Beauty
Until the eighteenth century, "beauty" was the single most important idea in the history of aesthetics. One of the earliest works in the literature of aesthetics, the Hippias Major (probably by Plato), was addressed to the question, "What is beauty?" Around this question most of later thought revolves. The treatment of the other major concept, art, when it is not ancillary to that of beauty, lacks comparable generality, for it is often restricted to a single artistic form or genre, or its theoretical status is equivocal, because art is taken as identical with craft or skill. The modern notion of the fine arts did not appear until the eighteenth century and, more important, it was then too that the concept of aesthetic experience was first formulated systematically. As a consequence, beauty lost its traditional centrality in aesthetic theory and has never since regained it.
Our survey of these historical developments will be selective. Specific theories will be singled out because they are paradigms of the major kinds of theory of beauty. Thus, where beauty is taken to be a property, we will be less concerned with what, on some particular proposal, this property is, more with the logical relations of beauty, so construed, to the other properties of beautiful things and to the conditions of its apprehension.
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