aesthetics

This work proposes an inversion of literary criticism, suggesting that books should be judged by the quality of reading they permit, rather than readers by their preferences.

Judgement, in the aesthetic sense the wiki uses the term, is the faculty that calls one thing beautiful and another not — and can give reasons for the distinction that others can follow and dispute. It is what distinguishes taste from preference, and what makes aesthetic conversation possible.

The argument that beauty is not a distraction from justice but a training in it — that to be stopped by a beautiful thing is to practise recognising what stands, and makes a claim, independently of us.

The wiki's central philosopher of beauty, music, and the cultivated life.

On what it means to hear music as music — as a sequence of intentions rather than a sequence of sounds, and why the disciplined ear is a moral achievement.