2017 Workshop Talk | 1:02:59 | All Grade Levels, General Classroom
Summary
Of the three great ideas, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, the most elusive to both define and defend is beauty. In spite of the importance of beauty for education and life as detailed in Lewis’ Abolition of Man and other authors, contemporary Christians are often at a loss when it comes to defending the notion that beauty, at least in part, is objective. What’s worse, many Christians (especially young Christians) fall into the popular opinion that beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder. Even if our students (and ourselves) affirm that Goodness and Truth are objective, they are often hesitant to defend the objectivity of beauty. Can anything be done? I propose that one of the problems we have in defending objective beauty is that we have failed to identify the First Principles (or axioms) of Aesthetics. Drawing heavily on the philosophy of Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, the great defender of Common Sense, this session will seek to identify 4 First Principles (or Common Sense Principles) of Aesthetics. Once we identify these principles, we see that our very experience of beauty argues that beauty cannot be wholly subjective. In other words, we cannot reasonably deny that beauty has objective content. Once we look at our very encounters with what anyone calls ñbeautifulî they must deny that beauty is merely ‘in the eye of the beholder.’
Speaker
Additional Materials
The Association of Classical & Christian Schools presents Repairing the Ruins, the ACCS annual conference, copyright ACCS. You may make additional copies of this recording for use by your school but please do not sell any copies of the recording, or post it on the internet.
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