[PDF] Thomas Aquinas On The Nature And Experience Of Beauty eBook

Author : Christopher Scott Sevier
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 14,92 MB
Release : 2015-02-12
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0739184253

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Aquinas on Beauty explores the nature and role of beauty in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with a standard definition of beauty provided by Aquinas, it explores each of the components of that definition. The result is a comprehensive account of Aquinas’s formal view on the subject, supplemented by an exploration into Aquinas’s commentary on Dionysius’s Divine Names, including a comparison of his views with those of both Dionysius and those of Aquinas’s mentor, Albert the Great. The book also highlights the tight connection in Aquinas’s thought between aesthetics and ethics, and illustrates how Aquinas preserves what is best about aesthetic traditions preceding him, and anticipates what is best about aesthetic traditions that would follow, marrying objective and subjective aesthetic intuitions and charting a kind of via media between the common extremes.

Author : Umberto Eco
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 13,44 MB
Release : 1988
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780674006768

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The well-known Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco discloses for the first time to English-speaking readers the unsuspected richness, breadth, complexity, and originality of the aesthetic theories advanced by the influential medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas, heretofore known principally as a scholastic theologian. Inheriting his basic ideas and conceptions of art and beauty from the classical world, Aquinas transformed or modified these ideas in the light of Christian theology and of developments in metaphysics and optics during the thirteenth century. Setting the stage with an account of the vivid aesthetic and artistic sensibility that flourished in medieval times, Eco examines Aquinas's conception of transcendental beauty, his theory of aesthetic perception or visio, and his account of the three conditions of beauty--integrity, proportion, and clarity--that, centuries later, emerged again in the writings of the young James Joyce. He examines the concrete application of these theories in Aquinas's reflections on God, mankind, music, poetry, and scripture. He discusses Aquinas's views on art and compares his poetics with Dante's. In a final chapter added to the second Italian edition, Eco examines how Aquinas's aesthetics came to be absorbed and superseded in late medieval times and draws instructive parallels between Thomistic methodology and contemporary structuralism. As the only book-length treatment of Aquinas's aesthetics available in English, this volume should interest philosophers, medievalists, historians, critics, and anyone involved in poetics, aesthetics, or the history of ideas.

Author : Michael Joseph Rubin
Publisher :
Page : 436 pages
File Size : 21,2 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Aesthetics
ISBN :

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This dissertation investigates whether "beauty" is a transcendental in the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas. For Thomas, a transcendental is a term that expresses a distinct attribute of every being insofar as it exists, and which therefore reveals something unique about the nature of all reality. Hence, the question of whether beauty is a transcendental for Thomas has important implications not only for his metaphysics, but for his thought in general. The Introduction argues that the question we are investigating actually consists of two questions, a historical one and a systematic one: "Did Thomas himself consider beauty to be a distinct transcendental?" and "Does Thomas's thought imply or entail that beauty is a distinct transcendental?" Furthermore, since beauty cannot be a distinct attribute of every being for Thomas unless it has a distinct meaning, neither question can be answered in isolation from a third question: "What is the meaning of 'beauty' in Thomas's thought?" Chapter One examines the historical question regarding beauty's transcendental status, namely whether Thomas himself considered beauty a transcendental. The chapter proceeds by extracting from his writings the characteristics that distinguish the transcendentals from all other terms, and then determining whether he attributes these marks to beauty. Chapter Two begins our investigation of the systematic question regarding beauty's transcendental status, namely whether Thomas's metaphysics implies or entails that beauty is a transcendental. The chapter examines the attempts of certain contemporary Thomists to prove either that beauty is a transcendental or that it is not. Our examination of the systematic question concerning beauty's transcendental status continues with an analysis of Thomas's opinions on both the subjective factors of aesthetic experience, i.e. a person's perception of and delight in beauty, and the objective factors of that experience, i.e. the ontological conditions for beauty in a being. Hence, we investigate the nature of aesthetic perception in Chapter Three, the nature of aesthetic pleasure in Chapter Four, and the nature of beauty's conditions in Chapter Five. The sixth and final chapter uses these findings to formulate a conclusion regarding the meaning of beauty and its transcendental status in Thomas's metaphysics.

Author : Roger Scruton
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 17,16 MB
Release : 2011-03-24
Category : Art
ISBN : 0199229759

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In a book that is itself beautifully written, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores this timeless concept, asking what makes an object--either in art, in nature, or the human form--beautiful.--From publisher description.

Author : Armand Augustine Maurer
Publisher :
Page : 162 pages
File Size : 21,28 MB
Release : 1983
Category : Philosophy
ISBN :

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"Originally lectures given at the Center for Thomistic Studies"--Introd. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Author : Alice Ramos
Publisher : CUA Press
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 34,9 MB
Release : 2012-05-07
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0813219655

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Addressing contemporary interest in the relationship between metaphysics and ethics, as well as the significance of beauty for ethics, Alice Ramos presents an accessible study of the transcendentals and provides a dynamic rather than static view of truth, goodness, and beauty.