HUMA 024 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Immanuel Kant
Document Summary
This last argument, that the subjectivity of judgements of beauty implies that there can be no single standard of beauty, is one that two 18th century philosophers, David hume of scotland and immanuel kant of germany, would reject as invalid. Both hume and kant asserted that (1) judgements of taste are subjective and relative, but that nevertheless (2) there is one, universal human standard of beauty, which implies that (3) some judgements of beauty are good, others bad. The subjectivity of judgements of beauty would seem to imply the hey, it"s all good! attitude. Most of us today probably assume that there can be no way of determing any universal standard of beauty. Underlying all of our biologically and environmentally determined differences is a sameness, a single, universal human nature, and a correspondingly single, universal human experience of the world.
