Hello, Callum; thanks for your question. Before Kant, there was a tradition in Enlightenment thinking about the nature of beauty and how we are able to perceive it. This tradition often referred to what was called the "faculty of taste" to distinguish this form of perception from other so-called faculties. The history runs roughly from Lord Shaftesbury, through Hutcheson, Burke, Hume, and then through Kant to Schopenhauer. A useful overview of this trajectory is in a book by George Dickie called _Evaluating Art_.

Yours,

Mitch Green

There is quite a good literature on aesthetics that gets at spirituality. I co-authored a recent book (out last year) with the American artist Jil Evans: The image in mind (Continuum) that gets at the aesthetic dimension of different ways of viewing the world (principally theism and naturalism) and we have a co-edited book Turning Images with Oxford that deals with aesthetics and religion / spirituality. An older book which has an excellent collection of different thinkers is: Art, Creativity, and the Sacred edited by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona. Gordon Graham has a good book: The Re-enchantment of the Word (OUP 2007), and Oxford has published an amazing series of five books on aesthetics and theology or the sacred by David Brown. It is disappointing that the Routledge volume did not include more on spirituality, as many of those who contributed to aesthetics historically and quite recently have had spiritual concerns. Plato's dialogue on beauty, the Symposium, is partly about the ascent of the soul to the higher beauties, and it deeply impacted subsequent religious thinkers and artists. Three quite diverse thinkers from the 20th century who thought of aesthetics in spiritual terms include Kandinsky, Dewey, and Tolstoy. Good wishes!

I don't think they do, although colleagues may know of someone who does.

In fact, one might go further in challenging this popular notion of inner beauty and suggest that there is something very impressive about a beautiful person who is in fact rather evil. One is compelled to admire the outward appearance of the individual while at the same time deploring his or her character, involving appreciation of the formal qualities of beauty while understanding the vileness of the character. In some ways the gossip columns play on that, the fact that many of our most admired personalities are deeply flawed and yet breathtaking to look at.

The question 'What is art?' has the form of a classical philosophical question--questions of that form were raised by Socrates in 'early' dialogues such as the Euthyphro--and although this question has received considerable attention from philosophers, it's not universally accepted that this question is indeed well-formed. (It has been claimed, for example, that the concept 'art' is a 'family resemblance concept' that does not admit of a characterization in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for falling under that concept and, hence, that much of traditional aesthetics, has rested on a mistake.) So the question of whether the question, 'What is art?' is indeed a genuine philosophical question is also a philosophical question!! Even if one were to conclude, however, that the question, 'What is art?' does indeed rest on a mistake, it should not therefore be concluded that reflection on the nature of art is not philosophically or artistically illuminating: it might well be argued that artists themselves push their media in new directions by expanding the concept of that particular art.

While the issue of the nature of art has been taken to be paradigmatic of a question in aesthetics, perhaps because philosophers of art have long sought to raise questions that are not related to any particular artistic medium, but other similarly general questions, such as questions about the nature of artistic representation and the nature of the interpretation of art, have long been and continue to be raised by philosophers. For what it's worth, however, I myself think that the most fruitful philosophical inquiries into art are likely to come from consideration of issues internal to a particular art or artistic practice. Such questions would, I think, be more closely engaged with actual artistic practice and thus be more engaging for all those interested in that practice. But if this is correct, then one can't specify in advance just what questions will count as questions in aesthetics, and so for meta-philosophical reasons, I would want to resist answering your question.

My admittedly contentious view aside, however, if one wants to get a sense for the range of questions that have traditionally taken to fall within the purview of aesthetics, one would do well to consider one of the handbooks or reference guides that have recently appeared on the topic, such as the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics.,

I hope it is possible, otherwise I am in trouble. As a boxing trainer and writer, I have found a number of bouts to be of staggering beauty. I don't believe that I use the same criterion of beauty for boxing as I do for, say, sunsets or for that matter poetry. I'm not sure what would follow if there were indeed something like harmony that was present in all things that we judged to be beautiful, but it doesn't seem to me as if there is any such thing. Thanks.

The answer is that it isn't. Here are links to recent tables of contents from two major aesthetics journals:

http://bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org/content/51/2.toc

http://www.temple.edu/jaac/archive/69.2.htm

As you'll see, beauty doesn't make much of a splash here; only one essay on the topic. If you do some archival digging, you'll see that this is pretty typical and has been for a long time. Aestheticians would agree with you: beauty is only one bit of our experience of art, and often not the most important bit.

This is a terrific question! But rather than answer it, let me direct you to someone who has treated it at some length with many interesting and provocative things to say. Check out Daniel Dennett's famous article "Quining Qualia," as well as his book "Consciousness Explained" -- you'll get some great material there, and then will probably come back and ask follow up versions of this question!

good luck,

ap

Most aestheticians make the distinction between aesthetics and philosophy of art, with "aesthetics" being the wider term and "philosophy of art" the narrower one. "Philosophy of art" is only the philosophy of works of art or art objects as they are unappealingly called these days. In other words, these philosophers accept that it is not only works of art to which the terms of aesthetic appraisal apply, such as "attractive", "unattractive", "lovely", not lovely", "unlovely", "majestic", "grubby", "oily", and on and on, without end. They also apply to the human face and the human form, to nature and parts of nature, including natural landscapes, the sea, etc. There is practically no word, I believe, that cannot one way or another be used as a term of aesthetic appraisal. The aesthetic is everywhere; a happy thought.

HIstorically and today, most who practice aesthetics treat the aesthetic as involving more than works of art. The term "aesthetics" was introduced in the 19th cedntury to stand for sensory experience and only later came to be used in a way that was specific to works of art, but most of the important works in the field of aesthetics (like Kant's Critique of Judgment) think of (for example) treat the natural world in aesthetic terms. The definition of "aesthetic" is not air tight, however, but I suggest its most common usage denotes the emotive features of objects. An excellent book on the aesthetic in general, and works of art in particular, is Gary Iseminger's The Aesthetic Function of Art (Cornell University Press, 2004). While Dewey did a great job in highlighting the aesthetics of life outside the world of art (he was highly critical of some of the museum cultures of his day), some philosophers are swayed by what they see as non-aesthetic features of artwork. On this front, you might want to consider Noel Caroll's excellent book Beyond Aesthetics. On such matters, I am more with Iseminger and seek to defend an aesthetic account of art in the book Aesthetics: A Beginner's Guide (Oxford; OneWorld Press, 2011).

This question seems to raise an aesthetic version of what has come to be known as the 'Euthyphro Question' (from Plato's dialogue Euthyphro), where it is asked if what is holy is holy because the gods love it, or if the gods love what is holy because it is holy. If one answers that what is holy is holy because the gods love it, one endorses a version of the view that values are created, or even subjective; if one answers that the gods love what is holy because it is holy, one endorses a version of the view that values are discovered, or even objective. (There are, of course, a range of alternatives between these poles, but let's stick to them, since they bring out the issue most sharply.) By parity of reasoning, it might seem that if one believes that the capacity to appreciate beauty reflects the sophistication of one's aesthetic judgment, then it would seem that beauty is independent of the perceiver, discovered by perceivers, and maybe even is objective; if one believes that beauty is constituted by the judgments of perceivers, then it would seem that beauty depends on perceivers and maybe even is subjective. Now it seems to me that one interesting thing about beauty is that while it is akin to other values, in that judgments of beauty can be justified and hence are, in a certain sense, objective; on the other hand, only if one experiences the thing in question, and has a subjective experience of it, is one in a position to judge whether it is beautiful. This may even reflect a difference between aesthetic value and other kinds of value (such as moral or epistemic value). The line that I've presented here is very loosely derived from the position elaborated by Kant, in the first part of his Critique of the Power of Judgment, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the nature of aesthetic judgments.