San Antonio College Library

BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Paul C. Taylor. "Combining a background in Anglo-American aesthetics with a deep knowledge of black expressive culture, and ramified by a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary mastery of cultural studies across the humanities, Paul Taylor's Black is Beautiful succeeds in situating black aesthetics in a strikingly original way, one which is not only valuable in itself, but also commendably reinvigorates...

"In this book, based on her 1976 Romanes Lecture, the distinguished novelist and philosopher discusses Plato's view on art and examines sympathetically the reasons for his hostility towards it. She offers a coherent and fully argued account of Plato's theories of art and of beauty and of their metaphysical background, which shows also that Plato was aware of the dangers of his own artistry. The argument more widely concerns the place of art in life,...

"Historical Dictionary of Aesthetics covers the history of this area of study from classical Greece to present, including entries on nonwestern aesthetics. It contains a chronology, a list of acronyms and abbreviations, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the main concepts; terminology; important philosophers, critics, and artists; and the rules and criteria used for judging art. By providing...

In this sweeping book, applied mathematician and popular author David Orrell questions the promises and pitfalls of associating beauty with truth, showing how ideas of mathematical elegance have inspired-and have sometimes misled-scientists attempting to understand nature. Orrell shows how the ancient Greeks constructed a concept of the world based on musical harmony; later thinkers replaced this model with a program, based on Newton's "rational mechanics,"...