Monday, January 21, 2019

Better living through music and film

One of the central branches of philosophy is aesthetics, the study of the beautiful (which may well align with the good in such a way that good living is living to kalon, that is, for the sake of the noble, beautiful or fine) and the relation of human artistic creations to the beautiful.  Any study of this branch of knowledge requires inductions from a vast aggregation of concrete instances.  My research in this area has brought me to rank-ordering units within two key artistic genres: Music and Film.

(I also have on the same website, in addition to a rank-ordering of favorite music artists [here], an increasingly-outdated, to-be-updated list of philosophy books that I consider worth studying.  An updated list would include books such as this one.  While it is out of print, it is available online, but in not nearly as useful and accessible a format as the print edition.  Can one do one's wisdom-oriented homework thoroughly without it?)

While there is a need for aesthetic theory (for which I can only refer readers at this point to the likes of Adorno, Aristotle, Barzun, Danto, Hegel, Hospers, Hume, Huxley, Kant, Rand, Schopenhauer, Scruton, The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, goodreads lists, etc.) to account for all this rank-ordering, we first need to have, and there is plenty positive to say about, the aesthetic experience themselves.

Enjoy!