Judgments of beauty are neither subjective nor arbitrary, and are a necessary part of practical reasoning in any attempt to harmonise our activities and ways of life with those of
The great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in the world, is too obvious not to have fallen under every one's observation. Men of the most confined knowledge
The concept of the aesthetic as it features in contemporary philosophy is a modern one deriving from eighteenth-century philosophical psychology and investigations into judgments o
The nature of beauty is one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy, and is—with the nature of art—one of the two fundamental issues in philosophical ae
Beauty is an important part of our lives. Ugliness too. It is no surprise then that philosophers since antiquity have been interested in our experiences of and judgments about beau
Introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the Eighteenth Century, the term ‘aesthetic’ has come to be used to designate, among other things, a kind of object, a kind of judg
None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his h
The theme chosen by the Pontifical Council for Culture for its 2006 plenary assembly follows in the wake of preceding assemblies in seeking to assist the Church to transmit faith i
Although the term ‘aesthetics’ only came into use in the 18th century, the idea of there being areas of experience, judgement and activity concerned with beauty in art and nature is ancient, getting its first systematic discussions in the dialogues of Plato. There seem to be three fundamental modes of thought and action: 1) that concerned with discovering and describing the way things are, for which the main assessment is true or false; 2) that concerned with how one ought to behave, assessed as right or wrong; and 3) that relating to something experienced or made to be an object of experience for its own sake, for which the terms of assessment are beautiful or ugly. In each case these are the most general evaluative terms and precise evaluations require more specific concepts, in the case of beauty ones such as complex, elegant, harmonious, intense, etc. The fundamental question for aesthetics is whether beauty is an objective feature or a projection of subjective preference. The ancient Roman phrase de gustibus non est disputandum - ‘there is no dispute in matters of taste’ represents the subjectivist position that there is nothing to get right or wrong about beauty or ugliness because it is just a matter of personal liking. Set against this is the equally ancient idea that beauty is consonantia the objective harmony of parts in proper relation. A third position is suggested by Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae, where he writes that “Beauty includes three conditions, integrity or perfection, due proportion or harmony; and clarity” but also that “the notion of the beautiful is that which calms the desire, by being seen or known”. This sides with objectivism in identifying beauty-making features of reality but allows that beauty itself relates to the human experience of them and that this has an emotional aspect.