Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Overview

What’s New in… Aesthetics

Kai Hammermeister on the beauty business.

Aesthetics is the philosophical investigation of art and the theory of beauty and opposite phenomena, like the ugly, the comical, the ironic, the grotesque and so on. The term comes from the Greek word aisthesis, meaning sensual perception. For a very long time in Western thought inquiries into art and into beauty were two very distinct affairs that need by no means overlap. All throughout the history of Western philosophy, beauty was treated together with the ideas of the good and the true as one of the aspects of being, i.e.

…