Content

This course addresses the role and nature of beauty in Aquinas’s thought. Special focus will be given to the following topics: (i) whether (for Aquinas) beauty is a transcendental, (ii) how beauty is related to the intellect or to cognition, (iii) the role of proportion and light in Aquinas’s philosophy, (iv) the problem of objective measurement, (v) aesthetic pleasure, and (vi) the role of ethics in aesthetics. In addition to various readings from Aquinas’s vast corpus (but especially his commentary on De Divinis Nominibus), students will critically examine Christopher Scott Sevier’s Aquinas on Beauty. The purpose of the course is to examine Aquinas’s metaphysics of beauty on which his overall aesthetic theory hangs. Insofar as their work comments on Aquinas’s aesthetics, the ideas of Jacques Maritain, Umberto Eco, Fran O’Rourke, et al., will also be respectfully examined.