We use cookies to enhance your experience on our website. By continuing to use our website, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time. Find out more

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $13.50

Format:
Paperback
160 pp.
Approximately 20 b/w photographs, 111 mm x 174 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199229758

Publication date:
April 2011

Imprint: OUP UK


Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

Roger Scruton

Series : Very Short Introductions

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 judgements of beauty when it is evident all around us that our tastes vary so widely. Is there a right judgement 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 last year's Turner Prize winner?

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.

Readership : General readers interested in philosophical questions about beauty in art, and in the arts themselves (from visual arts to music and literature). Also students of philosophy, aesthetics, and in the humanities more broadly.

Reviews

  • Review from previous edition: "As always with Scruton, his prose is exquisite and wonderfully clear, which fact together with the illustrations make his book a thing of beauty itself."

    --A. C. Grayling, The Art Newspaper 01/01/2010


  • "Careful and absorbing."

    --A. C. Grayling, The Art Newspaper 01/01/2010


  • "This is a fascinating and thought-provoking little book."

    --A. C. Grayling, The Art Newspaper 01/01/2010


  • "Roger Scruton has moments of great insight and clarity in this attractively slim volume."

    --Sebastian Smee, The Observer 22/03/2009


  • "A fascinating book, which I heartily recommend."

    --Bryan Wilson, Readers Digest 01/03/2009



  • "Short, fast paced, and wide ranging."

    --Michael Tanner, Literary Review 01/03/2009

Preface
1. Judging beauty
2. Human beauty
3. Natural beauty
4. Everyday beauty
5. Artistic beauty
6. Taste and order
7. Art and Eros
8. The flight from beauty
9. Concluding thoughts
Notes and Further Reading

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Roger Scruton is research Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences based in Arlington, Virginia. His previous academic affiliations have been Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, and subsequently Professor of Philosophy and University Professor at Boston University. His published works range from academic philosophy, specialising in aesthetics, to fiction, and political and cultural commentary. They includeOn Hunting (1998), An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture (1998), Spinoza (1998), Perictione in Colophon (2000), and England: an Elegy (2000).

Special Features

  • Examines the answers to key questions in aesthetics, such as: What is beauty? Why do we value it? Is beauty good?
  • Asks whether beauty is vanishing from our world.
  • This is a strongly-argued counter to the notion that judgements of beauty are purely subjective and relative, and that we can learn little from art criticism and study.
  • Looks at beauty in the visual arts, in music, architecture, nature, and literature.
  • Argues that our experience of beauty is rationally founded, and that beauty is a real and universal value. Scruton shows how our sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in the way we shape our world.