beauty changes everything
From 1958 to 1982, two adept philosophers—Monroe Beardsley and George Dickie—debated each other through their books and articles about the nature of aesthetic experience. By seeing the different attempts at an understanding and their respective critiques, it helps us to work through our own notion of what it means to have an aesthetic experience. I … Continue reading Aesthetic Experience: A Debate
Quality can be an ambiguous word when people approach from different perspectives. What makes a quality car? It could be how long it will last; how fast it will go; how much it can haul. What makes a quality movie? Answering this question might require us to differentiate between genres, such as horror, comedy, action, … Continue reading Quality Improvement for Healthcare
An aesthetic impact is powerful. From advertising influencing our decisions to political leaders instigating action, aesthetic motivations form a core compulsion of our lives, including for ethical or global issues. People often want to believe that they act only with good reason, since our emotions are frivolous. In "Taste, Foodways, and Everyday Life," Tim Waterman … Continue reading Positive and Negative Aesthetics
The relation between morality and beauty continues to capture attention. Philosophers, especially moralists like Anthony Cooper (aka Shaftesbury), connected the ability to comprehend beauty to a person's virtue. Making this explicit, Shaftesbury referred to this innate ability to understand beauty as the moral sense. Part of the basis for this belief was the idea that … Continue reading Virtue and the Beautiful
Tom Morris, philosopher to the business world, wrote an excellent book a while back called, If Aristotle Ran General Motors. The title, as he notes early on, is meant to be more symbolic than literal, with Aristotle standing in for philosophy and General Motors standing in for any business. What Morris presents is a way … Continue reading The Beautiful Business
Historically, philosophers wrote systems of philosophy that tried to connect the different branches—metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy—unifying the branches top each other. Steadily in the twentieth century, the academy became hyper-specialized. A few have attempted to systematically look at philosophy as whole again, as illustrated by Crispin Sartwell's 2017 book, Entanglements: A System … Continue reading Beauty: Objective or Subjective
How aesthetics impacts our decision-making is often ignored or overlooked. Some researchers, for example, have claimed that our feelings (i.e., aesthetic responses) account for 85 percent of our decision-making for retail purchases. Another example from clothing helps to illustrate this point further. In Everyday Aesthetics, Yuriko Saito describes how natural fibers, such as wool and … Continue reading Ugliness and Climate Solutions
Guest Post by Scott Lepisto The ancient Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger doesn’t just aim to teach his readers: he aims to transform them. Wonder at the beauty and mystery of the natural world plays a significant role in Seneca’s transformational program. He devotes less effort to explaining his aesthetic theory than to offering … Continue reading Dissolving the Ego: Aesthetics and Individuality in Senecan Philosophy
Bence Nanay published his book, Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction, with Oxford University Press in 2019. Below you can read the opening paragraphs of my review of it for the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, and find a link to the full pdf. Opening to the review: With hundreds of titles in Oxford’s Very … Continue reading Review of Aesthetics by Bence Nanay
Beauty has a long history in philosophy. "The Concept of Beauty in African Philosophy," by Diana-Abasi Ibanga, adds to this history by explaining another perspective. Ibanga, a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calabar, Nigeria, begins his article by drawing attention to the fact that the pursuit and experience of beauty … Continue reading Beauty in African Philosophy