THE RATIONALITY OF BEAUTY: AESTHETICS AND THE RENAISSANCE OF TELEOLOGY

As is well-known, the mechanistic ontology associated with the work of Descartes and Newton also challenged the irreducibility of final causes. This challenge undercut objective justifications of goodness and beauty. As one result, aesthetics has since been viewed largely or wholly as a subjective matter. In this article, however, I argue that the anti-teleological turn has now been undermined because of new discoveries in sciences. I argue therefore that the claim can no longer be made that science compels us to reject classical and objective accounts of goodness and beauty in aesthetics. Such developments are important to a wide range of fields, including aesthetics and metaphysics, as well as science and religion.