This is Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds.

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I think you'll all agree that Conan Doyle was a better writer than Agifer Christie. That Godfather One is a superior movie to Godfather Three and that the Beatles

were more talented than Justin Bieber.

Indisputable David Hume reflected on such judgments just in Beeba indisputable.

David Hume reflected on such judgments in his very short but very influential essay of

The Standard of Taste, a text which has been expertly dissected by Michael Martin of University College London and UC Berkeley.

Mike Martin, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Hello. The topic we're going to focus on is

Hume on Taste. We're going to be talking about a 34 paragraph essay.

Could you just say a little bit about that?

Sure. Hume wrote this essay of the standard of taste in haste to make up a gap in a book of his

essays called four dissertations which he published in February 1757.

And yet it's generally recognised as a key work in the history of

aesthetics. Absolutely though of course Hume himself would have labeled it

criticism. The term aesthetics only becomes popular in the 19th century.

So Hume is now standardly used in contrast to a manual can't.

So we kind of use the labels of Empiricist for Hume and also the idea that he's some kind of subjectivist.

Our taste or our sense of what is beautiful is located just in us, whereas Kant wants to emphasize,

although he doesn't locate beauty out in the world, that there are nonetheless matters of

necessity or correctness such that it's required of us to respond to the beautiful

...