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The power of discerning beauty is internal (mental) — Carmelics

Home/Aesthetics

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The power of discerning beauty is internal (mental)

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2 reasons against

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1.Objects of beauty are necessarily internal (mental)
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2.Mind alone can discern what is itself mental
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1.Hutcheson's supporting argument commits a category error: the mental origin of a perception does not entail that the object perceived is itself mental.
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2.Color perception is a mental act, yet philosophers from Locke onward distinguish the mental act of perceiving red from the external disposition in objects that causes it.
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3.Even granting that beauty-discernment is internal, this gives no warrant for concluding the objects of beauty are themselves mental rather than relational or dispositional.
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Reason against 2 of 2

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1.Beauty is regularly attributed to physical properties such as symmetry, proportion, and harmony that exist independently of any perceiving mind.
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2.If beauty resides in objective physical properties, the faculty discerning it need not itself be mental but could be a sensory capacity tracking real external features.
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Beauty is regularly attributed to physical properties such as symmetry, proporti...Color perception is a mental act, yet philosophers from Locke onward distinguish...Even granting that beauty-discernment is internal, this gives no warrant for con...Hutcheson's supporting argument commits a category error: the mental origin of a...

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If beauty resides in objective physical properties, the faculty discerning it ne...Mind alone can discern what is itself mental Objects of beauty are necessarily internal (mental)

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AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid

SEP: aesthetics-18th-british

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It is in arguing for the internality of the power of discerning beauty that Hutcheson’s departure from Shaftesbury begins to show. Shaftesbury, it will be recalled, argues that the discernment of beauty is internal (or mental) on the grounds that the objects of beauty necessarily are: mind alone can discern beauty because mind alone is beautiful, external objects managing a degree of beauty only by having a bit of mind imprinted on them. But Hutcheson cannot make this argument because he does no

Extraction notes

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

Details

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