Exam 10: Beauty

Both Plato and Aristotle understood beauty as an objective and not subjective reality.

The aesthetic, one of the best and most rewarding dimensions of human life, involves the ​

Before it became associated with art and beauty, the word aesthetics had to do with feeling in general.

Confucius believed that music appreciation is conducive to virtue because from the harmonious interplay among voices we learn how to construct harmony more generally in our lives.

According to Nietzsche, because our own natures are both individual and transpersonal, we need

Is there such a thing as "good taste"? Plato and Aristotle would have answered "Yes," in light of their shared belief that beauty (or, more generally, aesthetic value)is objective. Many people today, however, reject their objectivism, claiming instead that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." This means that the reality of beauty is subjective, depending on the responses and tastes of people to artwork. This is a much more democratic viewpoint insofar as it seems to imply the equality of all tastes. However, some philosophers, in particular Hume and Kant, developed a middle ground between Plato and Aristotle's strong objectivism and democratic subjectivism. They try to defend good taste and some version of subjectivism.   Write an essay on this disagreement. Start by laying out Plato and Aristotle's viewpoint and its implications for aesthetic taste. Then describe the democratic, subjectivist response. Follow this with an overview of Hume and Kant's viewpoints on taste. Do you believe that either Hume or Kant succeeded in carving out a workable compromise?

According to Aristotle, the function of tragedy is to allow us to get rid of or purify some of our most disturbing emotions.

Even today, the highest praise for any work of art is still the statement "It's beautiful."

Arthur Danto has argued that what makes something "art" is the shared understanding among members of "the artworld" that it is within the range of things they understand to be art.

Freud argued that laughter expresses

How does Aristotle explain the pleasure we take in watching dramas where bad and painful things happen to people?

Plato warned against the dangers of humor because he wanted to protect the guardians of the republic from the distortions and distractions of laughter.

Aristotle's goal, in analyzing the art of the theater, was to find out what made some plays "work" and others not work.

If you looked at The Matrix as a work of art, you'd be interested in

The closure of a work of art, its completeness in itself, its clearly defined limits, and its having "a beginning, a middle, and an end" are a universal, cross-cultural criterion of success in art.

According to David Hume, we should allow the collective judgment of the best critics through the ages to influence our own taste in the arts.

According to Immanuel Kant, truly appreciating a work of art is primarily

Plato is the source of some of the most powerful arguments against censorship of the arts.

What did it mean for medieval painters to conceive of their paintings of Christ's crucifixion as correct? ​

Briefly explain why, according to Schiller, art should be part of a child's education.