Beauty is about the world. More precisely, about humans. What makes humans perceive X as beautiful?
Required knowledge about the world: What happens in our brains? (Neuroscience, psychology, biology.) Do our beauty judgements change across cultures or centuries? (Sociology, anthropology, art history.) Do monkeys feel something similar? (Biology, ethology.)
It might prove helpful to look at humans etc. to understand the things that trigger the topic of beauty, in the sense that you might learn interesting related ideas in greater detail by studying these things. But the detailed conditions of triggering the topic are not necessarily among them, so “What makes humans perceive X as beautiful?” may be a less useful question than “What are some representative examples of things that are perceived by humans as beautiful?”. The world gives you detailed data for investigation, but you don’t necessarily care about the data, the ideas it suggests might make the original data irrelevant at some point.
That knowledge about the world is necessary is not in doubt. The issue is whether it is sufficient.
We agree about the first sentence. And the knowledge about the world also helps to form a qualified opinion about the second one.
I have no problem with students of philosophy learning Plato’s opinions and the related science, if they want to write a book about Beauty. (I just imagine them more likely to do the former part and ignore the latter.)
Beauty is about the world. More precisely, about humans. What makes humans perceive X as beautiful?
Required knowledge about the world: What happens in our brains? (Neuroscience, psychology, biology.) Do our beauty judgements change across cultures or centuries? (Sociology, anthropology, art history.) Do monkeys feel something similar? (Biology, ethology.)
It might prove helpful to look at humans etc. to understand the things that trigger the topic of beauty, in the sense that you might learn interesting related ideas in greater detail by studying these things. But the detailed conditions of triggering the topic are not necessarily among them, so “What makes humans perceive X as beautiful?” may be a less useful question than “What are some representative examples of things that are perceived by humans as beautiful?”. The world gives you detailed data for investigation, but you don’t necessarily care about the data, the ideas it suggests might make the original data irrelevant at some point.
Not in any sense that leadds to straightforward empiricism.
That knowledge about the world is necessary is not in doubt. The issue is whether it is sufficient.
We agree about the first sentence. And the knowledge about the world also helps to form a qualified opinion about the second one.
I have no problem with students of philosophy learning Plato’s opinions and the related science, if they want to write a book about Beauty. (I just imagine them more likely to do the former part and ignore the latter.)
A lot of this seems to be imagination-driven.
We imagine that our imagination has all the answers. In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they are not.