> On Sep 11, 2018, at 11:30 AM, diethelm <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> I’ll go with the simple elegance of the Aquinas conception of beauty: “…pulchrum dicuntur quae visa placent.” “Let that be called beauty, the very perception of which pleases.” (Summa Theologica I-a IIae, q.27)
>
> The response, full of affect, is not however shut out to reason and runs “from raw emotion to intellectual delight.”
>
> And isn’t it elegantly and beautifully put?
Just as with any terminology, word use largely tracks with the preferences of the word users. The old saw is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder but, to some extent, so is the definition of beautiful.
I have a few mathematicians in my family and my impression is that talking about a solution as elegant corresponds to a particular kind of simplicity—corresponding to the sort of beauty and elegance favored in much of Modernist design.
The romantics talked about the difference between the sublime and the beautiful (corresponding, to a large extent, to raw emotion and intellectual delight.) So the romantics may have claimed that the storm that’s heading my way is sublime. It is likely to produce more in the way of raw emotion than intellectual delight here in North Carolina. But by many definitions, Florence is quite beautiful. But not quite the sort of beauty that evokes simple formulas or William of Ockham, however.
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
[log in to unmask]
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
[log in to unmask]
+1 252 258-7006
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|