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. Gino Zaccaria, The Enigma of Art. On the Provenance of Artistic Creation, 2021, Brill, ISBN 978-9004448704

Philosophers of art weigh a culturally contingent conception of art versus one that is purely theoretical. They study the varieties of art in relation to their physical, social, and cultural environments. Aesthetic philosophers sometimes also refer to psychological studies to help understand how people see, hear, imagine, think, learn, and act in relation to the materials and problems of art. Aesthetic psychology studies the creative process and the aesthetic experience. [18] Aesthetic judgment, universals, and ethics [ edit ] Immanuel Kant believed that there could be no "universal criterion of the beautiful" and that the experience of beauty is subjective, but that an object is judged to be beautiful when it seems to display "purposiveness"; that is, when its form is perceived to have the character of a thing designed according to some principle and fitted for a purpose. [56] He distinguished "free beauty" from "merely dependent beauty", explaining that "the first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance therewith." [57] By this definition, free beauty is found in seashells and wordless music; dependent beauty in buildings and the human body. [57] Giannini AJ (December 1993). "Tangential symbols: using visual symbolization to teach pharmacological principles of drug addiction to international audiences". Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. 33 (12): 1139–1146. doi: 10.1002/j.1552-4604.1993.tb03913.x. PMID 7510314. S2CID 32304779. Lyotard, Jean-Françoise, "Scriptures: Diffracted Traces", in Theory, Culture and Society, Volume 21, Number 1, 2004.

Performing this analysis, the research team found that beautiful visual art and beautiful faces each reliably elicited activity in well-defined brain regions. No surprises here: it is hoped that the brain is doing something when you’re looking at a visual stimulus. The regions were almost completely nonoverlapping, however, which challenged the idea that a common beauty center was activated. If we take this at face value, then the beauty of a face is not the same as the beauty of a painting. Beauty is plural, diverse, embedded in the particulars of its medium. Gleiser, Marcelo (2010). A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe. Free Press. ISBN 978-1439108321. and that the rules by which attractiveness is established are similar across different genders and cultures. [101] [102]

Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine – Instant Impersonal Assessment of Photos". Penn State University. Archived from the original on 9 May 2009 . Retrieved 21 June 2009.Schmidhuber, J. (1991). Curious model-building control systems. International Joint Conference on Neural Networks. Vol.2. Singapore: IEEE press. pp.1458–1463. doi: 10.1109/IJCNN.1991.170605. M Garani (2007). Empedocles Redivivus: Poetry and Analogy in Lucretius. Routledge. ISBN 978-1135859831. Archived from the original on February 3, 2023 . Retrieved May 12, 2015. Wong, L.-K.; Low, K.-L. (2009). "Saliency-enhanced image aesthetic classification". Int. Conf. on Image Processing. IEEE. doi: 10.1109/ICIP.2009.5413825. a b c d e f g h i j De Clercq, Rafael (2013). "Beauty". The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. Routledge. Archived from the original on January 13, 2022 . Retrieved February 10, 2021. von Vacano, Diego, "The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory," Lanham MD: Lexington: 2007.