- Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the taste of beauty, art, and taste. It judges the beauty of an object based on how pleasing it feels to the eye. It does not require a certain conclusion.
- Art criticism is a way of studying a piece of art. It involves four steps, including description, analysis, interpretation, and judgment. Interpreting art through criticism enhances the aesthetic experience of an art critique.
- Hume’s art criticism cannot be replaced with an aesthetic philosophy of art. He was never interested in analyzing aesthetic properties or working out a theory of art. Although he developed a link between moral and aesthetic value, he never used the expression ‘fine arts’ in his book.
- Truth has a heuristic value in art criticism. It is expressed as pure plasticity in aesthetics. It can be taken as the normative concept where the opposite of it is false. Thus, every judgment is agreeable.
- The contemporary notion of aesthetic judgments is broader than Kent’s, which only focused on beauty and ugliness. It includes elegance, delicacy, dumpiness, and daintiness. Thus, it is uncontroversial to conclude that aesthetic judgment is a problem.
- The elements of any moral dilemma include specific actions and an agent to carry out those actions. Individuals are moral agents. They are condemned to moral failures because they will do something wrong after all.
- The false starts in moral philosophy led to many theories such as relativism and divine command. The former view states that moral judgments are true or false based on a particular standpoint, whereas the latter explains that God is the divine lawgiver. Therefore, it explains that moral judgments are defined regarding theological statements.
- One of the practical and logical problems with Aquinas’ Natural Law theory is that people interpret it in different manners. Where Aquinas believed that God orders law, their modern thinkers did not believe in it. Furthermore, the modern concept is that human behaviors are entirely reliant on the environment.
- Saint Thomas supported the view that ethics are not always political, nor are they personal. In fact, ethics consist of three parts, i.e., political ethics, familial ethics, and personal ethics. Every part has a formal object since each of them is moral and unitary knowledge.
- Locke and Hobbes both talked about the dangers of a state of nature. Both of the ideas are similar yet different. Hobbes explains that nature of nature is in a state of war whereas Locke takes this war as a subset of nature. Also, where Hobbes takes states of nature hypothetically, there Locke believed in the real existence of the states.
- Rousseau advanced the concept of nature as compared to Hobbes and Locke. He accepted the view of organized society but presented the depiction of the noble savage. He further criticized that goodness and other ethical values cannot live in a society where man is not good in the state.
- The labor theory of value states that commodity is measured by the average labor hours used to produce that commodity, whereas the labor theory of property explains that commodity comes into existence merely through the process of exerting labor on the natural resources.
- Karl Marx explained the goals of communism. He argued that class struggles had been the motivational force behind historical developments. The means of production defined the class relationships. Eventually, they ceased to be compatible with the developing means of production.
- Nozick stated that the state itself is intrinsically immoral. He argued against anarchy. Hospers defined the role of government as the guardian of its citizens against the aggression of other individuals.
- Rawls shaped both social democratic and modern liberal concepts of social justice. He based it on two core principles, i.e., each person has equal rights and that economic and social inequalities must be settled. Nozick provided a concept close to that of Locke as Anarchy, State, and Utopia. His justice preserving rules consist that wealth must be justly acquired, justly transferred, and justice should be rectified in case the wealth has been unjustly acquired or transferred.
