‘A beautiful symphony’, ‘a beautiful landscape’, ‘a beautiful woman’, ‘a beautiful soul’, ‘a beautiful machine’, ‘a beautiful proof’, ‘a beautiful article’ – are these expressions all to be understood in the same way, as dealing with a single quality, impression or experience? If there is a single quality called beauty, …(Read More)

The Antinomy of Taste. Kant argued that judgements of the beautiful are subjective – namely, that they arise from, depend upon and express, our immediate perceptual apprehension of their object. In talking of the beautiful I am not telling you how the world is independently of my perception: I am …(Read More)

Aesthetics and Everyday Life. Some light can be cast on the problem of objectivity if we turn our attention away from both art and nature, and enquire into the place of aesthetic judgement in everyday life. In many commonplace activities aesthetic judgement has an important role: furnishing a room, laying …(Read More)

Aesthetic Judgement and Beauty. In the 18th century ‘beauty’ and ‘aesthetic value’ were regarded as all but synonymous. The aesthetic experience, for philosophers like Shaftesbury, Burke, Hume and Kant, who were the first to explore its nature in a systematic way, arose from beauty, and it was because we value …(Read More)