The question of whether or not beauty exists in nature is a philosophical problem. In particular, there is the question of whether artworks, persons, or nature has aesthetic qualities. Most people say that they care about their own beauty. Moreover, they judge another person's appearance from an aesthetic point of view using aesthetic concepts. However, aesthetic judgements are not objective in the sense that the experience justifies their objectivity. By analysing Monroe C. Beardsley's theory of the objectivity of (...) aesthetic qualities, I examine whether there are really beautiful and ugly persons in the world. I will criticize the way analytic philosophers judge people and art from an aesthetic perspective. If there are no aesthetic qualities in the world, nobody can judge someone beautiful or ugly without oppression. Aesthetic judgement is exercise of power. (shrink)

We make choices about our own appearance and evaluate others' choices – every day. These choices are meaningful for us as individuals and as members of communities. But many features of personal appearance are due to luck, and many cultural beauty standards make some groups and individuals worse off (this is called “lookism”). So, how are we to square these two facets of personal appearance? And how are we to evaluate agency in the context of personal beauty? I (...) identify three ways of responding to these questions: beauty advo- cacy, beauty skepticism, and beauty revisionism. Advocates connect an honorific sense of beauty with personal charac- ter. Skeptics focus on beauty standards, and primarily offer a social critique of beauty standards. Some skeptics suggest embracing other aesthetic ideals – even ugliness. Revision- ists critique beauty standards, but retain an honorific sense of beauty. Each position offers tools to evaluate personal agency as aesthetic agency, whether first-personally or through our appreciation of others' appearance. (shrink)

This paper attacks an account of Kant's controversial distinction between "free" and "dependent" beauty. I present three problems—The Lorland problem, The Crawford Problem, and the problem of intrinsic relation—that are shown to be a consequence of various interpretations of Kant's distinction. Next, I reconstruct Robert Wicks' well-known account of dependent beauty as "the appreciation of teleological style" and point out a key equivocation in the statement of Wicks' account: the judgment of dependent beauty can be thought to (...) consist in comparing any two objects' teleological styles either in respect of how or in respect of how well each realizes a common purpose. I argue that this equivocation forces Wicks into a dilemma: either he must assert the impossibility of ugliness or he must assert that the judgment of dependent beauty is reducible to the judgment of perfection. Either way, he denies important theoretic desiderata. (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. (shrink)

A well-documented “beauty is good” stereotype is expressed in the expectation that physically attractive people have more positive characteristics. Recent evidence has also found that unattractive faces are associated with negative character inferences. Is what is good (bad) also beautiful (ugly)? Whether this conflation of aesthetic and moral values is bidirectional is not known. This study tested the hypothesis that complementary “good is beautiful” and “bad is ugly” stereotypes bias aesthetic judgments. Using highly controlled face stimuli, this preregistered study (...) examined whether moral character influences perceptions of attractiveness for different ages and sexes of faces. Compared to faces paired with nonmoral vignettes, those paired with prosocial vignettes were rated significantly more attractive, confident, and friendlier. The opposite pattern characterized faces paired with antisocial vignettes. A significant interaction between vignette type and the age of the face was detected for attractiveness. Moral transgressions affected attractiveness more negatively for younger than older faces. Sex-related differences were not detected. These results suggest information about moral character affects our judgments about facial attractiveness. Better (worse) people are considered more (less) attractive. These findings suggest that beliefs about moral goodness and physical beauty influence each other bidirectionally. (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)

Can an ugly experiment be a good experiment? Philosophers have identified many beautiful experiments and explored ways in which their beauty might be connected to their epistemic value. In contrast, the present chapter seeks out (and celebrates) ugly experiments. Among the ugliest are those being designed by AI algorithms. Interestingly, in the contexts where such experiments tend to be deployed, low aesthetic value correlates with high epistemic value. In other words, ugly experiments can be good. Given this, we should (...) conclude that beauty is not generally necessary or sufficient for epistemic value, and increasing beauty will not generally tend to increase epistemic value. (shrink)

In arguing for his theory of pure reflective judgments of taste Kant extensively analyses beauty, but almost wholly disregards ugliness. We commonly take ugliness as paradigmatic when we reflect on our negative aesthetic judgments, and so does Kant. Consequently, there ought to be a more explicit story explaining how Kantian judgments of ugliness are possible. In this paper I argue that a disharmony is the key to understanding Kantian ugliness. This way, an answer to the (...) question of ugliness in Kant can be given in terms of a disharmonious free play of the faculties of imagination and understanding. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the relationship between the idea of possible worlds and the notion of the beauty of God. I argue that there is a clear contradiction between the idea that God is utterly and completely beautiful on the one hand and the notion that He contains within himself all possible worlds on the other. Since some of the possible worlds residing in the mind of the deity are ugly, their presence seems to compromise God's complete and (...) utter beauty. (shrink)

In the recent literature on the issue, a number of commentators have argued that Kant’s aesthetic theory commits him to the position that nothing is ugly. For instance, in ‘Why Kant finds nothing ugly’, Shier argues that ‘within Kant’s aesthetics, there cannot be any negative judgments of taste’ (Shier (1998): 413). And in ‘Kant’s problems with ugliness’, Thomson claims that ‘Kant’s aesthetic theory precludes […] ugliness’ (Thomson (1992): 107). In other words, as it is presented in some of (...) the literature, Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment seems to preclude him from accounting for the possibility of ugliness. A number of reasons have been put forward to explain why there can be no ugliness for Kant. Some have to do with his account of experience in general. Others have to do with the very nature of the free play between imagination and understanding. Of course, the real source of the problem is that the Critique of Judgment does not actually discuss ugliness, so commentators are left with the task of filling in the gaps. This paper aims to argue that Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment commits him not only to the existence of the ugly, but to the distinction between two kinds of ugliness. To support this claim, I will start from the premise that if there is to be room for ugliness, it should be defined as the contrary of beauty. However, I will suggest that Kant’s account of beauty can be negated in two ways, one that gives rise to impure ugliness and the other to pure ugliness. I will examine them in turn, first by showing that impure ugliness is the contrary of beauty insofar as it contravenes our interests and produces a desire to dispose of it, whereas beauty is necessarily disinterested for Kant. In the second section, I will use Kant’s definition of judgments of pure beauty to carve a space for an account of pure ugliness. For, it should present all the characteristics that make it “pure” whilst replacing the characteristics that make it beautiful with the ones that make it ugly. On this basis, I will define pure ugliness as the disinterested displeasure caused by the experience of what I will call “foul play” between the imagination and the understanding. (shrink)

Kant’s theory of taste, as expounded in the Critique of Judgment, deals exhaustively with judgments of beauty. Rarely does Kant mention ugliness. This omission has led to a debate among commentators about how judgments of ugliness should be explained in a Kantian framework. I argue that the judgment of ugliness originates in the disharmonious play between the faculties of imagination and understanding. Such disharmony occurs when the understanding finds that it cannot in principle form any concept (...) suitable to a representation as it is presented by the imagination. (shrink)

In this article I reply to Jon Robson's objections to my argument that God does not contain any possible worlds. I had argued that ugly possible worlds clearly compromise God's beauty. Robson argues that I failed to show that possible worlds can be subject to aesthetic evaluation, and that even if they were it could be the case that ugliness might contribute to God's overall beauty. In reply I try to show that possible worlds are aesthetically evaluable (...) by arguing that possible worlds are maximally rich representations of possible events. I further argue that nothing in God's being can be aesthetically non-evaluable since God must be maximal beauty – a beauteous maximality which needs no ugliness. Finally I show in what sense Christ's heavenly scars can be beautiful. (shrink)

The attitudes P. F. Strawson dubs reactive are felt toward another (or oneself). They are thus at least in part affective reactions to what Strawson describes as qualities of will that people manifest toward others and themselves. The reactive attitudes are also interpersonal, relating persons to persons. But how do they relate persons? On the deontic, imperative view, they relate persons in second-personal authority and accountability relations. After addressing how best to understand the reactive attitudes as sentiments, I evaluate the (...) deontic imperative view. I argue that the modality of reactive attitudes is not invariably deontic nor is their mood invariably imperative. Certain reactive attitudes are aretaic, appellative sentiments that prescribe non-jural ideals of conduct or character. Although expansive, my resulting conception of the reactive attitudes escapes the charge of failing to distinguish reactive sentiments from “disengaged aesthetic reactions” to the beautiful and ugly in human action and character. (shrink)

"If the previous chapters by Cabrera, Reid and Craig, and Cerbone all accentuate the paradox of existence, that our being-in-the-world is simultaneously beautiful and ugly, good and evil, joyous and painful, Jussi Backman's "Not One Power, But Two: Dark Grounds and Twilit Paradises in Malick" investigates this fundamental ambivalence in terms of Schelling's doctrine of evil, a view that assigns evil (and hence melancholy) a fundamental place as a basic principle of reality. Backman's suggestion at once deepens and complexifies the (...) way in which Malick's films can be seen as exercises in "aesthetic theodicy," as Sinnerbrink has said." (Steven DeLay, Introduction). (shrink)

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.

This paper examines the relationship between beauty and aesthetic properties to argue that aesthetic properties are connected to a work’s content, to what a work conveys or expresses. I turn to Kant’s Critique of Judgement to make the case. My argument highlights two parts of Kant’s approach. Kant argues that pure aesthetic judgements of beauty are grounded in a harmonious yet free play of the imagination and understanding. Such free play is pleasurable and intimates that the power or (...) capacity of imagination is suitable for and can be brought within the conditions of the capacity for conceptual understanding. Within this broader frame, Kant’s account of artistic beauty specifies the relationship of aesthetic properties to the beauty of a work: aesthetic attributes help convey the aesthetic ideas that beautiful works express. I examine how Kant’s view helps us appreciate that aesthetic properties of artworks are integral to conveying the content of a work, and that the pleasure we feel has the potential to make us aware of the experience, its nature and value. (shrink)

This paper explores the ontology of the beautiful from the standpoint of competing logics, i.e., ways of speaking the Logos. The first is a theo-logic centered on the analogy of being, which uniquely regards reality as Logos—a structured hierarchy of the real, a ‘Who’ rather than a ‘What’—which provides an ontology of beauty as desirable being, and ultimately, the desirable Being. The correct response to reality is thus holiness, the sacral separateness of God imparted to, and thus borrowed by (...) and reflected through, creatures. The competing logic is what Baudrillard calls the simulacral, in which the real is suspended by its own model; the image exposes the poverty of the real and causes it to disappear altogether, revealing a transaesthetics of banality and indifference, a totalizing counterfeit of the real that is beyond real difference, beyond Logos—and therefore beyond structured hierarchy, beyond beauty and ugliness. The simulated real is thus the world of the spectacle, the world as product of consumer gaze. A way to repudiate the simulation, the murderous image, to uncover the real always and already grounding the image is to return to Logos: to emplace the image in a hierarchically relational context within Logos. The upshot is that, when so emplaced, the gaze of the image tells a different story: the world is not one of consumerist spectacle but of mutual self-gifting. Amidst the barbarism of the dislocated consumer ego, we can conscientiously commune with neighbor and turn away from what Augustine termed "fellowship with the demons.". (shrink)

In aesthetics there is a long tradition according to which beauty is the object of love. One construal of this suggests a sentimentalist theory of beauty: beauty just is the object of an emotion aptly described as love. The first step toward such a view would be to discern whether we can make sense of at least some kind of aesthetic affect as at least some kind of love. I suggest that we can by taking up a (...) thought from Frank Sibley, according to whom aesthetic properties reflect non-aesthetic values that “go deep into human life and interests” or that “mean much to us” given the kinds of lives we live. I show how we might think that a variety of aesthetic affect represents its object as embodying life-affirming value and as such we can see a variety of aesthetic affect as a kind of love of life. It remains to be seen whether this can be leveraged into a theory of beauty narrowly construed. (shrink)

This paper examines three accounts of the sleeping beauty case: an account proposed by Adam Elga, an account proposed by David Lewis, and a third account defended in this paper. It provides two reasons for preferring the third account. First, this account does a good job of capturing the temporal continuity of our beliefs, while the accounts favored by Elga and Lewis do not. Second, Elga’s and Lewis’ treatments of the sleeping beauty case lead to highly counterintuitive consequences. (...) The proposed account also leads to counterintuitive consequences, but they’re not as bad as those of Elga’s account, and no worse than those of Lewis’ account. (shrink)

Adam Elga takes the Sleeping Beauty example to provide a counter-example to Reflection, since on Sunday Beauty assigns probability 1/2 to H, and she is certain that on Monday she will assign probability 1/3. I will show that there is a natural way for Bas van Fraassen to defend Reflection in the case of Sleeping Beauty, building on van Fraassen’s treatment of forgetting. This will allow me to identify a lacuna in Elga’s argument for 1/3. I will (...) then argue, however, that not all is well with Reflection: there is a problem with van Fraassen’s treatment of forgetting. Ultimately I will agree with Elga’s 1/3 answer. David Lewis maintains that the answer is 1/2; I will argue that cases of forgetting can be used to show that the premiss of Lewis’s argument for 1/2 is false. (shrink)

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)

Among semanticists and philosophers of language, there has been a recent outburst of interest in predicates such as delicious, called predicates of personal taste (PPTs, e.g. Lasersohn 2005). Somewhat surprisingly, the question of whether or how we can distinguish aesthetic predicates from PPTs has hardly been addressed at all in this recent work. It is precisely this question that we address. We investigate linguistic criteria that we argue can be used to delineate the class of specifically aesthetic adjectives. We show (...) that there are, in fact, good motivations for keeping PPTs and aesthetic predicates apart: the semantic structure of the former, but not the latter, entails an experiencer. There are many adjectives whose semantic structure arguably also entails an experiencer, yet which are readily used in expressing aesthetic judgments. Adjectives such as provocative or moving are a case in point, since as adjectives they arguably maintain the experiencer argument from the verb they are derived from. Nevertheless, when we describe, say, a sculpture as provocative, or a theater performance as moving, we clearly make aesthetic judgments. The difficult question, then, is to articulate the relationship between an aesthetic predicate (of which beautiful and ugly are paradigms) and other predicates that just happen to be used in making an aesthetic judgment. Tightly related to this point is the more general question of the relationship between an evaluative predicate and a predicate that occurs in an evaluative judgment. One of our aims is to make some progress in addressing these questions. (shrink)

Human relationships with cars are multifaceted and morally fraught. Cars serve multiple functions, and generate experiences characteristic of both fine art and everyday aesthetic experience – but they’re also the roots of dire eco-social ills. Recent theories tend to undermine the aesthetic aspects of human-automobile relationships in order to emphasize cars’ ethically problematic effects. But cars’ shameful consequences need not cancel out their beauty or their relevance to aesthetic theories. I suggest that David Hume’s aesthetic tenets demonstrate how and (...) why cars are beautiful, foregrounding considerations that automobile aesthetics can’t afford to ignore but that risk being obscured by cars’ positively and negatively charged status. For instance, Hume underscores rational choice as an element of aesthetic experience: we can choose how and when to experience cars’ beauty or ugliness. According to Hume, utility tends to inspire sentiments of beauty; and what is ethically good is most useful to humanity at large. But tension arises from this principle, as Hume finds that even socially harmful phenomena are yet aesthetically interesting. This provocative tension is at the heart of the aesthetic appreciation of cars, and is part of what makes such appreciation worthwhile. Hume paves the way to a realistic aesthetics of automobiles that can account for their problematic effects while refusing to downplay their aesthetic potential. This paper was presented at the 2011 Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics in Tampa, Florida. (shrink)

A brief history, overview, and assessment of the thesis that beauty is the object of love.

In the United States, running as a leisure activity continues to grow in popularity. Healthism can explain some of this popularity, but it does not explain ultradistance running. Motivations for running can be seen through the framework of the Kantian beautiful and the sublime. Beauty arises through extrinsic motivation and relates to an economy of form, while the sublime arises through intrinsic motivation and relates to confronting the challenge of infinity. The commercial, casual, and competitive aspects of distance running (...) correspond to the beautiful, while its wilderness, serious, ultradistance aspects correspond to the sublime. This framework is used to explain the resistance of ultrarunning to the would-be detrimental effects of commodification, as well as ultrarunning’s ‘wild turn.’. (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)

Contemporary philosophical attitudes toward beauty are hard to reconcile with its importance in the history of philosophy. Philosophers used to allow it a starring role in their theories of autonomy, morality, or the good life. But today, if beauty is discussed at all, it is often explicitly denied any such importance. This is due, in part, to the thought that beauty is the object of “disinterested pleasure”. In this paper I clarify the notion of disinterest and develop (...) two general strategies for resisting the emphasis on it, in the hopes of getting a clearer view of beauty’s significance. I present and discuss several literary depictions of the encounter with beauty that motivate both strategies. These depictions illustrate the ways in which aesthetic experience can be personally transformative. I argue that they present difficulties for disinterest theories and suggest we abandon the concept of disinterest to focus instead on the special kind of interest beauty fuels. I propose a closer look at the Platonic thought that beauty is the object of love. (shrink)

It is shown through examples ranging from Parmenides and Plato to Whitehead and Wittgenstein that beauty is central among the values that have made metaphysical theories appealing and credible. A common attitude would be that the aesthetic properties of metaphysical theories may be important for effective presentation but are irrelevant to the cognitive value of the theories. This however is question-begging, since it assumes without argument that ultimate reality is indifferent to ’value considerations’ such as beauty. If on (...) the contrary we allow that the aesthetic properties of theories may be cognitively relevant, which such properties should be considered? This question is explored in the final section of the paper. (shrink)

In this chapter, we examine Iris Murdoch’s views about art. We highlight continuities and differences between her views on art and aesthetics, and those of Plato, Kant, and Freud. We argue that Murdoch’s views about art, though traditionally linked to Plato, are more compatible with Kant’s thought than has been acknowledged—though with his ethics rather than his aesthetics. Murdoch shows Plato’s influence in her idea that beauty is the good in a different guise. However, Murdoch shows a more Kantian (...) than Platonic influence in her suggestion that the experience of beauty can be conducive to virtue, and distances herself from Plato in her claim that the enjoyment, as well as the production, of certain kinds of art can be virtuous. We also argue that her view of bad art as self-consoling fantasy is consonant with Freudian thought. Lastly, we question her view of bad art, specifically concerning her identification of bad art as self-consoling fantasy or entertainment, and her separation of the latter and good art. (shrink)

This article analyzes Mencius 7B.23, a concise passage that offers complex ethical dilemmas. It provides a close reading of the passage, along with relevant passages elsewhere in the text and, occasionally, in other texts. The narrow goal of the article is to present a coherent reading of the passage within the context of the Mencius as a whole. This reading suggests that while the passage touches upon a wide range of topics, including personal credibility and political responsibility, the overarching concern (...) is on being a morally superior person, on the difficult dilemmas such people may face, and on how they would respond to them. More broadly, the article shows that while the philosophical practice of "weighing circumstances" (quan 權) allows moral agents in exceptional cases to break certain moral or ritual rules, Mencius seems unwilling to apply this discretion when morality as a whole, or the integrity of the person who embodies it (shi 士), are involved. (shrink)

Francis Hutcheson is generally accepted as producing the first systematic study of aesthetics, in the first treatise of An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, initially published in 1725. His theory reflected the eighteenth century concern with beauty rather than art, and has drawn accusations of vagueness since the first critical response, by Charles Louis DeVillete in 1750. The most serious critique concerns the idea of beauty itself: whether it was simple or (...) complex, and the idea of a primary or secondary quality. It is the latter question I shall answer, attempting to clarify the problematic passage that appears at the end of the first section of Hutcheson’s first treatise. (shrink)

Kant often seems to suggest that a cognition – whether an everyday cognition or a scientific cognition – cannot be beautiful. In the Critique of Judgment and the Lectures on Logic, he writes: ‘a science which, as such, is supposed to be beautiful, is absurd.’ (CJ 184 (5:305)) ‘The expression "beautiful cognition" is not fitting at all’ (LL 446 (24:708)). These claims are usually understood rather straightforwardly. On the one hand, cognition cannot be beautiful since on Kant’s account, it is (...) all about concepts whilst beauty is defined by its non-conceptual nature. On the other hand, beauty cannot contribute to cognition since the former is grounded on subjective feelings whilst cognition is all about objective knowledge. However, I will argue that Kant’s view of the relationship between cognition and beauty is not as straightforward as it may seem, and that both of these claims are in fact false. As I will show, cognition can be beautiful, and the feeling of beauty is cognitively valuable. Yet it is not because beauty is a sign of the truthfulness of a theory. Nor is it because the process that gives rise to the feeling of beauty, the free play, furthers scientific progress. Rather, it is because the experience of beauty stimulates our cognitive powers and thereby enhances our cognitive activity. On this basis, contrary to what is usually thought, cognition can, and in fact should, be beautiful for Kant. (shrink)

Love, avoidance, liking, thoughts of beauty, ugliness, sexual attraction are some of the categories that might be affirmed as belonging to the a set of relations called affinities. If one attempts to outline all of the influencing elements belonging to each of these terms it becomes very difficult to from a complete notion of concepts from particulars. For example, what factors are involved in the emergence feeling of love, and what factors comprise those feeling. A unique history to (...) each unique event in the emergence of feeling of love is most likely the case. The factors that comprise those feeling on the other hand (i.e. of a positive feeling of well being, a change in perception of factors that influence daily life experience, etc) are more accessible but their origin and history is difficult to tabulate in terms of a single nature or characteristics that compose the emergence of these feeling. In this respect, this presentation is devised to focus on the normally conducted projections and extensions of notions in ordinary investigation to these ends, verses a normally excluded and normally perceived insufficient, counterpart explanation of reduction absurdum (i.e. A=A). Thus it is proposed that the word "affinity", applied scientifically, when instantiated to human behavior is universally instantiatable as an innate universal property. (shrink)

“Crow recalls the story about his ancestor, Crow Forefather and Peacock, drawing feathers together. Crow Forefather had drawn a beautiful outfit for Peacock, but when it was the turn for Peacock to draw, Crow Forefather was in such a hurry to eat that he told Peacock to just pour the black ink bucket onto him. Since then, the Crows have lived with pit black, ugly-looking feathers.” -/- —In “Contentment”; The Kingfisher Story Collection [1].

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

Kant and the Feeling of Life positions Kant's concept of life as a guiding thread for understanding not only Kant's approach to aesthetics and teleology but the underlying unity of the Critique of Judgment itself. The "feeling of life," which Kant describes as affecting us in various ways--as animating, enlivening, and quickening the mind--lies at the heart of Kant's philosophical project, but it has remained understudied for a theme of such centrality. This volume brings together, for the first time, essays (...) focused on the topic of life in Kant's work, providing a wealth of perspectives and analyses ranging from the Critique of Judgment to Kant's early aesthetics, his social and political philosophy, his work connected to the body and health, and his moral theory. (shrink)

A new philosophical analysis is provided of the notorious Sleeping Beauty Problem. It is argued that the correct solution is one-third, but not in the way previous philosophers have typically meant this. A modified version of the Problem demonstrates that neither self-locating information nor amnesia is relevant to the core Problem, which is simply to evaluate the conditional chance of heads given an undated Monday-or-Tuesday awakening. Previous commentators have failed to appreciate the significance of the information that Beauty (...) gains upon waking, and which is relevant to the conditional chance of heads: de re acquaintance with the awakening itself and the non-locating knowledge that it is an experimental awakening. David Lewis and company are committed to several unjustifiable and unacceptable probability assessments. Previous commentators have in effect confused the information that Beauty undergoes this particular experimental awakening for the information that she undergoes some experimental awakening or other. Lewis in particular thereby illegitimately tips the scales both in favor of heads and in favor of Monday. The Sleeping Beauty Problem is equivalent to a ball-in-urn word problem in elementary probability theory. (shrink)

Plato conceived of the Form of Beauty as quite distinct from the Form of the Good. Beauty was a means to the Good. The ascent theory of the Symposium has suggested to some commentators that Plato envisaged two kinds of beauty, the sensuous and the intellectual, and that to reach the Good we must transcend our sensuous desires and cultivate an appreciation of intellectual beauty. However, in the Laws Plato presents us with a third notion of (...) beauty, which is neither sensuous nor intellectual. To experience beauty we need to cultivate our pleasure in harmonious forms. This is where we find a theory of beauty that resonates in Kant’s aesthetic theory. According to the latter, the feeling for beauty is a feeling for harmony that takes us beyond the confines of a world marked out by self-interest. I conclude that Plato’s aesthetic theory anticipates the role that aesthetic judgment would play in Immanuel Kant’s system of the mind. (shrink)

The article examines the collaborations between the pensionnaires of the Villa Medici in Rome and the members of the French School of Athens, shedding light on the complex relationships between architecture, art, and archeology. The second half of the 19th century was a period during which the exchanges and collaborations between archaeologists, artists, and architects acquired a reinvented role and a dominant place. Within such a context, Athens was the place par excellence, where the encounter between these three disciplines took (...) place. The main objective of the article is to render explicit how the revelations of archeology, actively disseminated by the members of the French School of Athens—the “Athéniens”—had an important impact on the approach of certain pensionnaires of the Villa Medici in Rome. Particular emphasis is placed on certain pensionnaires, who decided to devote their envois to ancient monuments of Greece. In parallel, the article intends to shed light on the methods that helped the pensionnaires-architects of the Villa Medici in Rome appropriate archaeological discoveries concerning Greek antiquities. The article takes, as a starting point, the following hypothesis: to better understand the figure of the architect-archaeologist, of whom Jacques Ignace Hittorff is an emblematic example, it is pivotal to bear in mind that before the second half of the 19th century neither the figure of Hellenic archeology nor the figure of the architect had yet acquired their autonomy. Taking into account that Johann Joachim Winckelmann, in the middle of the 18th century, forged an ideal Greek model, which was criticized during the second half of the 19th century, the article also sheds light on the fact that the revelations of archaeologists have called into question the Winckelmannian image of Greece. Another aspect that is explored in the article is Jacques Ignace Hittorff’s studies concerning the polychromy of ancient Greek monuments, paying special attention to his Restitution du temple d’Empédocle à Sélinonte ou l’Architecture polychrome chez les Grecs. The article also explores how the shifts of the status of philhellenism are related to the mutations of the meaning of travel to Greece. In parallel, it investigates the impact of Greek independence on the ideals of beauty and nature in arts, as well as how Greek independence is related to the intensification of the interest in the excavations of Greek antiquities. (shrink)

Miguel de Unamuno’s theory of tragic sentiment is central to understanding his unique contributions to religious existential thought, which centers on the production of perhaps the most unavoidable and distinctive kind of human feeling. His theory is rightly attributed with being influenced by the gestational thought of, inter alios, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, but within these pages I should like to suggest a peculiar kinship between seemingly strange bedfellows, namely, between Unamuno and Immanuel Kant. Although the relationship between Unamuno and (...) Kant is conflicted, ranging from clear indications of influence to expressions of antipathy, there has been relatively little comparative research done on these two thinkers. Moreover, this scant literature has mainly explored connections between Unamuno’s existential thought and Kant’s first two Critiques. In these works, however, feelings are regarded as inclinations and thus receive no serious consideration. In what follows, I therefore juxtapose Unamuno’s analysis of tragic feeling in The Tragic Sense of Life with Kant’s discussion of the feelings of beauty and the sublime in the Critique of Judgment. (shrink)

Art, beauty, and the voice of God. And what of beauty?

What is kitsch? The varieties of phenomena which can fall under the name are bewildering. Here, I focus on what has been called “traditional kitsch,” and argue that it often turns on the emotional effect specifically captured by Edmund Burke’s concept of “beauty” from his 1757 'A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful.' Burkean beauty also serves to distinguish “traditional kitsch” from other phenomena also often called “kitsch”—namely, entertainment. Although I argue that Burkean beauty in domestic (...) decoration allows for us to see “traditional kitsch” as resting on natural and even healthy impulses, I also argue that an all-too-common political function of traditional kitsch directs it to dangerous ends. (shrink)

In two experiments (N=888), we explore to what extent the folk concept of art is compatible with the leading philosophical definitions of art, and whether it is an essentialist or a non-essentialist concept. We manipulate three factors: whether an object is created intentionally, whether it has aesthetic value, and whether it is institutionally recognized. In addition, we also manipulate the artistic domain (visual art or music). The results suggest that none of the three properties is seen by the folk as (...) necessary for an object to be considered art, which suggests that the folk concept of art might be a cluster concept. (shrink)

It seems like we care about at least two features of our credence function: gradational-accuracy and verisimilitude. Accuracy-first epistemology requires that we care about one feature of our credence function: gradational-accuracy. So if you want to be a verisimilitude-valuing accuracy-firster, you must be able to think of the value of verisimilitude as somehow built into the value of gradational-accuracy. Can this be done? In a recent article, Oddie has argued that it cannot, at least if we want the accuracy measure (...) to be proper. I argue that it can. 1Introduction2Some Nuts and Bolts3First Attempts4Oddie’s Constraint5The Good5.1Proximity over the disagreement metric 5.2Proximity over the magnitude metric 6The Bad and the Ugly 7Some More Good: The Role of Evenness of Distribution 8Some More Bad: Which Propositions to Privilege? 9Concluding Thoughts: Accuracy and Practical Value. (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)

Today, many people have realized that the climate change and biodiversity loss issues lie in how and to what extent humans consume products for their lives in the Anthropocene era. Consumerism has pushed natural resource exploitation to its peak, and the depletion of resources is becoming increasingly prevalent. The beauty and personal care industry has a large market and high profits, especially in the high-income segment. However, this advantage also carries the risk of facing scrutiny, investigations, and criticism from (...) civil society organizations, environmental activists, and consumers. More than anyone else, the industry is vulnerable to the perils of unfavourable societal assessments, particularly the repercussions of consumer-led boycott actions. In this discourse, we suggest that, given the current circumstances, it is imperative for multinational beauty corporations to take a proactive role in allocating resources towards the development of sustainable agriculture practices. This entails not only advocating for the widespread adoption of environmentally conscious production methods but also dedicating efforts towards conducting research and innovation in the area of nature-friendly manufacturing techniques. Doing so will help demonstrate their commitment to the environment and actively provide convincing evidence to consumers of their social responsibility through emission reduction and biodiversity conservation activities. (shrink)

Abstract:Moore and Russell’s philosophical and personal paths through the early years of the twentieth century make a fascinating chronicle. Some of this story is familiar; but material from the unpublished Moore papers adds new and forceful detail to the account. It is a commonplace by now that Russell and Moore were not friends, although they maintained a long professional association. Their most intellectually intimate phase came early on, reaching a peak in 1897–99. But I show that during this period Moore (...) developed an indisputable antagonism toward Russell, which I argue was motivated by a form of intellectual self-preservation from the Russellian juggernaut. This paper examines aspects of the development of their views and their relationship between 1894 and 1901. (shrink)

One important but infrequently discussed difficulty with expressivism is the attitude type individuation problem.1 Expressivist theories purport to provide a unified account of normative states. Judgments of moral goodness, beauty, humor, prudence, and the like, are all explicated in the same way: as expressions of attitudes, what Allan Gibbard calls “states of norm-acceptance”. However, expressivism also needs to explain the difference between these different sorts of attitude. It is possible to judge that a thing is both aesthetically good and (...) morally bad. While the realist can explain the difference by suggesting that each judgment makes reference to a different property (or set of properties), the expressivist cannot. She must show that what is expressed by the speaker is different in each case. This has proven to be difficult to do. (shrink)

RésuméEn réponse à l'article de D. C. Matthew, « Racial Integration and the Problem of Relational Devaluation », j'examine la politique de la beauté physique à l'intersection entre les catégories de race et de genre. J’évalue et je rejette l'affirmation de Matthew selon laquelle être perçu comme physiquement attrayant se traduit à coup sûr soit par un bon traitement, soit par une haute estime de soi. Je soutiens que, au contraire, le genre peut fonctionner comme un moyen de contrôle social, (...) dans lequel le désir du corps des femmes n'apporte aucun bon traitement ni n'améliore leur estime de soi. Ce problème peut persister au sein des communautés raciales intragroupes autoségréguées. (shrink)