Philosophers such as Santayana have tried for centuries to understand beauty, but perhaps scientists are now ready to try their hand as well. And while science cannot yet tell us what beauty is, perhaps it can tell us where it is—or where it isn’t. In a recent study, a team of researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing and their colleagues examined the origin of beauty and argued that it is as enigmatic in our brain as it is in the real world. Beauty standards are rooted in cultural norms crafted by societies and media over centuries. As of 2018, it has been argued that the predominance of white women featured in movies and advertising leads to a Eurocentric concept of beauty, which assigns inferiority to women of color. [113] Thus, societies and cultures across the globe struggle to diminish the longstanding internalized racism. [114] Guy Sircello, "How Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Akiba, Fuminori (2013). "Preface: Natural Computing and Computational Aesthetics". Natural Computing and Beyond. Proceedings in Information and Communications Technology. 6: 117–118. doi: 10.1007/978-4-431-54394-7_10. ISBN 978-4431543930.

Rayonnant rose window in Notre Dame de Paris. In Gothic architecture, light was considered the most beautiful revelation of God, which was heralded in its design. [1] More recently, philosophers—distrustful of Kant’s theory of the faculties—have tried to express the notions of an “aesthetic attitude” and “aesthetic experience” in other ways, relying upon developments in philosophical psychology that owe much to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the phenomenologists, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (more precisely, the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations [1953]). In considering these theories (some of which are discussed below), a crucial distinction must be borne in mind: that between philosophy of mind and empirical psychology. Philosophy is not a science, because it does not investigate the causes of phenomena. It is an a priori or conceptual investigation, the underlying concern of which is to identify rather than to explain. In effect, the aim of the philosopher is to give the broadest possible description of the things themselves, so as to show how we must understand them and how we ought to value them. The two most prominent current philosophical methods—phenomenology and conceptual analysis—tend to regard this aim as distinct from, and (at least in part) prior to, the aim of science. For how can we begin to explain what we have yet to identify? While there have been empirical studies of aesthetic experience (exercises in the psychology of beauty), these form no part of aesthetics as considered in this article. Indeed, the remarkable paucity of their conclusions may reasonably be attributed to their attempt to provide a theory of phenomena that have yet to be properly defined. Martindale, C (2007). "Recent trends in the psychological study of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts". Empirical Studies of the Arts. 25 (2): 121–141. doi: 10.2190/b637-1041-2635-16nn. S2CID 143506308. In the Romantic period, Edmund Burke postulated a difference between beauty in its classical meaning and the sublime. [58] The concept of the sublime, as explicated by Burke and Kant, suggested viewing Gothic art and architecture, though not in accordance with the classical standard of beauty, as sublime. [59]aesthetics, the philosophical study of beauty and taste. It is closely related to the philosophy of art, which is concerned with the nature of art and the concepts in terms of which individual works of art are interpreted and evaluated. Francis Hutcheson (1726). An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue: In Two Treatises. J. Darby. ISBN 9780598982698. Archived from the original on February 3, 2023 . Retrieved June 14, 2020.

a b c d e Sartwell, Crispin (2017). "Beauty". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Archived from the original on 26 February 2022 . Retrieved 26 May 2021. a b Tang, Yijie (2015). Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity and Chinese Culture. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. p. 242. ISBN 3662455331 Datta, R.; Joshi, D.; Li, J.; Wang, J. (2006). "Computer Vision – ECCV 2006". Europ. Conf. on Computer Vision. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol.3953. Springer. pp.288–301. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.81.5178. doi: 10.1007/11744078_23. ISBN 978-3540338369. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (eds.), Women Artists at the Millennium. Massachusetts: October Books/MIT Press, 2006. ISBN 026201226XS Scolnicov (2003). Plato's Parmenides. University of California Press. p.21. ISBN 0520925114 . Retrieved May 12, 2015. von Vacano, Diego, "The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory," Lanham MD: Lexington: 2007. Sigmund Freud inaugurated aesthetical thinking in Psychoanalysis mainly via the "Uncanny" as aesthetical affect. [58] Following Freud and Merleau-Ponty, [59] Jacques Lacan theorized aesthetics in terms of sublimation and the Thing. [60] The Age of Reason saw a rise in an interest in beauty as a philosophical subject. For example, Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson argued that beauty is " unity in variety and variety in unity". [54] He wrote that beauty was neither purely subjective nor purely objective—it could be understood not as "any Quality suppos'd to be in the Object, which should of itself be beautiful, without relation to any Mind which perceives it: For Beauty, like other Names of sensible Ideas, properly denotes the Perception of some mind; ... however we generally imagine that there is something in the Object just like our Perception." [55] Aesthetics examines affective domain response to an object or phenomenon. Judgments of aesthetic value rely on the ability to discriminate at a sensory level. However, aesthetic judgments usually go beyond sensory discrimination.