Misplaced Pages

#417582

113-555: The series was Everett Peck's final animated production before his death in 2022. Squirrel Boy centers on the lives of the titular anthropomorphic squirrel named Rodney ( Richard Steven Horvitz ), who is full of crazy ideas and get-rich-quick schemes, and his best friend and owner, a boy named Andy Johnson ( Pamela Adlon ). In the family are Robert ( Kurtwood Smith ), Andy's pessimistic and unlucky father who utterly dislikes Rodney, and Lucille ( Nancy Sullivan ), Andy's cheery and mild-tempered mother. Andy and Rodney are arch-enemies with

226-423: A dog cone after he gets stitches in his arm. The PBS Kids animated series Let's Go Luna! centers on an anthropomorphic female Moon who speaks, sings, and dances. She comes down out of the sky to serve as a tutor of international culture to the three main characters: a boy frog and wombat and a girl butterfly, who are supposed to be preschool children traveling a world populated by anthropomorphic animals with

339-402: A one hit wonder on a popular 1990s sitcom Horsin' Around , living off the show's residuals in present time. Multiple main characters of the series are other animals who possess human body form and other human-like traits and identity as well; Mr. Peanutbutter , a humanoid dog lives a mostly human life—he speaks American English , walks upright , owns a house , drives a car , is in

452-405: A romantic relationship with a human woman (in this series, as animals and humans are seen as equal , relationships like this are not seen as bestiality but seen as regular human sexuality ), Diane , and has a successful career in television—however also exhibits dog traits —he sleeps in a human-size dog bed , gets arrested for having a drag race with the mailman and is once forced to wear

565-555: A "classical beauty" or said to possess a "classical beauty", whilst the foundations laid by Greek and Roman artists have also supplied the standard for male beauty and female beauty in western civilization as seen, for example, in the Winged Victory of Samothrace . During the Gothic era, the classical aesthetical canon of beauty was rejected as sinful. Later, Renaissance and Humanist thinkers rejected this view, and considered beauty to be

678-704: A circus run by their parents. The French-Belgian animated series Mush-Mush & the Mushables takes place in a world inhabited by Mushables, which are anthropomorphic fungi, along with other critters such as beetles , snails , and frogs . Sonic the Hedgehog , a video game franchise debuting in 1991, features a speedy blue hedgehog as the main protagonist. This series' characters are almost all anthropomorphic animals such as foxes, cats, and other hedgehogs who are able to speak and walk on their hind legs like normal humans. As with most anthropomorphisms of animals, clothing

791-446: A fact that may subconsciously condition males choosing mates. In 2008, other commentators have suggested that this preference may not be universal. For instance, in some non-Western cultures in which women have to do work such as finding food, men tend to have preferences for higher waist-hip ratios. Exposure to the thin ideal in mass media, such as fashion magazines, directly correlates with body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, and

904-417: A general definition of beauty and several authors take the opposite claim that such laws cannot be formulated, as part of their definition of beauty. A very common element in many conceptions of beauty is its relation to pleasure . Hedonism makes this relation part of the definition of beauty by holding that there is a necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, e.g. that for an object to be beautiful

1017-507: A great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked." Classical philosophy and sculptures of men and women produced according to the Greek philosophers ' tenets of ideal human beauty were rediscovered in Renaissance Europe, leading to a re-adoption of what became known as a "classical ideal". In terms of female human beauty, a woman whose appearance conforms to these tenets is still called

1130-426: A greater size than the original, Oldenburg created his sculptures out of soft materials. The anthropomorphic qualities of the sculptures were mainly in their sagging and malleable exterior which mirrored the not-so-idealistic forms of the human body. In "Soft Light Switches" Oldenburg creates a household light switch out of vinyl. The two identical switches, in a dulled orange, insinuate nipples. The soft vinyl references

1243-489: A harmonious interplay between the faculties of understanding and imagination. A further question for hedonists is how to explain the relation between beauty and pleasure. This problem is akin to the Euthyphro dilemma : is something beautiful because we enjoy it or do we enjoy it because it is beautiful? Identity theorists solve this problem by denying that there is a difference between beauty and pleasure: they identify beauty, or

SECTION 10

#1732917019418

1356-491: A necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, e.g. that for an object to be beautiful is for it to cause disinterested pleasure. Other conceptions include defining beautiful objects in terms of their value, of a loving attitude toward them or of their function. Beauty, together with art and taste, is the main subject of aesthetics , one of the major branches of philosophy. Beauty is usually categorized as an aesthetic property besides other properties, like grace, elegance or

1469-401: A normal dog in other ways; for example, he cannot resist chasing a ball and barks at the mailman, believing him to be a threat. In a similar case, BoJack Horseman , an American Netflix adult animated black comedy series, takes place in an alternate world where humans and anthropomorphic animals live side by side, and centers around the life of BoJack Horseman ; a humanoid horse who was

1582-547: A process akin to a category mistake , one treats one's subjective pleasure as an objective property of the beautiful thing. Other conceptions include defining beauty in terms of a loving or longing attitude toward the beautiful object or in terms of its usefulness or function. In 1871, functionalist Charles Darwin explained beauty as result of accumulative sexual selection in "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex". The classical Greek noun that best translates to

1695-524: A rise in an interest in beauty as a philosophical subject. For example, Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson argued that beauty is " unity in variety and variety in unity". He wrote that beauty was neither purely subjective nor purely objective—it could be understood not as "any Quality suppos'd to be in the Object, which should of itself be beautiful, without relation to any Mind which perceives it: For Beauty, like other Names of sensible Ideas, properly denotes

1808-499: A rowdy boy named Kyle Finkster ( Billy West ) and his own anthropomorphic parrot, Salty Mike ( Carlos Alazraqui ), who are neighborhood bullies and constantly pick on Andy and Rodney. Other characters in the show include Oscar ( Jason Spisak ), Andy's nerdy human friend with overprotective parents, Leon ( Tom Kenny ), a stray, blue squirrel who is Rodney's friend and lives in a tree in the Johnsons' backyard, Darlene ( Monica Lee Gradischek ),

1921-481: A stage", Fer interprets the artists in Eccentric Abstraction to a new form of anthropomorphism. She puts forth the thoughts of Surrealist writer Roger Caillois , who speaks of the "spacial lure of the subject, the way in which the subject could inhabit their surroundings." Caillous uses the example of an insect who "through camouflage does so in order to become invisible... and loses its distinctness." For Fer,

2034-402: A sub-culture known as furry fandom , which promotes and creates stories and artwork involving anthropomorphic animals, and the examination and interpretation of humanity through anthropomorphism. This can often be shortened in searches as "anthro", used by some as an alternative term to "furry". Anthropomorphic characters have also been a staple of the comic book genre. The most prominent one

2147-424: A thing designed according to some principle and fitted for a purpose. He distinguished "free beauty" from "merely adherent beauty", explaining that "the first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance therewith." By this definition, free beauty is found in seashells and wordless music; adherent beauty in buildings and

2260-431: A thing in itself. The ascent of love begins with one's own body, then secondarily, in appreciating beauty in another's body, thirdly beauty in the soul, which cognates to beauty in the mind in the modern sense, fourthly beauty in institutions, laws and activities, fifthly beauty in knowledge, the sciences, and finally to lastly love beauty itself, which translates to the original Greek language term as auto to kalon . In

2373-453: A virtuous personality to be the greatest of beauties: In his philosophy, "a neighborhood with a ren man in it is a beautiful neighborhood." Confucius's student Zeng Shen expressed a similar idea: "few men could see the beauty in some one whom they dislike." Mencius considered "complete truthfulness" to be beauty. Zhu Xi said: "When one has strenuously implemented goodness until it is filled to completion and has accumulated truth, then

SECTION 20

#1732917019418

2486-430: A wide range of different standards for beauty. A strong indicator of physical beauty is " averageness ". When images of human faces are averaged together to form a composite image, they become progressively closer to the "ideal" image and are perceived as more attractive. This was first noticed in 1883, when Francis Galton overlaid photographic composite images of the faces of vegetarians and criminals to see if there

2599-496: A yellow sea sponge , living in the underwater town of Bikini Bottom with his anthropomorphic marine life friends. Cartoon Network 's animated series The Amazing World of Gumball (2011–2019) are about anthropomorphic animals and inanimate objects. All of the characters in Hasbro Studios ' TV series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (2010–2019) are anthropomorphic fantasy creatures, with most of them being ponies living in

2712-460: A yellow, stray squirrel who is Rodney's love interest, Martha ( Eliza Schneider ), a nerdy human child prodigy who lives across the street and is Andy's love interest, and Esther Flatbottom, a cranky old lady who rides a motorized cart. Anthropomorphism Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. It is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology. Personification

2825-464: Is a human activity and to attribute it to nature misconstrues it as humanlike. Modern criticisms followed Bacon's ideas such as critiques of Baruch Spinoza and David Hume . The latter, for instance, embedded his arguments in his wider criticism of human religions and specifically demonstrated in what he cited as their "inconsistence" where, on one hand, the Deity is painted in the most sublime colors but, on

2938-407: Is a mind-independent feature of things. On this account, the beauty of a landscape is independent of who perceives it or whether it is perceived at all. Disagreements may be explained by an inability to perceive this feature, sometimes referred to as a "lack of taste". Subjectivism, on the other hand, denies the mind-independent existence of beauty. Influential for the development of this position

3051-685: Is associated with activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex . This approach of localizing the processing of beauty in one brain region has received criticism within the field. Philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco wrote On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea (2004) and On Ugliness (2007). The narrator of his novel The Name of the Rose follows Aquinas in declaring: "three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason, we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light", before going on to say "the sight of

3164-455: Is commonly described as a feature of objects that makes them pleasurable to perceive. Such objects include landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty, art and taste are the main subjects of aesthetics , one of the fields of study within philosophy . As a positive aesthetic value, it is contrasted with ugliness as its negative counterpart. One difficulty in understanding beauty is that it has both objective and subjective aspects: it

3277-569: Is difficult to give a general and detailed description of what is meant by "harmony between parts" and raises the suspicion that defining beauty through harmony results in exchanging one unclear term for another one. Some attempts have been made to dissolve this suspicion by searching for laws of beauty , like the golden ratio . 18th century philosopher Alexander Baumgarten , for example, saw laws of beauty in analogy with laws of nature and believed that they could be discovered through empirical research. As of 2003, these attempts have failed to find

3390-411: Is for it to cause pleasure or that the experience of beauty is always accompanied by pleasure. This account is sometimes labeled as "aesthetic hedonism" in order to distinguish it from other forms of hedonism . An influential articulation of this position comes from Thomas Aquinas , who treats beauty as "that which pleases in the very apprehension of it". Immanuel Kant explains this pleasure through

3503-458: Is no general agreement on how "ideal observers" are to be defined, but it is usually assumed that they are experienced judges of beauty with a fully developed sense of taste. This suggests an indirect way of solving the antinomy of taste : instead of looking for necessary and sufficient conditions of beauty itself, one can learn to identify the qualities of good critics and rely on their judgments. This approach only works if unanimity among experts

Squirrel Boy - Misplaced Pages Continue

3616-762: Is of little or no importance, where some characters may be fully clothed while some wear only shoes and gloves. Another popular example in video games is the Super Mario series, debuting in 1985 with Super Mario Bros. , of which main antagonist includes a fictional species of anthropomorphic turtle -like creatures known as Koopas . Other games in the series, as well as of other of its greater Mario franchise, spawned similar characters such as Yoshi , Donkey Kong and many others . Claes Oldenburg 's soft sculptures are commonly described as anthropomorphic. Depicting common household objects, Oldenburg's sculptures were considered Pop Art . Reproducing these objects, often at

3729-528: Is possible despite the fact that beauty is a mind-dependent property, dependent not on an individual but a group. A closely related theory sees beauty as a secondary or response-dependent property . On one such account, an object is beautiful "if it causes pleasure by virtue of its aesthetic properties". The problem that different people respond differently can be addressed by combining response-dependence theories with so-called ideal-observer theories : it only matters how an ideal observer would respond. There

3842-412: Is seen as a property of things but also as depending on the emotional response of observers. Because of its subjective side, beauty is said to be "in the eye of the beholder". It has been argued that the ability on the side of the subject needed to perceive and judge beauty, sometimes referred to as the "sense of taste", can be trained and that the verdicts of experts coincide in the long run. This suggests

3955-484: Is sometimes discussed under the label " antinomy of taste". It has prompted various philosophers to seek a unified theory that can take all these intuitions into account. One promising route to solve this problem is to move from subjective to intersubjective theories , which hold that the standards of validity of judgments of taste are intersubjective or dependent on a group of judges rather than objective. This approach tries to explain how genuine disagreement about beauty

4068-581: Is that between adherent beauty ( pulchritudo adhaerens ) and free beauty ( pulchritudo vaga ). A thing has adherent beauty if its beauty depends on the conception or function of this thing, unlike free or absolute beauty. Examples of adherent beauty include an ox which is beautiful as an ox but not beautiful as a horse or a photograph which is beautiful, because it depicts a beautiful building but that lacks beauty generally speaking because of its low quality. Judgments of beauty seem to occupy an intermediary position between objective judgments, e.g. concerning

4181-447: Is that judgments of beauty seem to be based on subjective grounds, namely our feelings, while claiming universal correctness at the same time. This tension is sometimes referred to as the "antinomy of taste". Adherents of both sides have suggested that a certain faculty, commonly called a sense of taste , is necessary for making reliable judgments about beauty. David Hume , for example, suggests that this faculty can be trained and that

4294-482: Is the related attribution of human form and characteristics to abstract concepts such as nations, emotions, and natural forces, such as seasons and weather. Both have ancient roots as storytelling and artistic devices, and most cultures have traditional fables with anthropomorphized animals as characters. People have also routinely attributed human emotions and behavioral traits to wild as well as domesticated animals. Anthropomorphism and anthropomorphization derive from

4407-480: Is true for all cases. For example, a cold jaded critic may still be a good judge of beauty because of her years of experience but lack the joy that initially accompanied her work. One way to avoid this objection is to allow responses to beautiful things to lack pleasure while insisting that all beautiful things merit pleasure, that aesthetic pleasure is the only appropriate response to them. G. E. Moore explained beauty in regard to intrinsic value as "that of which

4520-467: The Genesis creation myth : "So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them". Hindus do not reject the concept of a deity in the abstract unmanifested, but note practical problems. The Bhagavad Gita , Chapter 12, Verse 5, states that it is much more difficult for people to focus on a deity that is unmanifested than one with form , remarking on

4633-467: The Perception of some mind; ... however we generally imagine that there is something in the Object just like our Perception." Immanuel Kant believed that there could be no "universal criterion of the beautiful" and that the experience of beauty is subjective, but that an object is judged to be beautiful when it seems to display "purposiveness"; that is, when its form is perceived to have the character of

Squirrel Boy - Misplaced Pages Continue

4746-734: The World's Fair and the Olympics . These personifications may be simple human or animal figures, such as Ronald McDonald or the donkey that represents the United States's Democratic Party . Other times, they are anthropomorphic items, such as " Clippy " or the " Michelin Man ". Most often, they are anthropomorphic animals such as the Energizer Bunny or the San Diego Chicken . Beauty Beauty

4859-579: The absence of genetic or acquired defects . Since the 1970s there has been increasing evidence that a preference for beautiful faces emerges early in infancy, and is probably innate, and that the rules by which attractiveness is established are similar across different genders and cultures. A feature of beautiful women which has been explored by researchers is a waist–hip ratio of approximately 0.70. As of 2004, physiologists had shown that women with hourglass figures were more fertile than other women because of higher levels of certain female hormones,

4972-706: The prophets , who explicitly rejected any likeness of God to humans. Their rejection grew further after the Islamic Golden Age in the tenth century, which Maimonides codified in the twelfth century, in his thirteen principles of Jewish faith. In the Ismaili interpretation of Islam , assigning attributes to God as well as negating any attributes from God ( via negativa ) both qualify as anthropomorphism and are rejected, as God cannot be understood by either assigning attributes to Him or taking them away. The 10th-century Ismaili philosopher Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani suggested

5085-407: The sublime . As a positive aesthetic value, beauty is contrasted with ugliness as its negative counterpart. Beauty is often listed as one of the three fundamental concepts of human understanding besides truth and goodness . Objectivists or realists see beauty as an objective or mind-independent feature of beautiful things, which is denied by subjectivists . The source of this debate

5198-686: The 1920s to the present day. In the Disney/Pixar franchises Cars and Planes , all the characters are anthropomorphic vehicles, while in Toy Story , they are anthropomorphic toys. Other Pixar franchises like Monsters, Inc features anthropomorphic monsters and Finding Nemo features anthropomorphic sea animals (like fish, sharks, and whales). Discussing anthropomorphic animals from DreamWorks franchise Madagascar , Timothy Laurie suggests that " social differences based on conflict and contradiction are naturalized and made less 'contestable' through

5311-511: The 1960s, anthropomorphism has also been represented in various animated television shows such as Biker Mice From Mars (1993–1996) and SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron (1993–1995). Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , first aired in 1987, features four pizza-loving anthropomorphic turtles with a great knowledge of ninjutsu, led by their anthropomorphic rat sensei, Master Splinter. Nickelodeon 's longest running animated TV series SpongeBob SquarePants (1999–present), revolves around SpongeBob ,

5424-535: The English-language words "beauty" or "beautiful" was κάλλος , kallos , and the adjective was καλός, kalos . This is also translated as "good" or "of fine quality" and thus has a broader meaning than mere physical or material beauty. Similarly, kallos was used differently from the English word beauty in that it first and foremost applied to humans and bears an erotic connotation. The Koine Greek word for beautiful

5537-710: The Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testaments , as well as in the texts of some other religions. Anthropomorphism, also referred to as personification, is a well-established literary device from ancient times. The story of " The Hawk and the Nightingale " in Hesiod 's Works and Days preceded Aesop 's fables by centuries. Collections of linked fables from India, the Jataka Tales and Panchatantra , also employ anthropomorphized animals to illustrate principles of life. Many of

5650-466: The Idea ( Form ) above all other Ideas. Platonic thought synthesized beauty with the divine . Scruton (cited: Konstan) states Plato states of the idea of beauty, of it (the idea), being something inviting desirousness (c.f seducing ), and, promotes an intellectual renunciation (c.f. denouncing ) of desire. For Alexander Nehamas , it is only the locating of desire to which the sense of beauty exists, in

5763-497: The PQD is strongly present in the object. Elaine Scarry argues that beauty is related to justice. Beauty is also studied by psychologists and neuroscientists in the field of experimental aesthetics and neuroesthetics respectively. Psychological theories see beauty as a form of pleasure . Correlational findings support the view that more beautiful objects are also more pleasing. Some studies suggest that higher experienced beauty

SECTION 50

#1732917019418

5876-543: The Rabbit as research. Adams returned to anthropomorphic storytelling in his later novels The Plague Dogs (1977) and Traveller (1988). By the 21st century, the children's picture book market had expanded massively. Perhaps a majority of picture books have some kind of anthropomorphism, with popular examples being The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969) by Eric Carle and The Gruffalo (1999) by Julia Donaldson . Anthropomorphism in literature and other media led to

5989-504: The Tank Engine and other anthropomorphic locomotives . The fantasy genre developed from mythological, fairy tale, and Romance motifs sometimes have anthropomorphic animals as characters. The best-selling examples of the genre are The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), both by J. R. R. Tolkien , books peopled with talking creatures such as ravens, spiders, and

6102-648: The Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908); Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928) by A. A. Milne ; and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) and the subsequent books in The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis . In many of these stories the animals can be seen as representing facets of human personality and character. As John Rowe Townsend remarks, discussing The Jungle Book in which

6215-421: The admiring contemplation is good in itself". This definition connects beauty to experience while managing to avoid some of the problems usually associated with subjectivist positions since it allows that things may be beautiful even if they are never experienced. Another subjectivist theory of beauty comes from George Santayana , who suggested that we project pleasure onto the things we call "beautiful". So in

6328-492: The aging process as the sculpture wrinkles and sinks with time. In the essay "Art and Objecthood", Michael Fried makes the case that " literalist art " ( minimalism ) becomes theatrical by means of anthropomorphism. The viewer engages the minimalist work, not as an autonomous art object, but as a theatrical interaction. Fried references a conversation in which Tony Smith answers questions about his six-foot cube, "Die". Q: Why didn't you make it larger so that it would loom over

6441-476: The anthropomorphic qualities of imitation found in the erotic, organic sculptures of artists Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois , are not necessarily for strictly "mimetic" purposes. Instead, like the insect, the work must come into being in the "scopic field... which we cannot view from outside." For branding , merchandising , and representation , figures known as mascots are now often employed to personify sports teams , corporations , and major events such as

6554-476: The appearance of it, with the experience of aesthetic pleasure. Hedonists usually restrict and specify the notion of pleasure in various ways in order to avoid obvious counterexamples. One important distinction in this context is the difference between pure and mixed pleasure . Pure pleasure excludes any form of pain or unpleasant feeling while the experience of mixed pleasure can include unpleasant elements. But beauty can involve mixed pleasure, for example, in

6667-637: The basis of their story. Examples include Squid Girl (anthropomorphized squid), Hetalia: Axis Powers (personified countries), Upotte!! (personified guns), Arpeggio of Blue Steel and Kancolle (personified ships). Some of the most notable examples are the Walt Disney characters Mickey Mouse , Donald Duck , Goofy , and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit ; the Looney Tunes characters Bugs Bunny , Daffy Duck , and Porky Pig ; and an array of others from

6780-467: The beautiful implies peace". Mike Phillips has described Umberto Eco's On Beauty as "incoherent" and criticized him for focusing only on Western European history and devoting none of his book to Eastern European, Asian, or African history. Amy Finnerty described Eco's work On Ugliness favorably. Chinese philosophy has traditionally not made a separate discipline of the philosophy of beauty. Confucius identified beauty with goodness, and considered

6893-712: The beauty will reside within it and will not depend on externals." The word "beauty" is often used as a countable noun to describe a beautiful woman. The characterization of a person as "beautiful", whether on an individual basis or by community consensus, is often based on some combination of inner beauty , which includes psychological factors such as personality , intelligence , grace , politeness , charisma , integrity , congruence and elegance , and outer beauty (i.e. physical attractiveness ) which includes physical attributes which are valued on an aesthetic basis. Standards of beauty have changed over time, based on changing cultural values. Historically, paintings show

SECTION 60

#1732917019418

7006-402: The boy Mowgli must rely on his new friends the bear Baloo and the black panther Bagheera , "The world of the jungle is in fact both itself and our world as well". A notable work aimed at an adult audience is George Orwell 's Animal Farm , in which all the main characters are anthropomorphic animals. Non-animal examples include Rev. W. Awdry 's Railway Series stories featuring Thomas

7119-415: The case of a beautifully tragic story, which is why mixed pleasure is usually allowed in hedonist conceptions of beauty. Another problem faced by hedonist theories is that we take pleasure from many things that are not beautiful. One way to address this issue is to associate beauty with a special type of pleasure: aesthetic or disinterested pleasure . A pleasure is disinterested if it is indifferent to

7232-529: The characters in Walt Disney Animation Studios ' Zootopia (2016) are anthropomorphic animals, that is an entirely nonhuman civilization. The live-action/animated franchise Alvin and the Chipmunks by 20th Century Fox centers around anthropomorphic talkative and singing chipmunks . The female singing chipmunks called The Chipettes are also centered in some of the franchise's films. Since

7345-627: The classical standard of beauty, as sublime. The 20th century saw an increasing rejection of beauty by artists and philosophers alike, culminating in postmodernism 's anti-aesthetics. This is despite beauty being a central concern of one of postmodernism's main influences, Friedrich Nietzsche , who argued that the Will to Power was the Will to Beauty. In the aftermath of postmodernism's rejection of beauty, thinkers have returned to beauty as an important value. American analytic philosopher Guy Sircello proposed his New Theory of Beauty as an effort to reaffirm

7458-508: The classificatory matrix of human and nonhuman relations ". Other DreamWorks franchises like Shrek features fairy tale characters, and Blue Sky Studios of 20th Century Fox franchises like Ice Age features anthropomorphic extinct animals. Other characters in SpongeBob SquarePants features anthropomorphic sea animals as well (like sea sponges, starfish, octopus, crabs, whales, puffer fish, lobsters, and zooplankton). All of

7571-443: The concept belonged often within the discipline of mathematics. An idea of spiritual beauty emerged during the classical period , beauty was something embodying divine goodness, while the demonstration of behaviour which might be classified as beautiful, from an inner state of morality which is aligned to the good . The writing of Xenophon shows a conversation between Socrates and Aristippus . Socrates discerned differences in

7684-404: The conception of the beautiful, for example, in inanimate objects, the effectiveness of execution of design was a deciding factor on the perception of beauty in something. By the account of Xenophon, Socrates found beauty congruent with that to which was defined as the morally good, in short, he thought beauty coincident with the good . Beauty is a subject of Plato in his work Symposium . In

7797-461: The considerations of Plato. Aristotle defines beauty in Metaphysics as having order, symmetry and definiteness which the mathematical sciences exhibit to a special degree . He saw a relationship between the beautiful ( to kalon ) and virtue, arguing that "Virtue aims at the beautiful." In De Natura Deorum , Cicero wrote: "the splendour and beauty of creation", in respect to this, and all

7910-446: The development of eating disorders among female viewers. Further, the widening gap between individual body sizes and societal ideals continues to breed anxiety among young girls as they grow, highlighting the dangerous nature of beauty standards in society. A study using Chinese immigrants and Hispanic , Black and White American citizens found that their ideals of female beauty were not significantly different. Participants in

8023-584: The divine as deities with human forms and qualities. They resemble human beings not only in appearance and personality; they exhibited many human behaviors that were used to explain natural phenomena, creation, and historical events. The deities fell in love, married, had children, fought battles, wielded weapons, and rode horses and chariots. They feasted on special foods, and sometimes required sacrifices of food, beverage, and sacred objects to be made by human beings. Some anthropomorphic deities represented specific human concepts, such as love, war, fertility, beauty, or

8136-468: The dragon Smaug and a multitude of anthropomorphic goblins and elves . John D. Rateliff calls this the " Doctor Dolittle Theme" in his book The History of the Hobbit and Tolkien saw this anthropomorphism as closely linked to the emergence of human language and myth : "...The first men to talk of 'trees and stars' saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings... To them

8249-576: The earliest ancient examples set in a mythological context to the great collections of the Brothers Grimm and Perrault . The Tale of Two Brothers (Egypt, 13th century BCE) features several talking cows and in Cupid and Psyche (Rome, 2nd century CE) Zephyrus , the west wind, carries Psyche away. Later an ant feels sorry for her and helps her in her quest. Building on the popularity of fables and fairy tales, children's literature began to emerge in

8362-536: The earliest known evidence of anthropomorphism. One of the oldest known is an ivory sculpture, the Löwenmensch figurine , Germany, a human-shaped figurine with the head of a lioness or lion, determined to be about 32,000 years old. It is not possible to say what these prehistoric artworks represent. A more recent example is The Sorcerer , an enigmatic cave painting from the Trois-Frères Cave , Ariège, France:

8475-470: The existence of the beautiful object or if it did not arise owing to an antecedent desire through means-end reasoning. For example, the joy of looking at a beautiful landscape would still be valuable if it turned out that this experience was an illusion, which would not be true if this joy was due to seeing the landscape as a valuable real estate opportunity. Opponents of hedonism usually concede that many experiences of beauty are pleasurable but deny that this

8588-507: The facets of reality resulting from creation, he postulated these to be a reason to see the existence of a God as creator . In the Middle Ages , Catholic philosophers like Thomas Aquinas included beauty among the transcendental attributes of being . In his Summa Theologica , Aquinas described the three conditions of beauty as: integritas (wholeness), consonantia (harmony and proportion), and claritas (a radiance and clarity that makes

8701-474: The figure's significance is unknown, but it is usually interpreted as some kind of great spirit or master of the animals. In either case there is an element of anthropomorphism. This anthropomorphic art has been linked by archaeologist Steven Mithen with the emergence of more systematic hunting practices in the Upper Palaeolithic. He proposes that these are the product of a change in the architecture of

8814-535: The final state, auto to kalon and truth are united as one. There is the sense in the text, concerning love and beauty they both co-exist but are still independent or, in other words, mutually exclusive, since love does not have beauty since it seeks beauty. The work toward the end provides a description of beauty in a negative sense. Plato also discusses beauty in his work Phaedrus , and identifies Alcibiades as beautiful in Parmenides . He considered beauty to be

8927-532: The form of a thing apparent to the mind). In the Gothic Architecture of the High and Late Middle Ages , light was considered the most beautiful revelation of God , which was heralded in design. Examples are the stained glass of Gothic Cathedrals including Notre-Dame de Paris and Chartres Cathedral . St. Augustine said of beauty "Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it

9040-473: The gods' shapes and make their bodies of such a sort as the form they themselves have. ... Ethiopians say that their gods are snub–nosed [ σιμούς ] and black Thracians that they are pale and red-haired. Xenophanes said that "the greatest god" resembles man "neither in form nor in mind". Both Judaism and Islam reject an anthropomorphic deity, believing that God is beyond human comprehension. Judaism's rejection of an anthropomorphic deity began with

9153-515: The human body. The Romantic poets, too, became highly concerned with the nature of beauty, with John Keats arguing in Ode on a Grecian Urn that: In the Romantic period, Edmund Burke postulated a difference between beauty in its classical meaning and the sublime . The concept of the sublime, as explicated by Burke and Kant , suggested viewing Gothic art and architecture, though not in accordance with

9266-432: The human mind , an increasing fluidity between the natural history and social intelligences , where anthropomorphism allowed hunters to identify empathetically with hunted animals and better predict their movements. In religion and mythology, anthropomorphism is the perception of a divine being or beings in human form, or the recognition of human qualities in these beings. Ancient mythologies frequently represented

9379-475: The idea of a separate inside; an idea mirrored in the human form. Fried considers the Literalist art's "hollowness" to be "biomorphic" as it references a living organism. Curator Lucy Lippard 's Eccentric Abstraction show, in 1966, sets up Briony Fer 's writing of a post-minimalist anthropomorphism. Reacting to Fried's interpretation of minimalist art's "looming presence of objects which appear as actors might on

9492-438: The mass and shape of a grapefruit, and subjective likes, e.g. concerning whether the grapefruit tastes good. Judgments of beauty differ from the former because they are based on subjective feelings rather than objective perception. But they also differ from the latter because they lay claim on universal correctness. This tension is also reflected in common language. On the one hand, we talk about beauty as an objective feature of

9605-457: The method of double negation; for example: "God is not existent" followed by "God is not non-existent". This glorifies God from any understanding or human comprehension. In secular thought, one of the most notable criticisms began in 1600 with Francis Bacon , who argued against Aristotle 's teleology , which declared that everything behaves as it does in order to achieve some end, in order to fulfill itself. Bacon pointed out that achieving ends

9718-525: The nineteenth century with works such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll , The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) by Carlo Collodi and The Jungle Book (1894) by Rudyard Kipling , all employing anthropomorphic elements. This continued in the twentieth century with many of the most popular titles having anthropomorphic characters, examples being The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) and later books by Beatrix Potter ; The Wind in

9831-450: The observer? A: I was not making a monument. Q: Then why didn't you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top? A: I was not making an object. Fried implies an anthropomorphic connection by means of "a surrogate person – that is, a kind of statue." The minimalist decision of "hollowness" in much of their work was also considered by Fried to be "blatantly anthropomorphic". This "hollowness" contributes to

9944-578: The other, is degraded to nearly human levels by giving him human infirmities, passions, and prejudices. In Faces in the Clouds , anthropologist Stewart Guthrie proposes that all religions are anthropomorphisms that originate in the brain's tendency to detect the presence or vestiges of other humans in natural phenomena. Some scholars argue that anthropomorphism overestimates the similarity of humans and nonhumans and therefore could not yield accurate accounts. There are various examples of personification in both

10057-466: The parts should stand in the right proportion to each other and thus compose an integrated harmonious whole. On this account, which found its most explicit articulation in the Italian Renaissance , the beauty of a human body, for example, depends, among other things, on the right proportion of the different parts of the body and on the overall symmetry. One problem with this conception is that it

10170-425: The perspective of adherents to religions in which humans were created in the form of the divine, the phenomenon may be considered theomorphism , or the giving of divine qualities to humans. Anthropomorphism has cropped up as a Christian heresy , particularly prominently with Audianism in third-century Syria, but also fourth-century Egypt and tenth-century Italy. This often was based on a literal interpretation of

10283-529: The pony-inhabited land of Equestria . The Netflix original series Centaurworld focuses on a warhorse who gets transported to a Dr. Seuss -like world full of centaurs who possess the bottom half of any animal, as opposed to the traditional horse . In the American animated TV series Family Guy , one of the show's main characters, Brian , is a dog. Brian shows many human characteristics – he walks upright, talks, smokes, and drinks Martinis – but also acts like

10396-407: The presence of beauty in universal terms, which is, as existing in a cosmological state, they observed beauty in the heavens . They saw a strong connection between mathematics and beauty. In particular, they noted that objects proportioned according to the golden ratio seemed more attractive. The classical concept of beauty is one that exhibits perfect proportion (Wolfflin). In this context,

10509-432: The product of rational order and harmonious proportions. Renaissance artists and architects (such as Giorgio Vasari in his "Lives of Artists") criticised the Gothic period as irrational and barbarian. This point of view of Gothic art lasted until Romanticism, in the 19th century. Vasari aligned himself to the classical notion and thought of beauty as defined as arising from proportion and order. The Age of Reason saw

10622-419: The same object may produce very different ideas in distinct observers. The notion of "taste" can still be used to explain why different people disagree about what is beautiful, but there is no objectively right or wrong taste, there are just different tastes. The problem with both the objectivist and the subjectivist position in their extreme form is that each has to deny some intuitions about beauty. This issue

10735-413: The seasons. Anthropomorphic deities exhibited human qualities such as beauty , wisdom , and power , and sometimes human weaknesses such as greed , hatred , jealousy , and uncontrollable anger . Greek deities such as Zeus and Apollo often were depicted in human form exhibiting both commendable and despicable human traits. Anthropomorphism in this case is, more specifically, anthropotheism . From

10848-421: The several animals and think of some of them as royal animals, of others as silly, of others as witty, and others as innocent. Apollonius noted that the fable was created to teach wisdom through fictions that are meant to be taken as fictions, contrasting them favorably with the poets' stories of the deities that are sometimes taken literally. Aesop, "by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told

10961-486: The standards of validity of judgments of beauty are intersubjective, i.e. dependent on a group of judges, rather than fully subjective or objective. Conceptions of beauty aim to capture what is essential to all beautiful things. Classical conceptions define beauty in terms of the relation between the beautiful object as a whole and its parts: the parts should stand in the right proportion to each other and thus compose an integrated harmonious whole. Hedonist conceptions see

11074-437: The status of beauty as an important philosophical concept. He rejected the subjectivism of Kant and sought to identify the properties inherent in an object that make it beautiful. He called qualities such as vividness, boldness, and subtlety "properties of qualitative degree" (PQDs) and stated that a PQD makes an object beautiful if it is not—and does not create the appearance of—"a property of deficiency, lack, or defect"; and if

11187-536: The stereotypes of animals that are recognized today, such as the wily fox and the proud lion, can be found in these collections. Aesop 's anthropomorphisms were so familiar by the first century CE that they colored the thinking of at least one philosopher: And there is another charm about him, namely, that he puts animals in a pleasing light and makes them interesting to mankind. For after being brought up from childhood with these stories, and after being as it were nursed by them from babyhood, we acquire certain opinions of

11300-482: The truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events". The same consciousness of the fable as fiction is to be found in other examples across the world, one example being a traditional Ashanti way of beginning tales of the anthropomorphic trickster -spider Anansi : "We do not really mean, we do not really mean that what we are about to say is true. A story, a story; let it come, let it go." Anthropomorphic motifs have been common in fairy tales from

11413-632: The usage of anthropomorphic icons ( murtis ) that adherents can perceive with their senses. Some religions, scholars, and philosophers objected to anthropomorphic deities. The earliest known criticism was that of the Greek philosopher Xenophanes (570–480 BCE) who observed that people model their gods after themselves. He argued against the conception of deities as fundamentally anthropomorphic: But if cattle and horses and lions had hands or could paint with their hands and create works such as men do, horses like horses and cattle like cattle also would depict

11526-566: The verb form anthropomorphize , itself derived from the Greek ánthrōpos ( ἄνθρωπος , lit. "human") and morphē ( μορφή , "form"). It is first attested in 1753, originally in reference to the heresy of applying a human form to the Christian God . From the beginnings of human behavioral modernity in the Upper Paleolithic , about 40,000 years ago, examples of zoomorphic (animal-shaped) works of art occur that may represent

11639-498: The verdicts of experts coincide in the long run. Beauty is mainly discussed in relation to concrete objects accessible to sensory perception. It has been suggested that the beauty of a thing supervenes on the sensory features of this thing. It has also been proposed that abstract objects like stories or mathematical proofs can be beautiful. Beauty plays a central role in works of art and nature. An influential distinction among beautiful things, according to Immanuel Kant ,

11752-535: The whole of creation was 'myth-woven and elf-patterned'." Richard Adams developed a distinctive take on anthropomorphic writing in the 1970s: his debut novel, Watership Down (1972), featured rabbits that could talk—with their own distinctive language ( Lapine ) and mythology—and included a police-state warren, Efrafa . Despite this, Adams attempted to ensure his characters' behavior mirrored that of wild rabbits, engaging in fighting, copulating and defecating, drawing on Ronald Lockley 's study The Private Life of

11865-400: The work, the high priestess Diotima describes how beauty moves out from a core singular appreciation of the body to outer appreciations via loved ones, to the world in its state of culture and society (Wright). In other words, Diotoma gives to Socrates an explanation of how love should begin with erotic attachment , and end with the transcending of the physical to an appreciation of beauty as

11978-430: The works of early Greek philosophers from the pre-Socratic period, such as Pythagoras , who conceived of beauty as useful for a moral education of the soul. He wrote of how people experience pleasure when aware of a certain type of formal situation present in reality, perceivable by sight or through the ear and discovered the underlying mathematical ratios in the harmonic scales in music. The Pythagoreans conceived of

12091-423: The world that is ascribed, for example, to landscapes, paintings or humans. The subjective side, on the other hand, is expressed in sayings like "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". These two positions are often referred to as objectivism (or realism ) and subjectivism . Objectivism is the traditional view, while subjectivism developed more recently in western philosophy . Objectivists hold that beauty

12204-550: Was pulchrum ( Latin ). Beauty for ancient thinkers existed both in form , which is the material world as it is, and as embodied in the spirit, which is the world of mental formations. Greek mythology mentions Helen of Troy as the most beautiful woman. Ancient Greek architecture is based on this view of symmetry and proportion . In one fragment of Heraclitus's writings ( Fragment 106 ) he mentions beauty, this reads: "To God all things are beautiful, good, right..." The earliest Western theory of beauty can be found in

12317-423: Was John Locke 's distinction between primary qualities , which the object has independent of the observer, and secondary qualities , which constitute powers in the object to produce certain ideas in the observer. When applied to beauty, there is still a sense in which it depends on the object and its powers. But this account makes the possibility of genuine disagreements about claims of beauty implausible, since

12430-510: Was Neil Gaiman 's the Sandman which had a huge impact on how characters that are physical embodiments are written in the fantasy genre. Other examples also include the mature Hellblazer (personified political and moral ideas), Fables and its spin-off series Jack of Fables , which was unique for having anthropomorphic representation of literary techniques and genres . Various Japanese manga and anime have used anthropomorphism as

12543-534: Was a typical facial appearance for each. When doing this, he noticed that the composite images were more attractive as compared to any of the individual images. Researchers have replicated the result under more controlled conditions and found that the computer-generated, mathematical average of a series of faces is rated more favorably than individual faces. It is argued that it is evolutionarily advantageous that sexual creatures are attracted to mates who possess predominantly common or average features, because it suggests

12656-419: Was ensured. But even experienced judges may disagree in their judgments, which threatens to undermine ideal-observer theories. Various conceptions of the essential features of beautiful things have been proposed but there is no consensus as to which is the right one. The "classical conception" (see Classicism ) defines beauty in terms of the relation between the beautiful object as a whole and its parts :

12769-493: Was ὡραῖος, hōraios , an adjective etymologically coming from the word ὥρα, hōra , meaning "hour". In Koine Greek, beauty was thus associated with "being of one's hour". Thus, a ripe fruit (of its time) was considered beautiful, whereas a young woman trying to appear older or an older woman trying to appear younger would not be considered beautiful. In Attic Greek, hōraios had many meanings, including "youthful" and "ripe old age". Another classical term in use to describe beauty

#417582