BEAUTY

What is beauty? What is it about an object which makes it beautiful? What kind of qualities characterize an experience of beauty? In modern philosophy the questions have been: is beauty subjective or objective? Are there properties in the object that count towards beauty in all cases, that are sufficient or necessary for an object to be judged beautiful? What kind of pleasure is the pleasure we experience of beauty? In this chapter, I present an overview of how these questions have been answered by philosophers throughout the ages, and suggest how they might be answered within a physicalist world view.