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Books

Aesthetics & the Sciences of Mind

John Greenbank asks if science can ultimately tell us anything about artistic experience.

The nature of beauty is one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy, and along with the nature of art, is one of the two fundamental issues in aesthetics. Along with goodness, truth, and justice, beauty has traditionally been counted among the ultimate values. What would life be like if we could not respond to the beauty of sea and landscape, enjoy mind-transporting novels, admire great architecture and paintings, or be uplifted by the sound of words and music? Beauty was a primary theme among ancient Hellenistic and Medieval philosophers, and was central to Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century thought, as represented in treatments by such diverse thinkers as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Burke in Britain, and by Baumgarten, Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer in Germany.

Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762) thought that the senses had their own rules and their own perfection, differing from logical rules and the knowledge generated by logical thought-processing. The rules of perception were to be studied by a science of perception, which Baumgarten called aesthetics, from the Greek for ‘to sense/perceive’.

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