Bonjour, I am considered an attractive 26 year old woman. I have at times been asked to model but never have. I find our culture's obsession with beauty unappealing and it has led me to sort of play down my beauty in dress. Should I be worried or at least concious of society and its issues around beauty? Or should I just strive to be the most beautiful I can be, disregarding other things, purely for the sake of aesthetics?

Could aesthetics be considered an aspect of intuition? Or is the philosophical definition of intuition more specific? (I'm basing this on Herbert Spencer out of context, so you know ("Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect").) Thank you.

Hi, I'm a poet, I've published a few poetry books in French. I've been told that my poems are beautiful. I know that they are beautiful but I don't understand why. I also know that I can create beauty but I can't understand where this ability comes from. Is it a god-given ability or is it about technique? Any answers? Umar ( Mauritius )

Are aesthetic judgements entirely subjective?

I'd like to ask a question about aesthetics and philosophy in general. As an undergraduate student of philosophy, looking around at different traditions and particular, dominant thinkers, it seems that aesthetics is generally discounted as a strong motivation or deciding force in many facets of our lives. For instance, I think that most people will find it an odd when one suggests that aesthetics is an important part of ethics, economics, politics, science, mathematics, logic, ontology, epistemology, and so on. Yet in each of the disciplines I've just mentioned, it seems that an 'elegant' definition, solution or description is strongly praised by most people over 'messy' ones. For instance, we wonder at the simplicity and power of both Newton's laws and Einstein's e=mc2. An elegantly 'neat' solution to an ethical dilemma between two parties is generally preferred to an obscure, complex one. Plato is praised by many for his elegant use of illustrative metaphors. Elegance is surely an attribute firmly within the domain of aesthetics; and hence, aesthetic concerns do play a part in these disciplines. These examples are minimal: no great labour of thought was required to think them up. I am coming to suspect that (for whatever reason) aesthetic sense (whatever that is) is actually a fundamental part of the human experience; far greater than its proportional representation on library shelves suggests. I notice that on this web site, aesthetics is not even listed as a separate category: inferentially it has to be tacked on as a potential property of art, beauty, justice, medicine, knowledge, sex, sport, suicide, and so on. This contrasts to, say, ethics, which could also be described as a potential property of all the same categories, yet has its own category. My question is: are there philosophers who take aesthetics to be of as fundamental importance in philosophy as, say, ontology or epistemology? Also, is this an area of thought that is mobile in its degree of interest in the general philosophical community? Can we wait with suspenseful breath for a new Heidegger who reshapes our thinking about fundamental issues in terms of aesthetics?

Is a poem about nature beautiful because of its form, or is it beautiful because it reminds us of the beauty inherent in nature? Philosophers tend to equate aesthetic beauty with the form of a work of art and our 'interests' get in the way of appreciating the form. However if this is the case why is there not more beautiful poems about rubbish dumps and oil spills.

I was looking out the window of a bus yesterday and noticed the hoar frost on the snow bank. It's beautiful - it looks like the pelt of some huge beast or maybe alive, like coral. I started thinking of other beautiful things in nature like snow flakes and the patterns that frost forms on car windscreens, and not just freezing water examples but the shapes of trees, the songs of birds (okay, maybe not everything - e.g. the caw of a crow isn't necessarily beautiful but it doesn't hurt the ears either). Why do we find things in nature beatiful? Thanks, David

If I hypothetically make something that is widely accepted as beautiful, then I reproduce it and put it everywhere so that everyone in the United States will see it at least once a day, but probably more than that, will it be considered less beautiful? If so, why do objects become less beautiful if they become more accessible? How much do wonder, curiosity, and imagination contribute as factors in defining something's aesthetical value? A friend of mine studying architecture said this: "In the context of architecture, the original modernist designs were considered stunning in their simplicity... but once they were reproduced over and over, and classical/victorian/old buildings were knocked down and destroyed, the situation reversed: those old buildings were considered beautiful again and the now over-abundant modernist buildings were now just noise in the background." How much of aesthetics is determined by the attribution of favorable nonaesthetic traits? If I look at a logo for a company whose functional work I am impressed with, and whose business model is beyond admirable, do I associate its sense of design with beauty? Is beauty a byproduct of functional compatibility? [Note: I realize there are many questions here, and I don't anticipate answers for all of them -- the one I'm most curious about is our attribution of accessibility to aesthetics.]

I recently considered getting a nose job. Whenever I told people this, they were horrified and started ranting and raving at me about superficiality, shallowness and vanity. The most frequent comment was, 'It's better to have a beautiful mind than a beautiful face.' What confuses me is that this seems just as shallow as only caring about physical appearances. So much of the world is based on physicality and aesthetics - why is finding a beautiful face more significant than a beautiful idea more shallow? In fact physical beauty can sometimes be a great inspiration for thoughts and ideas. Recently I have begun to think that judging people on physical appearances is no less shallow than judging them only on the contents of their minds. Is this valid at all? Should I go back to the 'better clever than ugly' camp? Thanks for your time.

What, if anything, distinguishes natural beauty from artistic beauty?