The Gift of Beauty: The Good as Art

Stephen David Ross

Jul 1996 · State University of New York Press

About this ebook

Ross explores the developments in Western thought, from Plato and Aristotle through Kant and Hegel, when art was separated from science and philosophy. At the heart of the project is a reexamination of the good, found in Plato as that which makes being possible, which gives authority to knowledge and beckons to art, preserved in Levinas as infinite responsibility. The idea of the good is interpreted as nature's abundance, giving beauty and truth as gifts, calling us to respond. It gives rise to an ethics of inclusion, expressed in art.

About the author

Stephen David Ross is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the editor of Art and Its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory; and author of A Theory of Art: Inexhaustibility by Contrast; The Ring of Representation; Injustice and Restitution: The Ordinance of Time; Plenishment of the Earth: An Ethic of Inclusion; Perspectives in Whitehead's Metaphysics; Philosophical Mysteries; and Metaphysical Aporia and Philosophical Heresy all published by SUNY Press.