Tag: Thomas Aquinas

Mathematical Understanding as Seen Within a Framework of Beauty (part 3)

In the first two parts of this series, I began outlining how mathematics and mathematical understanding can be framed within the Thomistic modes of beauty: proportio, claritas, and integritas. In particular, I defined mathematics as the science whose subject-matter is measurable orders: objects understood as parts united into whole, having a distinction of same or […]

Mathematical Understanding as Seen Within a Framework of Beauty (part 2)

In part 1 of this series, I began to explore how mathematical reasoning can be understood within a Thomistic framework of beauty as expressed in the modes proportio, claritas, and integritas. In that post, I arrived at an initial description of the subject-matter of mathematics as pertaining to quantitative being understood as parts ordered into […]

Mathematical Understanding as Seen Within a Framework of Beauty (part 1)

In a previous series of posts (part 1 being here:  https://thinkingbeautifully.org/form-beauty-and-euclids-elements-part-1/) I began to describe how mathematics could be understood as an endeavor of human discovery and invention by showing how form and the pursuit of beauty underlies successes in such efforts. In particular, I focused on the opening of Book I of Euclid’s Elements […]

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 […]

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 […]