Beauty is mainly discussed in relation to concrete objects accessible to sensory perception. It has been suggested that the beauty of a thing supervenes on the sensory features of this thing. [10] It has also been proposed that abstract objects like stories or mathematical proofs can be beautiful. [11] Beauty plays a central role in works of art and nature. [12] [10] a b Chang, Chi-yun (2013). Confucianism: A Modern Interpretation (2012 Edition). Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company. p. 213. ISBN 9814439894

Eurocentric standards for men include tallness, leanness, and muscularity, which have been idolized through American media, such as in Hollywood films and magazine covers. [115] Vartanian, Oshin; Navarrete, Gorka; Chatterjee, Anjan; Fich, Lars Brorson; Leder, Helmut; Modroño, Cristián; Nadal, Marcos; Rostrup, Nicolai; Skov, Martin (June 18, 2013). "Impact of contour on aesthetic judgments and approach-avoidance decisions in architecture". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 110 (Suppl 2): 10446–10453. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1301227110. PMC 3690611. PMID 23754408. Datta, R.; Joshi, D.; Li, J.; Wang, J. (2006). "Computer Vision – ECCV 2006". Europ. Conf. on Computer Vision. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol.3953. Springer. pp.288–301. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.81.5178. doi: 10.1007/11744078_23. ISBN 978-3540338369. a b c De Clercq, Rafael (2013). "Beauty". The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. Routledge. Archived from the original on 13 January 2022 . Retrieved 26 May 2021. In the 1990s, Jürgen Schmidhuber described an algorithmic theory of beauty. This theory takes the subjectivity of the observer into account and postulates that among several observations classified as comparable by a given subjective observer, the most aesthetically pleasing is the one that is encoded by the shortest description, following the direction of previous approaches. [76] [77] Schmidhuber's theory explicitly distinguishes between that which is beautiful and that which is interesting, stating that interestingness corresponds to the first derivative of subjectively perceived beauty. He supposes that every observer continually tries to improve the predictability and compressibility of their observations by identifying regularities like repetition, symmetry, and fractal self-similarity. [78] [79] [80] [81]Aesthetics examines affective domain response to an object or phenomenon. Judgments of aesthetic value rely on the ability to discriminate at a sensory level. However, aesthetic judgments usually go beyond sensory discrimination. In the Middle Ages, Catholic philosophers like Thomas Aquinas included beauty among the transcendental attributes of being. [49] In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas described the three conditions of beauty as: integritas (wholeness), consonantia (harmony and proportion), and claritas (a radiance and clarity that makes the form of a thing apparent to the mind). [50] The "classical conception" [ further explanation needed] defines beauty in terms of the relation between the beautiful object as a whole and its parts: the parts should stand in the right proportion to each other and thus compose an integrated harmonious whole. [3] [5] [9] On this account, which found its most explicit articulation in the Italian Renaissance, the beauty of a human body, for example, depends, among other things, on the right proportion of the different parts of the body and on the overall symmetry. [3] One problem with this conception is that it is difficult to give a general and detailed description of what is meant by "harmony between parts" and raises the suspicion that defining beauty through harmony results in exchanging one unclear term for another one. [3] Some attempts have been made to dissolve this suspicion by searching for laws of beauty, like the golden ratio.

Reber, R; Schwarz, N; Winkielman, P (2004). "Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience?". Personality and Social Psychology Review. 8 (4): 364–382. doi: 10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3. hdl: 1956/594. PMID 15582859. S2CID 1868463. Conway, Bevil R.; Rehding, Alexander (March 19, 2013). "Neuroaesthetics and the Trouble with Beauty". PLOS Biology. 11 (3): e1001504. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001504. PMC 3601993. PMID 23526878. Beauty, together with art and taste, is the main subject of aesthetics, one of the major branches of philosophy. [3] [4] Beauty is usually categorized as an aesthetic property besides other properties, like grace, elegance or the sublime. [5] [6] [7] As a positive aesthetic value, beauty is contrasted with ugliness as its negative counterpart. Beauty is often listed as one of the three fundamental concepts of human understanding besides truth and goodness. [5] [8] [6]McNamara, Denis Robert (2009). Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy. Hillenbrand Books. pp. 24–28. ISBN 1595250271. Aesthetics and the philosophy of art [ edit ] A man enjoying a painting of a landscape. The nature of such experience is studied by aesthetics. Lyotard, Jean-Françoise, What is Postmodernism?, in The Postmodern Condition, Minnesota and Manchester, 1984. If we adopt such an approach, then there ceases to be a real distinction between aesthetics and the philosophy of art; and aesthetic concepts and aesthetic experience deserve their names through being, respectively, the concepts required in understanding works of art and the experience provoked by confronting them. Thus Hegel, perhaps the major philosophical influence on modern aesthetics, considered the main task of aesthetics to reside in the study of the various forms of art and of the spiritual content peculiar to each. Much of recent aesthetics has been similarly focused on artistic problems, and it could be said that it is now orthodox to consider aesthetics entirely through the study of art.

a b Phillips, Mike (January 29, 2005). "Review: On Beauty edited by Umberto Eco". the Guardian . Retrieved June 3, 2023. In another essay, " The Affective Fallacy," which served as a kind of sister essay to "The Intentional Fallacy" Wimsatt and Beardsley also discounted the reader's personal/emotional reaction to a literary work as a valid means of analyzing a text. This fallacy would later be repudiated by theorists from the reader-response school of literary theory. One of the leading theorists from this school, Stanley Fish, was himself trained by New Critics. Fish criticizes Wimsatt and Beardsley in his essay "Literature in the Reader" (1970). [46]D. Konstan (2014). Beauty - The Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea. published by Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199927265 . Retrieved November 24, 2015. F Nake (1974). Ästhetik als Informationsverarbeitung. ( Aesthetics as information processing). Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informatik im Bereich ästhetischer Produktion und Kritik. Springer, 1974, ISBN 978-3211812167 Matthen, Mohan; Weinstein, Zachary. "Aesthetic Hedonism". Oxford Bibliographies. Archived from the original on January 18, 2021 . Retrieved February 10, 2021. Schmidhuber, J. (2006). "Developmental robotics, optimal artificial curiosity, creativity, music, and the fine arts". Connection Science. 18 (2): 173–187. doi: 10.1080/09540090600768658. S2CID 2923356. Mario Perniola, The Art and Its Shadow, foreword by Hugh J. Silverman, translated by Massimo Verdicchio, London-New York, Continuum, 2004.