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    Material things can truly be beautiful, even if Shaftesbu... — Carmelics
    Home/Aesthetics
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Material things can truly be beautiful, even if Shaftesbury's characters sometimes seem to suggest otherwise.

    Aesthetics
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    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

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    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Francis Hutcheson, Shaftesbury's direct intellectual heir, systematically extended inner-sense beauty to material objects while preserving the core unity-in-variety criterion.
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    • 2.If the inner sense can perceive beauty in mathematical theorems and moral characters, it can equally register unified form in perceptible material things.
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    • 3.Denying beauty to material things would render Shaftesbury's aesthetics incapable of explaining our warranted aesthetic responses to nature, undermining his own natural theology.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Shaftesbury's own texts praise natural landscapes and the ocean as beautiful, indicating material things are genuine aesthetic objects for him.
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    • 2.Shaftesbury's hierarchy places mental beauty above material beauty without eliminating the latter, just as Plato's Symposium ascends without annulling lower beauty.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Shaftesbury's notion of beauty-as-unity implies that beauty consists in possessing a unified form.
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    • 2.A material thing really can possess a unified form.
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    • 3.Therefore, a material thing really can have the property of beauty.
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    Aesthetics

    Related

    A material thing really can possess a unified form.Denying beauty to material things would render Shaftesbury's aesthetics incapabl...Francis Hutcheson, Shaftesbury's direct intellectual heir, systematically extend...If the inner sense can perceive beauty in mathematical theorems and moral charac...
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    Shaftesbury's hierarchy places mental beauty above material beauty without elimi...Shaftesbury's notion of beauty-as-unity implies that beauty consists in possessi...Shaftesbury's own texts praise natural landscapes and the ocean as beautiful, in...Therefore, a material thing really can have the property of beauty.

    Similar

    Elsewhere, Shaftesbury (via Theocles) affirms that physical things can...83%Diderot still objects to André's reliance on innate ideas about what i...80%Alcibiades is presented as a case where love does not lead to love of ...79%Something cannot be merely beautiful without being beautiful in virtue...78%

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    SEP: shaftesbury
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    Adherents of the instrumentalist interpretation take Shaftesbury’s points about beauty of mind and the hierarchy as evidence that Shaftesbury thinks physical objects are not really beautiful at all, and that we should aspire to care only about the beauty of minds (see especially Tiffany 1923). On this view, the beauty of objects (including all art) is merely an early stage of appreciation of beauty that the wise person eventually leaves behind. Against this interpretation, however, Glauser argue
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit