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Philosophy of Beauty.
... Our current understanding of the dynamic nature of aesthetic preferences is limited. Historically, classical philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle argued that aesthetic preferences should be stable due to their dependence on equally stable formal attributes in the world (Kovach, 1974). In contrast, later philosophers such as Hume argued that aesthetic preferences relied on context and properties internal to the perceiver (Aleem et al., 2019;Sartwell, 2012). ...
What happens to aesthetic preferences over time? Everyday experience suggests that our preferences change over the course of our lives. Unfortunately, much of the existing research on aesthetics only measures preferences once, and therefore cannot capture these changes. A handful of studies that have measured aesthetic preferences at multiple moments show that preferences may change in as little as two weeks. However, the dynamics of these changes remain unclear. A thorough investigation of how aesthetic preferences change across multiple time points is needed. In this study, we measured aesthetic preferences for different colored objects at six-time points, spanning a month. We found that aesthetic preferences were not stable and tended to drift stochastically over time. Small statistically significant drifts occurred already after 20 min, and large ones happened after 2 weeks. Intriguingly, making more choices stabilized preferences for roughly 20% of participants, possibly due to learning. In addition, we found that the instability of aesthetic preferences could be explained by different factors related to the stimuli and participants. For example, instability was greater for “hard” choices between colors that were close in chromatic space as well as in their average preference rank. Males were more unstable than females, and instability tended to decrease with age. Surprisingly, no personality traits were found to correlate with how the participants’ aesthetic preferences changed over time. Overall, these findings suggest not only that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but also that the beholder is constantly changing as well.
... Unified, proportionate, integral parts constitute an orderly whole. Therefore, every beautiful material being is an orderly whole" [25]. ...
In this paper, an axiological analysis for the role of values in person-centered healthcare is undertaken from aesthetic, epistemic, and ethical perspectives, given the backdrop of a robust notion of personhood. To that end, personhood is first analyzed and conceptualized to provide a practical framework for situating the axiological analysis for the role of values, especially the value of human dignity, in healthcare. In terms of aesthetic values, beauty plays an essential role within person-centered healthcare, especially with respect to the value of wellbeing, and for providing a platform to analyze further both epistemic and ethical values in healthcare. With respect to epistemic values, truth - particularly in terms of the value of competence - plays a critical role in providing effective healthcare. In terms of ethical values, the good, especially with respect to the value of caring, plays a vital role in shaping how both clinicians and patients comport themselves in the clinical encounter. In a concluding section, the significance of the axiological analysis for the role of values in person-centered healthcare, in contrast to healthcare based on the biomedical model, is briefly discussed.
Over the past 150 years, Thomists have been divided over whether or not St. Thomas Aquinas himself held to the transcendentality of beauty. Francis J. Kovach divides the Thomists into three groups: (1) the transcendentalists, (2) the anti-transcendentalists, and (3) the undecided. Some contemporary Thomist philosophers in the transcendentalist camp, such as Étienne Gilson, see beauty as the forgotten transcendental. We will briefly trace the historical context of the debate by mentioning how philosophers viewed the transcendentality of beauty in ancient and medieval times. Then, we will summarize a contemporary Thomistic transcendentalist view of the nature of beauty and its transcendental status, followed by a contemporary Thomistic anti-transcendentalist view of the nature of beauty and its transcendental status. After that, we will evaluate the nature of beauty according to St. Thomas, as well as the criteria which determines transcendentality. Finally, both the transcendentalist and anti-transcendentalist positions on beauty’s transcendental status will be evaluated to determine whether it is metaphysically consistent to regard beauty as a transcendental according to Thomistic thought.
How do the perception and presentation of both beauty and gender differ and compare? These concepts (feminism, masculinity, and beauty) have struggled to be defined in their respective fields, Gender Theory and Aesthetics, due to their multiplicitous nature. When analyzing the works of gender-questioning artists Cindy Sherman and Claude Cahun, the connection between the subjectivist approach to aesthetic analysis and Judith Butler’s theory becomes apparent. In these works, it is the signifiers, not the person who allows us to interpret the art as gendered or beautiful. The idea of no inherent gender on a body is essentially the same as no intrinsic beauty within a work. This idea then questions the perception and study of art and gender.
The article addresses the basic elements of Thomas Aquinas’s thought on beauty by analyzing some selected texts and points out some of the debates that still exist regarding the interpretation of Thomas Aquinas’s position on various issues, such as the question of the transcendentality of the beautiful. The fundamental aim is to recover some of Aquinas’s basic intuitions for contemporary aesthetics, which no longer makes use of many of the intellectual categories that were in common use in medieval philosophy, and to show how some of Thomas Aquinas’s fundamental ideas are closer to the aesthetic thought of some fundamental contemporary authors than the modern categories with which aesthetics was forged. This article is also intended to show how the modern conception of the beautiful has meant an ontological impoverishment with respect to the medieval thought.
The structural-systematic philosophy requires a moral theory. This essay seeks to determine whether either of two recent works, Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes and Michael Tomasello’s A Natural History of Human Morality , should influence that theory. It first argues that Greene’s fails to make its case for utilitarianism over deontology. It then argues that Tomasello’s thesis that early humans developed moralities of sympathy and fairness, particularly when taken in conjunction with aspects of Alan Gewirth’s moral theory, fits well with the moral theory envisaged by extant works on the structural-systematic philosophy. The envisaged theory maintains the objectivity of human rights.
This paper aims to study colour in architecture, based on texts that would have been written by a Syrian mystic of the fifth century who used to conceal his identity under the alias of Dionysius the Areopagite, a council member of the Athenian Areopagus law court and follower of the apostle Paul, as mentioned in the book of Acts in the Bible (Acts 17:34). Dionysius acquired a nearly apostolic authority which gave enormous credibility to his writings in the Middle Age and the Renaissance. This work deals with Dionysius's concepts of colour, regarding the writings of Goethe and Plato, particularly the ones found in Timaeus, Menon, and Socrates; aiming at applying them in a study of the chromatic perceptive processes of architecture. It intends to present concepts that can contribute to a better understanding of some historic approaches of those processes and the relation among harmony, chromatic diversity and completeness. It also intends to analyse aspects, regarding colours, which could have influenced Gothic constructions, particularly the abbey of Saint-Dennis in France, as well as the work of Abbot Suger.
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