At the end of the Santayana episode, I brought up his condemnation of any theory that would call the non-beautiful an object of aesthetic appreciation. This topic is worthy of a whole episode, and I've been looking into readings for such an eventual discussion, but let me lay out a bit of it now and how Santayana fits in: In parallel to philosophical considerations of the Continue Reading …
Why can’t life always be beautiful?
[A blog post from friend of PEL Phillip C. It's a bit longer than our normal posts and is heavy with the name drops but I'm going to let it go because it's on art, is related to a discussion group and I make the editing decisions around here - Seth] “What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to Continue Reading …
Episode 77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty (Citizens Only)
On George Santayana's The Sense of Beauty (1896). What are we saying when we call something "beautiful?" Are we pointing out an objective quality that other people (anyone?) can ferret out, or just essentially saying "yay!" without any logic necessarily behind our exclamation? The poet and philosopher Santayana thought that while aesthetic appreciation is an immediate Continue Reading …
PREVIEW-Episode 77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty
This is a short preview of the full episode. Buy Now Purchase this episode for $2.99. Or become a PEL Citizen for $5 a month, and get access to this and all other paywalled episodes, including 68 back catalogue episodes; exclusive Part 2's for episodes published after September, 2020; and our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and chat more Continue Reading …
Philosophy Doesn’t Make Propositions?
There's a claim I laid out from Deleuze in the episode that I wanted to bring up for explicit discussion. I think it's provocative and deserves some thought but is almost certainly wrong. It's about the picture of science as producing concepts and not propositions. I gave the example of Descartes's Cogito, and laid out a few of the apparent claims involved in that (the Continue Reading …
Topic for #77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty
On 5/16 the regular foursome recorded a discussion of The Sense of Beauty (1896) by George Santayana. What is "the beautiful?" Do we have a "sense" by which we grasp it comparable to what Hume describes as the moral sense? Listen to the episode. Where most pre-Humean philosophers considered beauty an objective quality in objects that people then can grasp (think about Continue Reading …
Science Determines Beauty
This Reuters video (and I'm sorry about the 30 second commercial that you have to sit through to get to it) depicts "Britain's Most Natural Beauty," where the contest "wasn't just a matter of subjective beauty, but settled with science. Researchers said that the distance between facial features, and the width and length of the face are deciding factors for perfection." Some of Continue Reading …