PaleBlueDot wrote: My experience from my lessons in philosophy is that the older the philosopher, the less likely am I to agree with him/find his views relevant/learn something new. This is not to say ancient philosophers are stupid, but what they got right, the world now takes for granted. Besides, the world has moved on a lot since. Learning psychology, politics or evolutionary theory by reading Freud, Jung, Marx and Darwin is at best historically interesting. Their theories have been improved, rejected, adjusted etc many times. That is why I by default find it a lot more interesting to hear a modern view on the subject.
This broad claim has two aspects that ought to be distinguished. The philosophical and the scientific. Philosophy has not advanced since Plato, although the possibility of advancement exists. Science, on the contrary, is advancing continually on the heals of technology, and is dragging culture with it as best as it can.

Your insight is applicable to naive naturalistic Aristotelean philosophy and its later elaborations.

Ageless, eternal aspects of beauty, and those aspects with which we might be biologically endowed, should there be any, could not have advanced over time. Cultural aspects have. You, as the necessary product of your culture incorporate at least these three elements.

The architect expresses his subjective sense of beauty. To the extent that his subjective sense of beauty is in harmony with the judging public's sense, he creates an object of cultural attraction that might be described as having elements of beauty, or even to be beautiful.

YadaYada wrote:

This broad claim has two aspects that ought to be distinguished. The philosophical and the scientific. Philosophy has not advanced since Plato, although the possibility of advancement exists. Science, on the contrary, is advancing continually on the heals of technology, and is dragging culture with it as best as it can.

Your insight is applicable to naive naturalistic Aristotelean philosophy and its later elaborations.

Ageless, eternal aspects of beauty, and those aspects with which we might be biologically endowed, should there be any, could not have advanced over time. Cultural aspects have. You, as the necessary product of your culture incorporate at least these three elements.

The architect expresses his subjective sense of beauty. To the extent that his subjective sense of beauty is in harmony with the judging public's sense, he creates an object of cultural attraction that might be described as having elements of beauty, or even to be beautiful.

I disagree that philosophy does not advance continually. Philosophers build on each others work just like scientists, and for most of history, both branches were considered philosophy. Socrates built a foundation for talking about morality, but he had no concept of utilitarianism, deontology etc. Later philosophers added that. If a philosopher today tried to write about human morality and ignores these "findings" in philosophy, he will be in deep trouble. Would you rather know everything that Socrates knew about morality, or everything Peter Singer knows about morality (which includes much of the history of philosophy) before working on the subject?

The architect expresses his subjective sense of beauty indeed. But the architect who created the Parthenon Temple or Westminster Abbey seems to have a taste much more in harmony with the public. Elements such as ornamentation exists in all cultures and all times, and I am tempted to say we are by nature hard-wired to enjoy patterns, also found in folk art and clothing since the beginning of craft. So when modernist architecture decides to remove ornamentation from their designs because such primitive enjoyment is more appropriate for the "peasants and lower races" (quote from Corbusier, the "greatest" modernist architect) you start to wonder what is happening. And you get results like Cabrini Green. I would like to see architects being more in touch with the universal sense of beauty, and less obsessed with personal expression and fashion.

PaleBlueDot wrote: I would like to see architects being more in touch with the universal sense of beauty, and less obsessed with personal expression and fashion. I don't usually post in ethics or aesthetics, leaving them to the specialists. What happened here was that after a late dinner, I woke up in the middle of the night and happened on a PBS show about the design and construction of IM Pei's Suzhou Museum (city, museum).

The predominance of geometric patterns in a balanced array is in contrast to the usual clutter of detail on China's traditional buildings. This was apparent on the panoramas of the TV show, but unfortunately can only be imagined with the cropped photos on the internet. The grounds and buildings are unquestionably beautiful, and are probably representative of Pei's work at the same time. How would you separate the two?

Evolutionary aesthetics might be a useful field to look into if you're primarily interested in separating which elements of our beauty-response might be hardwired, and which are most likely the result of cultural, or indiviual factors. Denis Dutton's book The Art Instinct, is a good place to start, as well as Evolutionary Aesthetics, which is a collection of essays put together and edited by Grammer and Voland.

One must also be aware of some papers in evolutionary aesthetics that seem to push the envelope too far towards evolution as being able to explain and account for the large majority of artworks. What was said about modern art earlier in this thread seems to be intuitively accurate in a number of ways, especially in the way that many modern works can be seen as a kind of "anti-art". A tendancy in the field of evolutionary athestics is to leave these outlying or more difficult cases of "art" alone, and to instead focus on works which are unanimously considered great, and have generally stood the test of time. While this approach has its merits (of course why would we build a theory around attmempting to explain a work that was an exception, rather than the rule), there is also a sense that "ignoring" these difficult cases is somewhat of a convenience.

Hopefully you can find the time to have a quick browse over some evolutionary aesthetics, as I believe it will help you to at least clarify and outline some of the problems you've been having concerning the notion of objective beauty. I would also recommend reading Hume's On The Standard of Taste, as well as Kant's work on aesthetics, as both of them allude to the possibility of a universal, human notion of beauty.

Also, books by Charles Murray and Frederick Turner.