2012/08/04 by Roger Scruton · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Reformation and Early Modern Christianity #Beauty #Musical #Object (grammar) #Subject (documents) #Philosophy #Hegelianism #Scholarship #Argument (complex analysis) #Aesthetics #Relation (database) #Epistemology #Literature #Art #Linguistics #Law
paper · doi:10.1093/aesthj/ays019
openalex publication_date 2012/08/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
What is beauty? And is there a specifically musical form of it? Those are difficult questions, responsible for many a wreck in the history of philosophy, from Pythagoras to Hanslick and beyond. Férdia Stone-Davis’s approach, in this short but ambitious book, is to take two important thinkers, one noted for his theory of music, the other for his theory of beauty, and to attempt a synthesis of their views. The two are Boethius, who loved music, though of a kind that has largely disappeared from the world, and Kant, who loved beauty but didn’t think that music contained very much of it. It is surprising that Stone-Davis extracts so much of interest from two such unpromising authorities. This is partly to be explained by her meticulous scholarship, which means that she is always expounding, rarely concluding. The somewhat Hegelian thesis suggested in her subtitle—namely that music has a special role to play in the subject–object relation—is more hidden than revealed by her argument. And much is left in the form of suggestion, rather than explicit statement. Nevertheless, I recommend her book as an honest attempt to revive the topic of musical beauty, and to make both Boethius and Kant relevant to contemporary discussions of it.