Taste - Taste, Personal Taste, The Relationship Between Taste And Personal Taste, Bibliography
set aesthetic preferences word
We tend to use the word taste in two different ways. First, to refer to the ability to judge a thing correctly, usually (but not always) a work of art from an aesthetic point of view. Second, we use the word to refer to a particular set of aesthetic preferences, and given the most popular sense of this second usage, we understand that one person's set of preferences may differ from another person's set. In this article, taste refers to taste in the first sense, and personal taste refers to it in the second. "Personal taste" does not imply that one person's set of aesthetic preferences cannot be shared by others.
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Formalism, as an objective approach to aesthetic judgment, has been very popular. We find in St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) a formalist account of beauty: for an object to be beautiful is for it to exhibit unity, number, equality, proportion, and order, with unity as the most basic notion. And in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274), we find a formal account of beauty, which …
The second sense in which the word taste is used, what we are calling "personal taste," focuses on particular sets of aesthetic preferences. There is certainly a relationship between taste and personal taste, and we want to explore that a bit later on. For now, consider the nature of the preference that one may exhibit for vanilla ice cream over chocolate, for chicken over fish, for …
The recent understanding of taste (as closer to personal taste and away from the more traditional, realist sense of the word) can still be seen as pointing toward greater authority of the judgment of the individual that was one of the motivators of the original taste theorists. If there is ultimately no way to reasonably, authoritatively, or meaningfully adjudicate among divergent particular judgm…
Addison, Joseph, and Richard Steele. "On the Pleasures of the Imagination." In Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator. Edited by Robert Allen. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1957. Dickie, George. Evaluating Art. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Goldman, Alan. "The Education of Taste." British Journal of Aesthetics 30 (1990): 105–116. Hume…
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