Stéphane Symon: Schoonheid
Stéphane Symons
Lannoo Campus, 2023
€26,00
Beauty appears in the most diverse guises. This book takes us from a bench in Delft and a park in Amsterdam, past the Pantheon and the Santa Maria sopra Minerva basilica in Rome, to a colorful bird in the rainforest of New Guinea. Yet today not everyone is convinced of the realization that beauty is so indispensable. It is seen by many critics as an unattainable ideal. Worse still, beauty would mainly evoke artificial desires and create fictions that have little to do with everyday existence.
This book provides an answer to the question why the ideal of beauty has come under fire today, also in art circles. In a quick walk past a number of great names in art history and with the help of numerous illustrations, cultural and art philosopher Stéphane Symons reconstructs how concepts such as the sublime, the ugly and the real threaten to overthrow the notion of ‘beauty’. Above all, he provides arguments to restore the classical ideal.
Stéphane Symons is a professor at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of KU Leuven. IN DUTCH!
ISBN: 9789401495592
