OUGD601 - RESEARCH - Philosophical Aesthetics

PHILOSOPHICAL AESTHETICS: AN INTRODUCTION:
Oswald Hanfling

Aesthetic qualities: Beauty and proportion:
- 'there is an ancient view that beauty consists essentially of such properties as symmetry and proportion'.
- Aristotle - "the chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in special degree".
- St. Augustine - "beautiful things please proportion, with pairs of equivalent members responding to each other" (p.41).

Beauty and feeling:
- 'David Hume (1711-76) pointed out that there must be more to the perception of beauty than the perception of particular objective qualities'.
- 'Hume's account of beauty may be described as 'subjectivist', for according to it beauty is, or is dependant, on a subjective occurrence: a feeling or 'sentiment' with the observer' (p.45).
- 'there is a connection between beauty and feeling' (p.46).

Aesthetic experience:
- 'for the Greeks, in the time of Aristotle (384-322 BC), the word was 'aesthesis'. It referred to both sensation and perception, and meant in general, 'perception by means of the senses' (p.111).
- 'we are reminded that much aesthetic experience is grounded or has its beginnings in sense experience' (p.112).
- "aesthetics deals with a kind of perception. People have to see the grace or unity of a work, hear the plaintiveness or frenzy in the music, notice the gaundness of a colour scheme, feel the power of a novel, its mood or its uncertainty of tone. The crucial thing is to see, hear, feel" (Sibley, 1965).
- 'although aesthetic experience may begin with the senses, it does not end with them. If we reflect on what is involved in 'sense perception' or 'sensory experience' we realise we are not referring simply to physical stimuli and responses' (p.113).

REFERENCE: Hanfling, O. (1992) Philosophical Aesthetics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.