directly relevant to key arguments for the historical nature of art because contents can represent complex kinds and properties. Conceptual realism is especially well-suited for explaining perception of artworks and aesthetic properties because it emphasizes that forms of understanding—in the sense of capacities, abilities and techniques—are involved in perceptual engagement with individual objects and instances of properties. To make this case, the paper examines influential arguments for the historical nature of art and aesthetic properties by Arthur C. Danto and Kendall L. Walton; and examines art-historical discussions by Michael Baxandall, Linda Nochlin and T. J. Clark. The paper argues that the aesthetic properties of an artwork depend on human intentional uses of properties, colours and contours among them, and such uses may themselves be aesthetic. The Wittgensteinian notion of use is contextual and historical, and uses are perceptible. (shrink)

This chapter is a rethinking of my earlier “The Ages of Beauty” which investigated Charles Hartshorne’s Diagram of Aesthetic Values. The argument is placed in a long history of beauty being considered as the middle between extremes. It slowly develops into a structure not merely of aesthetic experience but of existence itself, making it an alternative to Heidegger’s fourfold.

Some versions of the doctrine of divine simplicity imply that God lacks really differentiated parts. I present a new argument against these views based on divine beauty. The argument proceeds as follows: God is beautiful. If God is beautiful, then this beauty arises from some structure. If God’s beauty arises from a structure, then God possesses really differentiated parts. If these premises are true, then divine simplicity is false. I argue for each of the argument’s premises and defend it against (...) objections, including an objection based on analogical predication, and an objection that supposes that God is simple while appearing complex. (shrink)

The Stoa might be not the first philosophical school that comes to mind when considering the most important ancient contributions to aesthetics, yet multiple extant fragments show that the Stoics had a non-marginal theoretical interest in aesthetic properties. Probably the most important piece of evidence for the Stoic attempts to theorize beauty is the definition of beauty as summetria of parts with each other and with the whole. In the first half of this article, I present and analyse the main (...) evidence for this definition. Then I discuss Plotinus' critique of the definition and argue that it contains some pertinent remarks that, with support of additional evidence, lead to the conclusion that the Stoics conceptualized aesthetic properties as supervening on functional composition. (shrink)

A free copy of the review can be obtained by following this link: -/- http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/pKdJUN4BCKP7z8SneF6X/full .

The chapter challenges hyperbolic claims about the centrality of appreciation of beauty to Buddhism. Within the texts, attitudes are more mixed, except for a form of 'inner beauty' - the beauty found in the expression of virtues or wisdom in forms of bodily comportment. Inner beauty is a stable presence throughout Buddhist history, practices, and art.

I argue, contra Mohan Matthen, that at least some aesthetic pleasures arising from the appreciation of aesthetic features of artworks are what he calls ‘r-pleasures’ as opposed to ‘f-pleasures’—and moreover, that the paradigm aesthetic pleasure appears to be an r-pleasure on Matthen's terms. I then argue that talk of r- and f-pleasures does not distinguish different kinds, but two different features of pleasure; so this supposed distinction cannot be used to characterize a sui generis aesthetic pleasure.

In his entire oeuvre Brentano defended a scientific conception of philosophy and advocated the adoption of a rigorous, scientific method. Given this background it might come as a surprise that in his reflections on aesthetics he firmly rejected the classic definition of aesthetics as the science of beauty. This must not be read as an expression of disinterest in – or a dismissal of – aesthetics, though. It is rather an expression of Brentano's view concerning the position of aesthetics in (...) his overall system. He conceived it – on a par with logic and ethics – not as a theoretical science, but as a practical discipline that was rooted in psychology: aesthetics, Brentano suggests, is not constituted by a set of intrinsically related propositions; it rather serves the practical purpose of instructing those who want to experience the beautiful with correct taste or to create works of art. The task of aesthetics is, in other words, to formulate a set of rules or instructions that teach us how to correctly experience beauty, how to come to prefer the more over the less beautiful, but also how to create beauty and how to produce works of art that have the power to bring about aesthetic pleasure in the beholder. (shrink)

Ugliness is a neglected topic in contemporary analytic aesthetics. This is regrettable given that this topic is not just genuinely fascinating, but could also illuminate other areas in the field, seeing as ugliness, albeit unexplored, does feature rather prominently in several debates in aesthetics. This paper articulates a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness. Ultimately, I argue that deformity, understood in a certain way, and displeasure, jointly suffice for ugliness. First, I motivate my proposal, by locating a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness in (...) aesthetic tradition, offering examples in support, and rejecting related alternative suggestions. Second, I argue that the proposal boasts considerable merits. Not only does it capture much of what we ordinarily think of as ugly, but it also comprises an objective criterion for ugliness, offers unity and comprehensiveness, and is informative and explanatorily potent. Third, I discuss a number of objections, thereby demonstrating that the proposal withstands reflective scrutiny. (shrink)

The first commented edition of K.W.F. Solger's Vorlesungen über Ästhetik (1819), edited by Giovanna Pinna.

In this paper, I ask whether there is a defensible philosophical view according to which everybody is beautiful. I review two purely aesthetical versions of this claim. The No Standards View claims that everybody is maximally and equally beautiful. The Multiple Standards View encourages us to widen our standards of beauty. I argue that both approaches are problematic. The former fails to be aspirational and empowering, while the latter fails to be sufficiently inclusive. I conclude by presenting a hybrid ethical–aesthetical (...) view according to which everybody is beautiful in the sense that everybody can be perceived through a loving gaze. I show that this view is inclusive, aspirational and empowering, and authentically aesthetical. (shrink)