Delineating beauty: On form and the boundaries of the aesthetic

Paris, Panos ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2549-1075 2024. Delineating beauty: On form and the boundaries of the aesthetic. Ratio: An international journal of analytic philosophy 37 (1) , pp. 76-87. 10.1111/rati.12388

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Abstract

Philosophical aesthetics has recently been expanding its purview—with exciting work on everyday aesthetics, somaesthetics, gustatory aesthetics, and the aesthetics of imperceptibilia like mathematics and human character—reclaiming territory that was lost during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the discipline begun concentrating almost exclusively on the philosophy of art and restricted the aesthetic realm to the distally perceptible. Yet there remains considerable reluctance towards acknowledging the aesthetic character of many of these objects. This raises an important question—partly made salient again by the ongoing expansion of the aesthetic domain, and partly by the fact that many still seem resistant to this aesthetic diversification—which aestheticians seem to avoid: what, if anything, constrains the scope of beauty or the aesthetic? I argue that form, construed as comprising a degree, however minimal, of experienceable complexity, is necessary and sufficient for an object's candidature for the possession of aesthetic properties. Such a condition serves to discriminate between attempts to expand the scope of the aesthetic that are legitimate and those that are not. If correct, my view suggests that the aesthetic realm, though not limitless, is very broad indeed—but this, I think, is as it should be.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	1467-9329
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	24 July 2023
Date of Acceptance:	9 July 2023
Last Modified:	26 Mar 2024 14:27
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/161209

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