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DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-M014-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-M014-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/beauty/v-1

5. Restoration of beauty as a theoretical subject

Twentieth-century philosophies of beauty are comparatively rare, due to a general shift of interest towards the aesthetic. An exception to the rule is a searching, broad-gauge theory by Guy Sircello, which construes virtually all aesthetic values as species of beauty and explains beauty in terms of non-defective and non-defective-seeming ‘properties of qualitative degree’. As these properties are highly context-dependent both for their existence and for their status as non-defective and non-defective-seeming, it is hard to be sure of their ontological or, to an extent, their epistemological standing. Moreover, Sircello does not hazard a sufficient condition for the overall beauty of things as opposed to their beauty in respect of a property of the sort mentioned. Another effort was made to revive the theory of beauty by Mary Mothersill, after reflection on Kant’s aesthetics, and especially on his dictum that there can be no laws of taste. On her view ‘Any individual is beautiful if and only if it is such as to be a cause of pleasure in virtue of its aesthetic properties’. The latter are understood in a new way, namely as properties so sensitive to their context as to be incapable of being possessed by two individuals unless the latter are perceptually indistinguishable under standard conditions of observation. For example, the distinctive wavelike contour running through El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz, when taken in the full context provided by the painting, is qualified by the totality of perceptible relationships between it and all other features of the design. In this way she supports Kant’s idea of the judgment of beauty being logically singular, since such radically contextualized properties cannot figure in non-trivial laws or principles. Mothersill’s theory, developed with skill and panache, raises daunting problems but, like Sircello’s, opens up possibly profitable lines of research.

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Citing this article:
Brown, John H.. Restoration of beauty as a theoretical subject. Beauty, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-M014-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/beauty/v-1/sections/restoration-of-beauty-as-a-theoretical-subject.
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