Beauty

References and further reading

	Dutton, D. (2009) The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, New York: Bloomsbury Press. (A Darwinian study of the relation of aesthetic and artistic values to the innate, universal needs, desires, capacities, preferences and impulses developed in humanity’s long Pleistocene prehistory.)
	Eaton, M. (2001) Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A relativist or social constructivist theory of aesthetic and ethical value, notable for holding that aesthetic properties are those intrinsic, nonsupervenient properties that a given culture selects as worthy of perception and reflection.)
	Guyer, P. (2005) Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.. (Contains a number of extremely helpful and meticulously researched essays on Kant’s aesthetic theory. See especially ‘The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited’ and ‘Free and Adherent Beauty: A Modest Proposal.’)
	Guyer, P. (2009) ‘18th Century German Aesthetics’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (spring edn), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/aesthetics-18th-german/ (A major contribution to the history of aesthetics both in making theories available to English-only readers and in supplying insightful commentary.)
	Hume, D. (1757) ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, inOf the Standard of Taste and Other Essays, ed. J. Lenz, New York: Macmillan, 1965. (Admirably clear discussion of criteria of accuracy applicable to the supposed sense of beauty, whether or not Hume believes in such a sense.)
	Hutcheson, F. (1725) An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, ed. with intro. and notes by P. Kivy, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1993. (The fullest formulation of the eighteenth-century sense of beauty theory.)
	Kant, I. (1790) Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard, New York: Macmillan, 1951. (The first part, ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’, contains Kant’s theory of beauty and sublimity.)
	Kieran, M. (2005) Revealing Art, London and New York: Routledge. (Contains a searching study in ch. 2 of how far Kant’s theory can be extended and where it must be supplemented, and a vigorous response in ch. 5 to Scruton’s dismissive view of the contemporary avant-garde – see the note to Scruton (2009) below.)
	Kirwan, J. (1999) Beauty, Manchester: Manchester University Press. (A theory of beauty obtained by psychologizing Neoplatonism; results in the experience of beauty having at a deep level an utterly mystical transcendence as its true content, a ‘beauty beyond beauty’.)
	McMahon, J. A. (2007) Aesthetics and Material Beauty, New York and London: Routledge. (A fledging venture in naturalizing Kant’s basic approach to beauty employing ideas from cognitive science.)
	Mendelssohn, M. (1997) Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The selections most pertinent are ‘On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences’ and ‘Rapsody or Additions to the Letters on Sentiments’.)
	Moore, G. E. (1903) Principia Ethica, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 4, ‘The Ideal’. (A classic statement of the intuitionist position regarding moral and aesthetic value.)
	Mothersill, M. (1984) Beauty Restored, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Contains Mothersill’s theory and discussions of historical positions regarding beauty; useful bibliography.)
	Parsons, G. and Carlson, A. (2008) Functional Beauty, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (The first book-length treatment of this contentious subject.)
	Plato (c.380s) Phaedrus, trans. R. Hackford, inThe Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963, 244–57.ve.) (Plato’s ideas about love and beauty are presented mythopoeiacally in Socrates’ speech to the god of love.
	Plato (c.380s) Symposium, trans. M. Joyce, inThe Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963, 209d–212a. (The classic account of the ascent of the soul to the vision of absolute beauty.)
	Plotinus (c. 260) Enneads, trans. S. McKenna, ed. J. Dillon, New York: Viking Penguin, 1991. (See Ennead I, 6th tractate, ‘Beauty’; and Ennead V, 8th tractate, ‘On the Intellectual Beauty’.)
	Santayana, G. (1986) The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory, New York: Modern Library, 1955. (This classic and much admired subjectivist text, was a protest against realist notions of taste (Kant’s subjective universality in particular), though the taste exhibited by the author in discussing examples is far from eccentric. Santayana’s observations about aesthetic value here and in The Life of Reason (1905–6) strongly support what is called ‘procedural rationality’ in §6 above.)
	Scruton, R. (2009) Beauty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Overall the best introduction to issues concerning beauty yet produced, in spite of the jeremiad against the drift of popular and avant-garde culture in ch. 8, ‘The Flight from Beauty’. Wide-ranging, well-furnished with insightful commentary upon examples, and deeply appreciative of serious aesthetic and moral values.)
	Shaftesbury, A. (1711) Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. J. M. Robertson, Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964. (Shaftesbury’s idea of disinterested pleasure is set forth in Treatise IV, bk 2, §1.)
	Shelley, J. (2009) ‘18th Century British Aesthetics’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (spring edn), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/aesthetics-18th-british/ (Useful account of the views of Alison, Gerard, and Reid referred to in passing in §4.)
	Sircello, G. (1975) A New Theory of Beauty, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A mostly nontechnical exposition of the theory discussed in §5. Contains an instructive survey of difficulties in ascertaining the sources of aesthetic disagreement in §31.)
	Sircello, G. (1989) Love and Beauty, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Links the author’s theory of beauty to an equally ambitious theory of love; especially focused on aesthetic enjoyment.)
	Walton, K. (2008) ‘“How Marvelous!”’, inMarvelous Images: On Values and the Arts, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Ingenious new thoughts about beauty, aesthetic experience and aesthetic value.)
	Zangwill, N. (2001) The Metaphysics of Beauty, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (A full scale treatment of beauty that contains the most industrious discussion in recent years of metaphysical issues relating to beauty.)
	Zemach, E. (1997) Real Beauty, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. (A particularly robust attempt to demolish subjectivism and develop an objectivist theory of beauty that relies heavily on the alleged dependence of scientific truth on aesthetic criteria.)