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Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
Audiobook6 hours

Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

Written by Roger Scruton

Narrated by Chris MacDonnell

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference. In this Very Short Introduction, the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object-either in art, in nature, or the human form-beautiful, and examining how we can compare differing judgments of beauty when it is evident all around us that our tastes vary so widely. Is there a right judgment to be made about beauty? Is it right to say there is more beauty in a classical temple than a concrete office block, more in a Rembrandt than in an Andy Warhol Campbell Soup Can? Forthright and thought-provoking, and as accessible as it is intellectually rigorous, this introduction to the philosophy of beauty draws conclusions that some may find controversial, but, as Scruton shows, help us to find greater sense of meaning in the beautiful objects that fill our lives.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 26, 2019
ISBN9781977345929
Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
Author

Roger Scruton

Sir Roger Scruton is widely seen as one of the greatest conservative thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and a polymath who wrote a wide array of fiction, non-fiction and reviews. He was the author of over fifty books. A graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, Scruton was Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London; University Professor at Boston University, and a visiting professor at Oxford University. He was one of the founders of the Salisbury Review, contributed regularly to The Spectator, The Times and the Daily Telegraph and was for many years wine critic for the New Statesman. Sir Roger Scruton died in January 2020.

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Reviews for Beauty

Rating: 4.040229885057471 out of 5 stars
4/5

87 ratings6 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wonderful meditation on the nature of beauty. Lots of food for thought.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book is an utterly beautiful and fascinating work. If you are serious or just curious about aesthetics and the philosophy of art this would be a great use of your time.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    People seem to rate this low because Scruton goes against the current of relativist thinking when it comes to art and art appreciation, and voices a defense in the traditional classicist view. What does warrant a low rating is not the viewpoint but the execution. It's just not very good. The documentary "Why Beauty Matters" is the reason I read this and is a much better execution; you will find no deeper defense here.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The main observation seems to be that beauty is a sensual perception that satisfies our intellect. He introduces different contexts in which beauty manifests, such as architecture, day to day life, and art. It often felt as though he was showing off his erudition, but, in fairness, his meaning was not heavily dependent on his references.

    There is some cursory discussion of the philosophical arguments concerning aesthetics, but the book mostly consists of the author's own musings. Scruton is known as a politically conservative thinker, but this mus be one of his less polemical works. Aside from some anthropocentricism my political sensibilities were not affronted, though I may not be sophisticated enough to have picked up on all the implications of his words.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I took this book to read, after listening to Scruton's view of Beauty. He says beauty cannot be deduced as a syllogism. The first 60 pages of this book are worth reading. When you describe something as beautiful, you are describing it, not your feelings. Each desire is specific to its object because it is a desire for that person as the individual. Beauty invites us to focus on the individual object. His example of merely a body and embodied was thought provoking. It intrigues me always, that a person is not just flesh but their eyes is a window to their soul.

    Some interesting quotes,

    "Beauty is for its own sake."

    "State of mind is judgement of beauty."

    "Wanting something for beauty is to contemplate it."

    Deus Vult
    --Gottfried
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Roger Scruton's introduction to beauty is indeed very short, but its importance is vast. Scruton cogently analyses several traditional western approaches to identifying, apprehending, and learning from the beautiful, and crisply diagnoses the aesthetic disease of the postmodern west: we veer toward two extremes -- kitsch and desecration -- that both keep us from understanding, producing and learning from real beauty. And this sickness goes deep; it reveals our inability to live lives that reach beyond the mundane into the sacred and sacrificial realms in which we are created and called to live:"That is why art matters. Without the conscious pursuit of beauty we risk falling into a world of addictive pleasures and routine desecration, a world in which the worthwhileness of human life is no longer perceivable."This is a nearly perfect little book, marred only by repeated, and odd, errors in punctuation. I find it difficult to believe Scruton himself does not grasp apposition, so I suspect his editors at Oxford University Press are to blame. But this is a minor flaw. Scruton has written an illuminating, provocative, and -- may I say it -- occasionally beautiful book.