Beauty cover art

Beauty

A Very Short Introduction

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Beauty

By: Roger Scruton
Narrated by: Chris MacDonnell
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference.

In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object - either in art, in nature, or the human form - beautiful and examining how we can compare differing judgments of beauty when it is evident all around us that our tastes vary so widely.

Is there a right judgment to be made about beauty? Is it right to say there is more beauty in a classical temple than a concrete office block, more in a Rembrandt than in an Andy Warhol Campbell's Soup Cans?

Forthright and thought-provoking and as accessible as it is intellectually rigorous, this introduction to the philosophy of beauty draws conclusions that some may find controversial but, as Scruton shows, help us to find greater sense of meaning in the beautiful objects that fill our lives.

©2011 Horsell's Farm Enterprises Limited (P)2019 Tantor Aesthetics Art Philosophy Beauty Philosophy

Listeners also enjoyed...

 How to Be a Conservative cover art
The Soul of the World cover art
Against the Tide cover art
I Drink Therefore I Am cover art
On Human Nature cover art
A Political Philosophy cover art
Kant cover art
Aesthetics cover art
Where We Are cover art
Music as an Art cover art
The Aesthetic Brain cover art
Colonialism cover art
The Christian Mind cover art
Values, Voice and Virtue cover art
America's Cultural Revolution cover art
A Revolution Betrayed cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
i enjoyed the clarity of thought and the values that emerged. There is plenty here to live. thank you☺️

beauty, desecration, kitch

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is one of Scruton’s finest works, and an excellent starting point for anyone wishing to engage with his broader views on art, literature, architecture, philosophy and morality. It is marred, however, by generally poor narration. That Chris MacDonnell’s voice is bland and flat would be bad enough; but Scruton’s text is replete with references to works and phrases in French, German, Italian and Latin - and there is scarcely a foreign word which the hapless and evidently monoglot MacD does not succeed in mispronouncing, often to unintended comic effect.

Beauty marred

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
can't express how much I enjoyed this book. insightful, informed and entirely inspitational.
will get the text version too.

Extraordinary Book and Narration.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It really made me think about what is beauty and why we need it in our lives? The narrator was really good too and really brought the issues to life.

loved it

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The expectation was of a neutral summarised introduction to the philosophy of art, but instead this was mostly a discussion of sexual desires and religious influences, the direct opposite of my interests - which is subjective, but also was absolutely not made clear by neither the blurb nor the context of the series. At times I found myself rolling my eyes and feeling irritated at the old fashioned misogynistic interests and arguments only thinly veiled with afterthoughts of counter argumentations that felt more like editorial corrections to get away with the initial arguments, and as a listener, more like gaslighting than a genuinely balanced account. A very frustrating listen filled with weirdly pornographic tendencies and obvious arguments. Why am I listening to an entire chapter on how a page three “model” isn’t considered art? This kind of intellectualised teenage boy thought process was quite irritating to listen to. Sure, it’s a valid argument theoretically, but not one I would have wasted my time with if the contents of the book had been correctly conceptualised in the blurb and the title of the book. I’m quite sorely disappointed in the fact that this is even part of the series at all, which is usually much more reliably neutral and factual instead of wildly deviating and entirely singular, more like an essay with a particular approach and argument, than in any way any sort of “introduction”. If you’re into this sort of thing go ahead but I hated it.

Book should be called “How Porn can make Sense of Art to People who like Sex”

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.