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Hello, beauty is truth, truth beauty.

That's all you know on earth and all you need to know.

That was John Keats' emphatic conclusion to his own to agree and earn.

It seems to express Plato's theory of aesthetics, his idea that an apprehension of beauty is an apprehension of perfection,

and that all things in our shadowy realm are partial representations of perfect forms that exist elsewhere.

Beauty is goodness and for Plato the ultimate of all the forms is the good.

But does beauty really have a moral quality and is it inherent in things or is it in the mind of the observer how much influence

as Plato's ideas had on the history of aesthetics and what's been said to counter or develop

them. With me to discuss the philosophy beauties and Jehovah Hobbs, lecturer in philosophy at Warwick University,

Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College University of London, and Julian Bageini,

editor of the Philosophist magazine. Angie Hobbes, can you give us an overview of what's often called the key question in aesthetics?

Yes, I think there are three main, very briefly, I think there are three main sets of questions we need to consider.

First, as you said, we need to ask what beauty is.

Does it exist objectively in things and people themselves?

Does it exist subjectively in the mind of the perceiver, or a third option, do

things possess objective qualities which give rise to a perception of beauty in the mind of all perceivers with normally functioning faculties.

Now the second set of questions concerns that the range of objects to which the term beauty may properly be applied

is beauty simply sensible or aesthetic or can there be such a thing as intellectual or

moral beauty and if there can does sensible beauty lead

one to intellectual or moral beauty or is it a distraction or even a deception and

...