Venus is the Roman name for the Greek Aphrodite, the Goddess of beauty. For Plato, the Beautiful Itself is transcendent, not itself in the physical world, and yet can be detected in the world. Our capacity to detect it reminds… Read more ›
Plato (detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens) When we engage in the philosophical activity of ethics we ask questions like: what are right and wrong actions? What does it mean for something to be good or bad? What is… Read more ›
Our experiences of beauty and duty appear to be very different. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), in his book Critique of Judgment, argued that judgments of the beautiful must be “disinterested.” This means that we make these judgments (1) without concern for the truth; (2) without… Read more ›
In Plato’s Symposium we learn that love is the desire for the continued possession of the Good (206a-b) and that the Good is ultimately eternal Being that is timeless and always “the same in every way” (208b). Thus the goal… Read more ›
Is there a relationship between beauty and freedom? If we accept some central ideas about beauty from Immanuel Kant we can say that there is. In this essay I want to show how, given Kant’s analysis, we can discern some… Read more ›
Tristan Tzara, in his Dadaist Manifesto of 1918, argued that Dadaists were out to “assassinate beauty”. But why would anyone want to assassinate beauty? In the previous post in this series (go here) I discussed, with reference to Plato’s Symposium,… Read more ›
For centuries it was understood that if something was art then it was beautiful. However, in the 19th and 20th centuries many artists turned their backs on beauty. Here we could think of various works created within the romantic movement… Read more ›
In Japanese aesthetics yūgen refers to those moments when we feel as if we have had a partial glimpse into a hidden reality. Such a glimpse is felt to be profoundly mysterious. It is also experienced as beautiful. According to… Read more ›
Plato’s pupil Aristotle claimed that the “chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree”. For many, THE chief form of beauty is the golden ratio. Two quantities are in the… Read more ›
One of the more enduring and influential principles of explanation is associated with the medieval philosopher William of Ockham (c 1280-1349) and is widely known as “Ockham’s Razor.” This principle prescribes that, if we are confronted with competing explanations that… Read more ›
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argued that the phenomenal world we experience – the world of space and time with unified objects that are causally related – is the outcome of our minds giving form to sense data. Or, to use his… Read more ›
Clive Bell (1881-1964) We all value things: people, places, animals, things, and so on. When we think about the nature of our valuing we discover that we value some things instrumentally – we see them as a means to an… Read more ›
Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), in section 109 of his book The Gay Science, observes that the world is, despite certain appearances to the contrary, complete chaos: “Let us be on our guard against supposing that anything so methodical as the cyclic… Read more ›
Fighting the Gravity of Vice: An Essay on Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth Dwight Goodyear Introduction (Spoiler Alert) The cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) is one of my favorite films. It was directed… Read more ›
Directions for making an anamorphic projection from Jean-Francois Niceron’s La Perspective Curieuse (1652) Introduction I recently realized that some of the most powerful lessons I have encountered in philosophy share a dynamic which can be elucidated with the help of… Read more ›