Can I read Beauty: The Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea (Onassis Series in Hellenic Culture) on EtoBox?

Beauty: The Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea (Onassis Series in Hellenic Culture) by David Konstan is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Beauty: The Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea (Onassis Series in Hellenic Culture) about?

What does it mean to say something is beautiful? On the one hand, beauty is associated with erotic attraction; on the other, it is the primary category in aesthetics, and it is widely supposed that the proper response to a work of art is one of objective contemplation. At its core, then, beauty is a contested concept, and both sides feel comfortable appealing to the authority of Plato, and via him, to the ancient Greeks generally. So, who is right-if either? Beauty offers an elegant investigation of ancient Greek notions of beauty and, in the process, sheds light on how we ought to appreciate the artistic achievements of the classical world. The book opens by reexamining the commonly held notion that the ancient Greeks possessed no term that can be unambiguously defined as'beauty'or'beautiful.'Author David Konstan discusses a number of Greek approximations before positioning the heretofore unexamined term kállos as the key to bridging the gap between beauty and desire, and tracing its evolution as applied to physical beauty, art, literature, and more. The book then examines corresponding terms in Biblical Hebrew and ancient Latin literature to highlight the survival of Greek ideas

Author

David Konstan

Publisher

Oxford University Press, Incorporated

Published

2014

Language

EN

ISBN

9780190663445

Subjects

History, Philosophy, Humanities