Erin asked:

While reading Gulliver's Travels,I found myself questioning the theories of perception and aesthetics.
In particular, could you explain Thomas Aquinas' theories of aesthetics?

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I haven't read Gulliver's Travelsand so don't know what connection Aquinas on aesthetics might
have. The following is a basic summary. There is book called About Beautyby Armand A. Maurer
which will provide you with more detail.

For Aquinas, beauty is essentially related to existence. What we perceive to exist is what is given to
experience and then conceptualised as a determinate form. When a form i.e. a thing perceived as
something, such as a flower has perfection, harmony and radiance, we perceive it as beautiful. The
Thomist view is a realist, objective account of beauty since it is not by means of evaluation that we
hold something to be beautiful, but because of a thing's actual radiance and harmony, that we do
perceive it as beautiful.

Kant has held that an aesthetic judgement is subjective and he laid down the conditions he believed
necessary for making a true judgement of beauty, so an aesthetic judgement for Kant bears essential
reference to the subject. For Aquinas, such a judgement is essentially related to the way the world is.
Beauty is not conceptual where bringing something under a concept is a means of understanding as
when we recognise something as a flower as opposed to a weed. But it is cognitive in the sense of
being a true judgement about something which exists. The way in which things exist is beautiful, so
when the judgement is made the mind has perceived the actuality of existence.

So there are three ways in which existence, as well as perception, is relevant to something's being
beautiful, or aesthetically appreciated. In its existence as the form of a flower there is intrinsic
perfection, firstly, in terms of its proportion, and secondly in terms of its harmony which are real
features of the flower, as perceived. Thirdly, it is not because of our appreciative response that we
say something is beautiful, but because it has a radiance which we perceive. Everything that exists is
beautiful when it exists fully in these ways. Ugliness, by contrast, is a falling short in terms of the
fullness of being. There is no modern day distinction here between primary and secondary qualities
and evaluative qualities.

The beauty of the object provides the mind with an aesthetic experience. To perceive aesthetically
requires the adoption of an aesthetic attitude which, is to gaze at something beautiful with pleasure.
But according to Aquinas we don't say something is beautiful becauseof this response, which is more
of a Kantian or Humean subjectivist approach.

Natural beauty is distinguished from created art in terms of different cause and end but art is also
found beautiful in terms of how it exists.

Rachel Browne