- 1
c. 428–348 BCE · Ancient GreekPlato
Art imitates appearances and stirs the passions — banish the poets. Yet love rises by a ladder from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself.
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384–322 BCE · Ancient GreekAristotle
Imitation is natural and instructive; tragedy purges pity and fear; poetry is more philosophical than history.
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551–479 BCE · ChineseConfucius
Music and ritual shape character — hearing the Shao music, he forgot the taste of meat for three months.
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c. 571–471 BCE · ChineseLaozi
“When all the world knows beauty as beauty, ugliness arises.” Beauty and ugliness define each other.
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1711 – 1776 · British & IrishDavid Hume
Beauty is a sentiment, but true judges — of strong sense and delicate taste — set the standard; Sancho’s kinsmen and the key in the wine-cask.
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1724 – 1804 · German-languageImmanuel Kant
The beautiful pleases without interest and without a concept; it is “purposiveness without a purpose”. The sublime reveals our reason’s power over nature.
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1770 – 1831 · German-languageGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Art is the sensuous appearing of the Idea — and in modernity “a thing of the past” as the highest vehicle of truth.
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1788 – 1860 · German-languageArthur Schopenhauer
In aesthetic contemplation we escape the Will for a moment; music is a direct copy of the Will itself.
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1844 – 1900 · German-languageFriedrich Nietzsche
Art is the union of Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy; “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence justified”.
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1821 – 1881 · RussianFyodor Dostoevsky
“Beauty will save the world” — reported, with irony, in The Idiot; and Dmitri: “beauty is a terrible thing… there God and the devil are fighting”.
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1828 – 1910 · RussianLeo Tolstoy
Art is the transmission of feeling from artist to audience — and true art must be accessible to all.
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The Indian theory of rasa (the emotional “flavour” of art, systematized by Bharata and Abhinavagupta) will join this ladder with the Indian aesthetics pages.
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The relay race of epistemology — from Plato’s Cave to Kant’s categories, via Descartes’ demon and Hume’s billiard balls.
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From Thrasymachus’s “advantage of the stronger” to Rawls’s veil of ignorance — the question of what we owe each other and who should rule.
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Can reason know everything — or are there things the mind can never reach? From the Upanishads’ unknowable knower to Kant’s boundary and Wittgenstein’s silence.
What Is the Meaning of Life?
Liberation, virtue, tranquillity, God, the will, revolt — the great answers to the greatest question.
What Is Time?
Flux and permanence, the moving image of eternity, Augustine’s puzzle, Kant’s form of intuition, eternal recurrence, Heidegger’s temporality.
Are We Free?
Fate, karma, determinism, compatibilism, radical freedom — the long argument over whether we choose what we do.