SHAPE Seminar David Macarthur will present a paper titled ³Beauty as Not-Knowing².
Time: Friday, 25th march, 10.30am Place: Philosophy Common Room, USYD Abstract Beauty seems both familiar and distant. It is a familiar term in our description of the experience of certain natural and artefactual objects (e.g. people, fashion, artworks). It is mysterious in the Platonic tradition that pictures beauty as having a metaphysical essence that is unified, perfect, truth-conducive, morally uplifting and transcendent (or otherworldly). Although many now accept a non-essentialist view of beauty the debate remains tethered to Platonic assumptions. In this paper I argue against a more subtle metaphysical assumption shared by the main positions in the Platonic tradition: essentialism, qualified essentialism and anti-essentialism (Neo-Wittgensteinian family resemblance theory). The idea is that beauty things are beautiful in virtue of beauty-making features or relations. I offer an alternative conception based on Kant¹s idea that beautiful things are expressive of aesthetic ideas. That is, beauty is what transcends our powers of expression. Beauty, like love, is an elusive contentfulness, a ever-out-of-reach fullness, that for all our attempts to put it into words always exceeds them. The attitude of one towards beauty is a matter of not-knowing but wanting or getting to know. I close by saying something about how this conception of beauty bears on the issue of modern skepticism. All welcome! Cheers, David Dr. David Macarthur Senior Lecturer Philosophy Department University of Sydney, 2006, Australia Ph: +61-2-9351-3193 http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/philos/staff/profiles/dmacarthur.shtml
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