Jonathan Fine

University of Hawai'i, Manoa
University of Hawaii
  •  388
    This chapter presents several of the dominant ideas and intellectual debates about human beauty from archaic Greece to early Christianity. At issue are ideals of character, ethical ideals of who one should be and how one should live. What constitutes beauty and why beauty matters change alongside conceptions of body and soul, virtue and happiness, and the relationship between human beings and the divine.
  •  1016
    The Guise of the Beautiful: Symposium 204d ff
    Phronesis 65 (2): 129-152. 2019.
    A crux of Plato’s Symposium is how beauty relates to the good. Diotima distinguishes beauty from the good, I show, to explain how erotic pursuits are characteristically ambivalent and opaque. Human beings pursue beauty without knowing why or thinking it good; yet they are rational, if aiming at happiness. Central to this reconstruction is a passage widely taken to show that beauty either coincides with the good or demands disinterested admiration. It shows rather that what one loves as beautiful…Read more
  •  671
    Plato and the dangerous pleasures of poikilia
    Classical Quarterly 71 (1): 152-169. 2021.
    A significant strand of the ethical psychology, aesthetics and politics of Plato's Republic revolves around the concept of poikilia, ‘fascinating variety’. Plato uses the concept to caution against harmful appetitive pleasures purveyed by democracy and such artistic or cultural practices as mimetic poetry. His aim, this article shows, is to contest a prominent conceptual connection between poikilia and beauty (kallos, to kalon). Exploiting tensions in the archaic and classical Greek concept, Pla…Read more
  •  377
    Review of the first comprehensive companion to the growing scholarship on ancient Greek and Roman aesthetics
  •  215
    Beauty Before the Eyes of Others
    In Fabian Dorsch & Dan-Eugen Ratiu (eds.), Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, University of Fribourg. pp. 164-176. 2016.
    This paper pursues the philosophical significance of a relatively unexplored point of Platonic aesthetics: the social dimension of beauty. The social dimension of beauty resides in its conceptual connection to shame and honour. This dimension of beauty is fundamental to the aesthetic education of the Republic, as becoming virtuous for Plato presupposes a desire to appear and to be admired as beautiful. The ethical significance of beauty, shame, and honour redound to an ethically rich notion of a…Read more
  •  2379
    [Condensed abstract] Socrates' ironic use of 'makaria' (blessedness) in the Republic exhorts Glaucon to think more critically. Certain features of the supposedly ideal city, motivated by Glaucon's character, may be protreptic for Glaucon to practice philosophical courage and intellectual moderation.