What is Beauty?
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Is a thing of beauty, as Keats wrote, “a joy forever?” Or is it, as in the view of Camus, “unbearable”? The precise nature of beauty and how to understand its role in our lives may prove elusive to most of us, but it is the everyday work of philosophers. Is beauty skin deep? Is it socially and culturally determined and, if so, what are the implications? What power does it hold over us? What is the relationship between beauty and art? This session will feature philosophers engaging in age-old debates about the meaning of beauty and how we might understand its force in our world.
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Society
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