Aesthetics:The Beauty of God, Nature, and Art

About the Book

Aesthetics: The Beauty of God, Nature, and Art is an anthology of historical, literary, mathematical, musicological, philosophical, political, psychological and scientific papers illuminating the motif of the aesthetic experience and aesthetic value ("beauty")of God, nature, and art as intrinsic properties of the objects in accord with St. Thomas Aquinas's definition of beauty as "that which pleases in the very apprehension of it" - that is, in the spirit of a moderate realist epistemological view of the objects of the aesthetic experience since, as Aristotle said, "Beauty is order, symmetry, and definition." The topics are inclusive of the beauty of mathematics as exemplified in hyperbolic non - Euclidean geometry and in the consistency of real analysis and the propositional calculus, the mathematical symmetry of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) - the genetic material - and other physical, biological, and artistic objects in terms of the "golden ratio" and the unity of string theory, the Schillinger projective geometrical method of composition of melody in terms of the use of melodic "organic forms" (i.e. the terms of the golden spirals of the Fibonacci summation series) in composing the notes of the melody based upon the principle of expanding intervals, the movie review of Pi (p) with its focus upon the theme of numerological patterns inherent in all physical and biologic phenomena of the universe (i.e. the ubiquity of the f, the "golden ratio") and the theory of its protagonist that diverse systems of nonlinear dynamics share a unifying numerical pattern ("chaos theory"), the cursive form of hieroglyphics (hieratic) and the mathematical structure of the Rhind Papyrus as illustrative of the beautiful in Egyptian mathematics of the Middle Kingdom, phenomenological and philosophical reflections on the spiritual nature of human self - consciousness (the "I" - soul) which apprehends beauty and expresses aesthetic judgments.

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