“I once had a chat with a janitor in front of the house. … I asked his opinion: ‘How should a composer write his music?’ He looked at me. ‘Ah, what a question. I think he has to love each single sound.’ … I never heard anything like that. This understanding opens up a whole […]
Author: Jim Turner
Beauty, Form, and Euclid’s Elements Part 3
In the previous posts to this series, https://thinkingbeautifully.org/form-beauty-and-euclids-elements-part-2/ I set out to articulate a perspective on the opening of Euclid’s Elements as arising by abstraction of forms that arise from sensible perceptions of things experienced in the real world. I aimed to make the case that certain ones of his Definitions and the forms his Postulates […]
Form, Beauty, and Euclid’s Elements (part 2)
In the previous installment https://thinkingbeautifully.org/form-beauty-and-euclids-elements-part-1/ (upon which this part depends), I gave what I feel is the correct beginning in how to arrive at and understand basic notions in mathematics. In doing so, I attempted to re-appropriate medieval concepts of matter, form, and abstraction in order to understand what constitutes the objects and subject-matter of […]
Aquinas on Beauty (Book Review)
“Aquinas’s account of beauty respects both the objective and the subjective aspects that are involved in the aesthetic experience, since both objects (e.g. things, actions, people, etc.) and subjects (perceivers of such things) are necessary for the human experience of beauty to occur. At the end of the day, Aquinas’s account of beauty is best […]
Form, Beauty, and Euclid’s Elements (part 1)
I want to begin exploring, or perhaps recovering, a way of understanding the discipline of mathematics as one that integrally involves a perspective of beauty, not a “beauty cold and austere, like that of a sculpture,” (Bertrand Russell) but a beauty that irradiates from the form of anything that can be understood as having being. […]