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Document Details :

Title: Bread and Body
Subtitle: An Immodest Proposal for a Mormon Aesthetic
Author(s): FAULCONER, James E.
Journal: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie
Volume: 84    Issue: emeritaatsnummer   Date: 2022   
Pages: 219-236
DOI: 10.2143/TVF.84.5.3290718

Abstract :
My thesis is that aesthetics lost much when it fell under the sway of a Platonic view of things and, thereby, forgot that the Greek root, αἴσθησις, means ‘sense-perception’, human contact with the material world — touch and being touched, in other words, physical relationship. Aesthetics is about the beautiful. That is not in question. The question is: ‘what counts as beautiful?’ Does beauty amount to beautiful appearance only, or should we consider more than that, specifically materiality and physical relationship as well? My own view is that a materialist aesthetics would include more than attention to beautiful appearance. In particular, it would find a way to make the haptic more central, if not central. In fact, I suggest (as a matter of interest rather than of apologetics or proselytism) that the beliefs of the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — ‘the Mormon church’ — are unusually compatible with the possibility of an aesthetics of sense perception, understood broadly to consider touch and human relationship as of central importance to human understanding.

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