Abstract

Man has always been interested in beauty and art and shown this interest in different ways. However, not many people have ever paid attention to issues such as the definition, nature, secret, and reason of beauty, and the relation between beauty and art, the origin of art, the relation between religion, on the one hand, and beauty and art, on the other, or ever looked at them curiously. All the above-mentioned issues are out of the domains of experimentation and testing and are, therefore, of a philosophical nature. Nevertheless, if we see that they have been propounded in certain fields of empirical sciences, such as psychology and biology, they have, again, left the border of experimentation behind and adopted a philosophical nature. Such a view of aesthetics and art is certainly a philosophical one, and it is among philosophers' duties to deal with its related problems. It is emphasized that some philosophers have not ignored this, and exactly in the same way that they try to obtain the knowledge of being, have inquired into such issues and presented a number of views and ideas in this regard which have been quite useful in their own right and increased the accuracy of man's view of these problems. In this paper the author has tried to review and evalute some of these views and theories.