The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas
Title | The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas PDF eBook |
Author | Umberto Eco |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Total Pages | 306 |
Release | 1988 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 9780674006768 |
The well-known Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco discloses for the first time to English-speaking readers the unsuspected richness, breadth, complexity, and originality of the aesthetic theories advanced by the influential medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas, heretofore known principally as a scholastic theologian. Inheriting his basic ideas and conceptions of art and beauty from the classical world, Aquinas transformed or modified these ideas in the light of Christian theology and of developments in metaphysics and optics during the thirteenth century. Setting the stage with an account of the vivid aesthetic and artistic sensibility that flourished in medieval times, Eco examines Aquinas's conception of transcendental beauty, his theory of aesthetic perception or visio, and his account of the three conditions of beauty--integrity, proportion, and clarity--that, centuries later, emerged again in the writings of the young James Joyce. He examines the concrete application of these theories in Aquinas's reflections on God, mankind, music, poetry, and scripture. He discusses Aquinas's views on art and compares his poetics with Dante's. In a final chapter added to the second Italian edition, Eco examines how Aquinas's aesthetics came to be absorbed and superseded in late medieval times and draws instructive parallels between Thomistic methodology and contemporary structuralism. As the only book-length treatment of Aquinas's aesthetics available in English, this volume should interest philosophers, medievalists, historians, critics, and anyone involved in poetics, aesthetics, or the history of ideas.
The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas
Title | The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas PDF eBook |
Author | Umberto Eco |
Publisher | Vintage |
Total Pages | 287 |
Release | 1988 |
Genre | Aesthetics |
ISBN | 9780091823597 |
Aquinas on Beauty
Title | Aquinas on Beauty PDF eBook |
Author | Christopher Scott Sevier |
Publisher | Lexington Books |
Total Pages | 241 |
Release | 2015-02-12 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0739184253 |
Aquinas on Beauty explores the nature and role of beauty in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with a standard definition of beauty provided by Aquinas, it explores each of the components of that definition. The result is a comprehensive account of Aquinas’s formal view on the subject, supplemented by an exploration into Aquinas’s commentary on Dionysius’s Divine Names, including a comparison of his views with those of both Dionysius and those of Aquinas’s mentor, Albert the Great. The book also highlights the tight connection in Aquinas’s thought between aesthetics and ethics, and illustrates how Aquinas preserves what is best about aesthetic traditions preceding him, and anticipates what is best about aesthetic traditions that would follow, marrying objective and subjective aesthetic intuitions and charting a kind of via media between the common extremes.
A Theory of Esthetic According to the Principles of St. Thomas Aquinas ... by Leonard Callahan ...
Title | A Theory of Esthetic According to the Principles of St. Thomas Aquinas ... by Leonard Callahan ... PDF eBook |
Author | John Leonard Callahan |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 144 |
Release | 1927 |
Genre | Aesthetics |
ISBN |
Philosophy of Beauty
Title | Philosophy of Beauty PDF eBook |
Author | Francis J. Kovach |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 360 |
Release | 2012-07 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 9780806113630 |
There has long been a need for a work on the philosophy of beauty treating fundamental problems against the background of the history of aesthetics--ancient and medieval as well as modern and contemporary. This book answers that need with the comprehensive presentations of an objectivist philosophy of beauty to balance the currently popular aesthetic subjectivism. It includes a synopsis of views and theories expressed on the various questions about beauty by philosophers down through the ages. Kovach's acquaintance with relevant literature from the ancient Greeks to twentieth-century authors is staggering. He draws on the observations of thinkers from ancient times--Plato, Aristotle. Philo of Alexandria, Cicero, Plotinus, Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, and others; from medieval times--Alexander of Hales, John of la Rochelle, Thomas of York, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Dionysius the Carthusian, and others; from modern times--Descartes, J. Addison, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Tolstoi, Santayana, Croce, Maritain, Sartre, H. Read, Thomas Munro, and others. With delicate precision Kovach systematically discusses the philosophy of beauty and the problems it raises. Whether or not one agrees with Kovach's objectivist position, no one in the field can afford to be without this book.
Bonaventure’s Aesthetics
Title | Bonaventure’s Aesthetics PDF eBook |
Author | Thomas J. McKenna |
Publisher | Rowman & Littlefield |
Total Pages | 187 |
Release | 2020-12-10 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1498597661 |
The authors of the standard approach to Bonaventure’s aesthetics established the broad themes that continue to inform the current interpretation of his philosophy, theology, and mysticism of beauty: his definition of beauty and its status as a transcendental of being, his description of the aesthetic experience, and the role of that experience in the soul’s ascent into God. Nevertheless, they also introduced a series of pointed questions that the current literature has not adequately resolved. In Bonaventure’s Aesthetics: The Delight of the Soul in Its Ascent into God, Thomas J. McKenna provides a comprehensive analysis of Bonaventure’s aesthetics, the first to appear since Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit, and argues for a resolution to these questions in the context of his principal aesthetic text, the Itinerarium mentis in Deum.
Aesthetic Perception
Title | Aesthetic Perception PDF eBook |
Author | Kevin E. O'Reilly |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 146 |
Release | 2007 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN |
In his seminal work, "Truth and Method", Hans-Goerg Gadamer highlighted the misguided supposition of the Enlightenment that such a thing as 'pure reason' actually exists. The notion that 'prejudice' informs all understanding is not however a novel one in the history of Western thought; this idea is to be found in the work of Aquinas, albeit in an implicit manner. In this book the implications of this idea for a Thomistic approach to the problematic of aesthetic perception are examined. Beginning with Thomas' famous definition of beautiful things as 'those things which when seen give pleasure', the author highlights the limitations present in previous treatments of Thomas' embryonic aesthetic theory and shows how insights gleaned from Thomas' virtue ethics can contribute to a Thomistic aesthetic theory, a theory which has relevance for both philosophy and theology.