Arete and Taste: Towards virtue-theoretic aesthetics.

摘要

Historically, philosophers talk about two different kinds of virtue: ethical virtues that help us to do the right thing and live a good life, and intellectual virtues that help us to acquire knowledge and true beliefs about the world. This dissertation argues that we can understand taste in terms of aesthetic virtues, i.e., habituated, multi-track dispositions that help us to appreciate beauty and other aesthetic values in art and in nature. In this way, it advocates for a virtue theoretic approach to a cluster of problems in aesthetics, beginning with the classic problem of taste as described by Hume and Kant.