Carolyn Korsmeyer

Whatever approach one favors, the relationships between the most abstract and disembodied sense of beauty and the physical, erotic sense are clearly harder to sever than many philosophers have previously realized. The soul may be glad to forget its connection with the body, as Santayana put it, but that gladness indicates that the connection is there to be forgotten in the first place. And often it is not so much forgotten as reshaped and transfigured. Such transformations are explored here with excursions into the place of beauty in art; into the queering of beauty in the exemplars of beautiful artworks; into explorations of the marginal and exotic that allure while defying conventional models; into the literal carving of facial features for cosmetic and artistic purposes that both conform to and challenges norms of appearance. In such different contexts these authors dramatize the various ways that beauty can function in relation to personal desires, artistic values, and social authority. Here we can discover beauty not only as a quality and a value, but also as a project and a practice that drives our lives from both within and without--internal standards, external expectations, and ambivalence meeting in provocative disputation.

Alexander Nehamas calls beauty a ‘promise of happiness’ and claims that it is an object of love. While this approach appealingly places beauty at the center of both artistic passion and everyday life, it also renders it riskily personal. This discussion raises two main questions to Nehamas. The first question regards the role of happiness in the concept of beauty, for many beautiful artworks seem to acknowledge the inevitability of sorrow rather than its opposite. The second question concerns how beauty may be both personal and grounded in factors sufficiently outside the self to safeguard it against the instability of individual preferences. To explore the latter issue, Nehamas's ideas are compared to those of another Platonist, Iris Murdoch.

This special issue was the first philosophy journal issue in English devoted to feminist perspectives in aesthetics. It was prompted by more than two decades of feminist scholarship in all academic disciplines that challenged the operations of gender in research and theory, prompting widespread examination of disciplinary assumptions and methods, new understandings of the histories of fields and their classic texts, and refinement of awareness of how scholarship retains gender bias. An expanded version of the journal resulted in the publication of Hein and Korsmeyer's anthology from Indiana University Press, Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective (1993).

Emphasizing the human body in all of its forms, Beauty Unlimited expands the boundaries of what is meant by beauty both geographically and aesthetically. Peg Zeglin Brand and an international group of contributors interrogate the body and the meaning of physical beauty in this multidisciplinary volume. This striking and provocative book explores the history of bodily beautification; the physicality of socially or culturally determined choices of beautification; the interplay of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ethnicity within and on the body; and the aesthetic meaning of the concept of beauty in an increasingly globalized world.

Feminist scholarship has awakened us to the suspicion that such reliance on "common human nature" renders philosophical concepts not neutral and universal, as Hume believed, but heavily inflected by models of ideal masculinity that inform discussions of human nature. One purpose of this essay is to extend this line of thought by elucidating the idea of gendered concepts. By this phrase I refer to concepts that, lacking any obvious reference to males or females, or to masculinity or femininity, nevertheless are formulated in such a way that their neutral quality and universal applicability are questionable. Here I pursue this suspicion by examining Hume's famous standard of taste. Examination of gendered concepts not only casts doubt on the scope and operation of such a standard; it reveals the peculiarly unstable position of the idea of "female" in concepts of the "human."