Tag: Aesthetics

• September 14, 2014

  Making perspicuous the connections: Cheerfulness, surprise, and marvel

  1. It dawns on me that there is a particular kind of person that I have been trying to describe over the past couple of years. There are three sets of terms that bring this kind of character more sharply into focus: dispositional terms, aesthetic terms, and an occurrence term. 2. The dispositional terms are…
• December 13, 2013

  Orders of beauty: In accordance with nature (2)

  Let us remind ourselves of what we have said. 1. The best human life is one that is lived in accordance with nature. 2. To live in accordance with nature is to bring into harmony the good, the true, and the beautiful. 3. First metaphysics. Nature (or reality) reveals itself in its three aspects: finitude,…
• July 1, 2013

  Why is Kenko disillusioned?

  All around Kenko are signs of late autumn. The flowers, irregularly strewn yet carefully placed, so completely matches Kenko’s  aesthetic ideas of simplicity, irregularity, and incompleteness–not to mention his ascetic notion of the value of exclusion–that he is taken aback. That a man could live like this is… if not wisdom, then at least admirable.…
• July 4, 2012

  On my love of sensualism

  I would never have imagined that philosophical life, which seems to privilege inquiry, abstract considerations, mathematical rigor, and mental activity more generally, could open me up to ‘sensualism’ but it has. Perhaps it is that dwelling on how all transient things hang together points me back to this particular thing here, revealing to me a…
• June 11, 2012

  Adderall and philosophical life

  The Sunday New York Times front page article on the pervasiveness of Adderall use among wealthy high school students, “Risky Rise of the Good-Grade Pill: Taking Stimulants Not for a High, but for a Higher SAT Score” (June 10, 2012), misses the philosophical point. The reporter Alan Schwarz covers the usual suspects–availability, pervasiveness, potentially adverse side…