In my essay „Beauty Is Not One“ I defended a strong diversity thesis about visual beauty. In my lecture today I will first recall in outline the main points of that defense. I will then proceed to support the thesis further by narrowing my focus to three of the main varieties of visual beauty, to wit, natural beauty, artistic beauty, and human beauty. Or otherwise put, the beauty of nature (and especially landscapes), the beauty of artworks (and especially paintings), and the beauty of human beings (and especially women). My aim in focusing on these three varieties of visual beauty will be to expand and deepen my phenomenological characterization of them so as to reinforce the thesis of their fundamental difference from one another.

Jerrold Levinson (PhD, Michigan) is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy. His main philosophical interest is aesthetics, with secondary interests in metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of mind. Among the arts he is particularly concerned with philosophical problems arising in connection with music, film, and literature. Levinson has written extensively on the definition of art, expression in music, emotional response to art, the nature of literary interpretation, and the ontology of artworks. Topics of recent interest include intrinsic value, the nature of humor, sexual morality, jazz improvisation, the expressive specificity of jazz, the ethics of jokes, the analysis of artistic achievement, and the varieties of visual beauty.

The public lecture takes place within the scope of the workshop with Jerrold Levinson “Beauty: Unity versus Variety”.