For the Love of Beauty

"This is an astonishing book, one I hardly hoped to see appear in our time. It reaffirms purposeful and morally coherent reality as the ground for the pursuit of beauty, and brilliantly brings into play the ideas of thinkers ranging from Eastern and Western Church Fathers to Lao Tzu, and including such fascinating moderns as Thomas Molnar and ?tienne Gilson, whose key voices are foolishly ignored by most of today's academics. " "-" "- Jonathan Chaves, Professor of Chinese, The George Washington University" "This book offers that which frustrated scholars of the humanities have been waiting: substance. Pontynen deftly connects the dots through western culture from what it is that a culture believes, to what it makes, to how it behaves. For the Love of Beauty offers a compelling defense of truth, goodness and beauty that quickens and inspires and makes one wince at the vapidity of much that passes today for scholarship."" " "- Dr. Rod Miller Associate Professor and Chair, Art Department, Hendrix College" "A remarkable change is occurring in western publishing. We were used to practical and pragmatic approach on the US-side and philosophical on the European. Now, that is changing: Americans write "imperial," not to say meta-historical works and Europeans are interested in concrete figures and party-politics. [In For the Love of Beauty] Professor Pontynen joins now the American agenda; he focuses with great erudition on the artistic side of world history. In well-structured chapters, he satisfies our interest in aspects of our past and present."" " "- Thomas Molnar Professor, University of Budapest" "This is an astonishing book, one I hardly hoped to see appear in our time. It reaffirms purposeful and morally coherent reality as the ground for the pursuit of beauty, and brilliantly brings into play the ideas of thinkers ranging from Eastern and Western Church Fathers to Lao Tzu, and including such fascinating moderns as Thomas Molnar and ?tienne Gilson, whose key voices are foolishly ignored by most of today's academics. " - --Jonathan Chaves, Professor of Chinese, The George Washington University "This book offers that which frustrated scholars of the humanities have been waiting: substance. Pontynen deftly connects the dots through western culture from what it is that a culture believes, to what it makes, to how it behaves. For the Love of Beauty offers a compelling defense of truth, goodness and beauty that quickens and inspires and makes one wince at the vapidity of much that passes today for scholarship." --Dr. Rod Miller Associate Professor and Chair, Art Department, Hendrix College "A remarkable change is occurring in western publishing. We were used to practical and pragmatic approach on the US-side and philosophical on the European. Now, that is changing: Americans write "imperial," not to say meta-historical works and Europeans are interested in concrete figures and party-politics. [In For the Love of Beauty] Professor Pontynen joins now the American agenda; he focuses with great erudition on the artistic side of world history. In well-structured chapters, he satisfies our interest in aspects of our past and present." --Thomas Molnar Professor, University of Budapest "This is an astonishing book, one I hardly hoped to see appear in our time. It reaffirms purposeful and morally coherent reality as the ground for the pursuit of beauty, and brilliantly brings into play the ideas of thinkers ranging from Eastern and Western Church Fathers to Lao Tzu, and including such fascinating moderns as Thomas Molnar and ?tienne Gilson, whose key voices are foolishly ignored by most of today's academics. " - --Jonathan Chaves, Professor of Chinese, The George Washington University "This book offers that which frustrated scholars of the humanities have been

Arthur Pontynen was chairman of the Department of Art at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh.

1: Introduction; 2: Art History and the Cultural Amnesia of Modernism and Postmodernism; 3: Classicism: The Nature of Beauty, the Fragility of Goodness; 4: The Laocon : The Challenge of Tragedy and the Metaphysics of Plotinus; 5: The Judeo-Christian Tradition: Aesthetics and Beauty Reconciled; 6: The Renaissance, Mannerism, and the Baroque: From a Quantative to a Quantative Universe; 7: The Modernist-Postmodernist Tradition: The Subjective-Objectivity of the Enlightenment and the Decline of Beauty; 8: Ways of Worldmaking: Nietzsches Rebirth of Tragedy; 9: Western Culture at the Crossroads: The History of Art and the Postmodern Eschaton; 10: Conclusion: Subject, Object and Responsible Freedom in the Pursuit of Beauty