Abstract
What is beauty? This is the first and an everlasting question in aesthetics. However, there is no clear definition about beauty so far in aesthetic history because of the confusion of name and reference. Beauty is often interpreted as the beautiful thing or the beautiful attribution of thing. This paper aims to delineate the problematic of the naming and reference of beauty by putting the problem back to the context of Plato's time and tracing the process of the formation of this philosophic concept. The paper falls into three sections, which first problematizes the naming of beauty and the reasons behind it, explores the specific characteristics of beauty as a noun and the approaches to name beauty in the light of contemporary naming theory, and clarifying the referential object of beauty in the context of ancient Greek. This paper concludes that beauty in ancient Greek refers to the state of ecstasy in religious activities and that it is then conceptualized by Plato as the ideal of pure form.
First Page
162
Last Page
168
Recommended Citation
Li, Hongxiang. 2015. "On Beauty: Its Naming and Reference." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 35, (6): pp.162-168. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol35/iss6/12
