In this paper I present an overview of the doctrine known as Positive Aesthetics regarding aesthetic judgements about nature. According to this view, all pristine nature is always beautiful and, generally, although not necessarily, human intervention tends to introduce ugliness in nature. One of the strong practical motivations behind this claim is an attempt to ground our reasons to preserve natural environments in aesthetic reasons. Positive Aesthetics has been defended within contrary approaches to nature appreciation such as the cognitivists and (...) the anti-cognitivist. Recently, the possibility of real ugliness in nature has been defended; at the same time, it is argued that the presence of ugly items in nature does not lead necessarily to the idea that they are not aesthetically valuable. Hence, natural ugliness can be a reason to preserve nature. In this sense, the denial of the Positive Aesthetics claim is shown to be compatible with the appeal to aesthetic negative qualities as a source of reasons for preserving natural environments. (shrink)

Philosophical aesthetics has recently been expanding its purview—with exciting work on everyday aesthetics, somaesthetics, gustatory aesthetics, and the aesthetics of imperceptibilia like mathematics and human character—reclaiming territory that was lost during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the discipline begun concentrating almost exclusively on the philosophy of art and restricted the aesthetic realm to the distally perceptible. Yet there remains considerable reluctance towards acknowledging the aesthetic character of many of these objects. This raises an important question—partly made salient again by (...) the ongoing expansion of the aesthetic domain, and partly by the fact that many still seem resistant to this aesthetic diversification—which aestheticians seem to avoid: what, if anything, constrains the scope of beauty or the aesthetic? I argue that form, construed as comprising a degree, however minimal, of experienceable complexity, is necessary and sufficient for an object's candidature for the possession of aesthetic properties. Such a condition serves to discriminate between attempts to expand the scope of the aesthetic that are legitimate and those that are not. If correct, my view suggests that the aesthetic realm, though not limitless, is very broad indeed—but this, I think, is as it should be. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Allen Carlson moves away from a purely scientific–cognitive framework for environmental aesthetics towards a ‘combination position’ based on the ecoaesthetics theorised by Xiangzhan Cheng. Carlson argues that only an aesthetics informed by ecological knowledge can offer the correct foundations for the continued relevance of environmental aesthetics to environmental ethics. However, closer analysis of Cheng's theory of ecoaesthetics reveals a number of problems related to questions of anthropocentrism and in particular, the issue of an ethic based on (...) love. In this paper, I offer an alternative approach for the future of environmental aesthetics in the form of an intergenerational aesthetics based on Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK). (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to show that the current incineration techniques of corpses are directly related to the Holocaust itself and its purposes. It is the same technique which, in the inhuman years of Nazi atrocities, was developed to be applied massively against the Jewish people and the other groups, because as a method it served and expressed both politically and ideologically the plan of a “final solution:” the final “dis-solution,” the disappearance of the human body even as (...) a residue, because the human body, even as a corpse, still retains identity and value. The findings of this study suggest a different analysis of the Nazis’ choice to eliminate the corpses of the Jews, while, at the same time, exploring the original approach offered here helps to understand better the value that the human corpse retains. Many social and religious groups that currently refuse to accept this way of managing human corpses become more understandable in their choice not to accept what nature itself denies but modern technique imposes, namely perfect oblivion, extinction of the corpse. Initially, it is presented in historical and intercultural terms in which ways human societies mainly behave towards the human corpse along with the most prevalent funeral burial customs. Subsequently, the semiology of the human corpse is evaluated in terms of philosophical aesthetics and is included in the corresponding aesthetic categories. Finally, this work airs and analyzes new bioethical issues which arise considering this ever-increasing tendency towards the practice of those responsible for the Holocaust, namely the disappearance of the human corpse. (shrink)

One of the most intriguing – and arguably counter-intuitive – doctrines defended by environmental philosophers is that of positive aesthetics, the thesis that all of nature is beautiful. The doctrine has attained philosophical respectability only comparatively recently, thanks in no small part to the work of Allen Carlson, one of its foremost defenders. In this paper, we argue that the doctrine can be found much earlier in the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who devised and defended a version of positive (...) aesthetics in the early modern period, grounded in a conception of the world as a world of monads, each of which individually fulfils the rationalist aesthetic criteria of multiplicity-in-unity and that taken together ensure that the world as a whole is a harmoniously ordered system of multiple and diverse individuals, whose intelligible order and variety is made known to us through natural scientific endeavour. In showing this, we advance two further theses: first, that Leibniz's vers.. (shrink)

At the end of section §6 in the Analytic of the Beautiful, Kant defines taste as the “faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest”. On the face of it, Kant’s definition of taste includes both; positive and negative judgments of taste. Moreover, Kant’s term ‘dissatisfaction’ implies not only that negative judgments of taste are those of the non-beautiful, but also that of the ugly, depending on the presence of an (...) actual displeasure. (shrink)

The theistic argument from beauty has what we call an 'evil twin', the argument from ugliness. The argument yields either what we call 'atheist win', or, when faced with aesthetic theodicies, 'agnostic tie' with the argument from beauty.

For in all natural things there is something marvelous.1 None of nature’s landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.2 Positive aesthetics is the idea that all of nature is beautiful.3 The more qualified version supported here claims that nature—to the extent it is not influenced by humans—is specially and predominantly beautiful. Some of the most prominent figures in environmental aesthetics and ethics have defended PA. Holmes Rolston III was an early proponent: The Matterhorn leaves us in awe, but (...) so does the fall foliage on any New England hillside, or the rhododendron on Roan Mountain. Those who linger with nature find this integrity where it is not at first suspected, in... (shrink)