Aristotelian Objectivism about Beauty: A Defence

Abstract

Is the objective existence of beauty the most discredited notion in philosophy, or can it be defended? The goal of this thesis is to answer the latter question positively by recourse to the philosophy of Aristotle. It intends to show that though realism about beauty fails on other systems, it succeeds within Aristotle’s scheme in which beauty is the mode of appearance of the good. This thesis argues from two assumptions that are clarified as the argument unfolds. First, that there is such a thing as aesthetic experience, which presents data of intrinsic value that at least seems to come from things themselves rather than our own minds. Second, that any aesthetic theory seeking to explain this data cannot sacrifice it for the sake of theory or explaining other data. This thesis uses a combination of logical, grammatical, and phenomenological methods to analyse the viability of several non-Aristotelian aesthetic views. It concludes that the theory which preserves the data of aesthetic experience best while remaining procedurally sound is also the one that makes beauty a real feature of objects in the world: Aristotelianism. The argument proceeds in two parts, negative and positive. The first three chapters are the negative part, which criticise various non-Aristotelian aesthetic theories. The fact-value dichotomy and resulting propositionalism about aesthetic value emerge as the main faults of aesthetics since the Enlightenment. First, I treat of Plato, then Kant, then various varieties of modern propositionalist aesthetics. I argue that each of these either preserves realism at the cost of indefinability (Plato), sacrifices some of the data of experience for the sake of theory (Kant), or makes aesthetic experience wholly unintelligible (non-Kantian propositionalism). The last chapter contains the positive argument for a robust Aristotelian aesthetic realism. It uses a mixture of the grammatical method of Philippa Foot and Peter Geach, with premises drawn from Gestalt phenomenology. The conclusion reached is that if we do not commit to the assumptions of the philosophies criticised, Aristotelian most closely fits our experience of beauty and its grammatical use as a concept.