The Metaphysics of Beauty

Download or read book The Metaphysics of Beauty written by Nick Zangwill and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In chapters ranging from "The Beautiful, the Dainty, and the Dumpy" to "Skin-deep or In the Eye of the Beholder?" Nick Zangwill investigates the nature of beauty as we conceive it, and as it is in itself. The notion of beauty is currently attracting increased interest, particularly in philosophical aesthetics and in discussions of our experiences and judgments about art. In The Metaphysics of Beauty, Zangwill argues that it is essential to beauty that it depends on the ordinary features of things. He uses this principle to defend the notion of the aesthetic, to call for a version of aesthetic formalism, and to reconsider the reality of beauty. The Metaphysics of Beauty brings beauty to the center of intellectual consciousness in a manner informed by contemporary metaphysics and engages with beauty as an enduring object of human thought and experience.