beauty

The empirical counterpart to the wiki's aesthetic argument: that engagement with the arts is measurably good for the body.

Attention, in the sense that runs through the wiki's philosophical frame, is the capacity to be genuinely present to what is before you — without immediately translating it into what it resembles, what it costs, or what you already think of it. It is the capacity to let the thing speak before you respond.

The philosophical case that beauty is not decoration but judgement — a quiet act of recognition in which a particular thing is permitted to stand for the order it belongs to.

The argument that calling a thing beautiful is a claim that invites agreement, not a report of private feeling.

The most candid account of Scruton's intellectual life — architecture, music, religion, beauty, and the philosophy of home — in his own words, at Sunday Hill Farm.

The epidemiologist whose Art Cure makes the empirical case that engagement with the arts is a pillar of health.

Beauty is not decoration. It is not subjective preference. It is a form of judgement — a quiet act of recognition in which a particular thing is permitted to stand for the order it belongs to. The disciplined exercise of that judgement — the willingness to call one thing beautiful and another not and to mean it seriously, to defend the judgement, to hold it against fashion, and to revise it only when given reason — is the condition under which beauty survives.

Author of On Beauty and Being Just, who argues that beauty is an apprenticeship in justice.

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.

Chic without conventional beauty — Dariaux's central evidence.

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.

Proportion is the governing principle of the interior, the face, the musical phrase, and the well-set paragraph. It is the relation of parts to the whole that produces the sense of rightness — the recognition that things are as they should be.

Beauty without chic — the reciprocal cautionary case.

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