The aesthetic dimension of scientific discovery: finding the inter-maxillary bone in humans

This paper examines the points of disagreement between Petrus Camper and J. W. von Goethe regarding the existence of the inter-maxillary bone in humans as the link between man and the rest of nature. This historical case illustrates the fundamental role of aesthetic judgements in scientific discovery. Thus, I shall show how the eighteenth century discovery of the inter-maxillary bone in humans was largely determined by aesthetic factors-specifically, those sets of assumptions and criteria implied in the aesthetic schemata of Camper and Goethe. I argue that the relevance of scientifically ascertainable morphological properties that count as evidence for the existence of bona fide anatomical structures depend on the aesthetic schema adopted by the communities assessing the classification. At the same time, I propose and explain mechanisms by which aesthetic considerations might determine the acceptability of empirical claims about the world. Based on the reconstruction of the arguments of Camper and Goethe, I conclude that aesthetic considerations play a substantive role in both the generation and preliminary evaluation of scientific hypotheses. This paper suggests a complementary relation between the mediation of aesthetic criteria in theory choice and in scientific discovery in that while aesthetic considerations in theory choice lead to conservatism; in the context of discovery they often lead to innovation.

Special operations: a hidden chapter in the histories of facial surgery and human enhancement

During the Second World War, Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret service established to encourage resistance and carry out sabotage, employed various techniques of enhancing the ability of its personnel to operate undetected in enemy territory. One of these methods was surgery. Drawing on recently declassified records, this article illuminates SOE's reasons for commissioning this procedure, the needs and wants of those who received it, and the surgeons employed to carry it out. It also aims to underline the role of context in shaping perceptions of facial surgery, and the potential for surgery for wartime disguise to resonate with current debates about human enhancement.

What Historical Ideals of Women's Shapes Teach Us About Women's Self-Perception and Body Decisions Today

The Body Issue: What Global and Historical Perspectives of the Ideal Female Body Can Teach Us About Our Own Present-Day Bodies is a graphic memoir that explores cultural and social factors that influence women's body image and restrict their decisions about their bodies. Drawing from historical and contemporary sources, such as advertisements, magazines, and body satisfaction surveys, as well as personal experience, the memoir offers insight into the cultural and social overemphasis on women's physical appearance. This article summarizes key points from The Body Issue and invites readers to consider bodies as a means to individuality instead of assimilation.

What can science and technology studies learn from art and design? Reflections on 'Synthetic Aesthetics'

In this paper we reflect on a project called 'Synthetic Aesthetics', which brought together synthetic biologists with artists and designers in paired exchanges. We - the STS researchers on the project - were quickly struck by the similarities between our objectives and those of the artists and designers. We shared interests in forging new collaborations with synthetic biologists, 'opening up' the science by exploring implicit assumptions, and interrogating dominant research agendas. But there were also differences between us, the most important being that the artists and designers made tangible artefacts, which had an immediacy and an ability to travel, and which seemed to allow different types of discussions from those initiated by our academic texts. The artists and designers also appeared to have the freedom to be more playful, challenging and perhaps subversive in their interactions with synthetic biology. In this paper we reflect on what we learned from working with the artists and designers on the project, and we argue that engaging more closely with art and design can enrich STS work by enabling an emergent form of critique.

Malleability and Machines: Glenn Gould and the Technological Self

The Pianist Glenn Gould has often been portrayed as a musical idealist who embraced mundane recording media as a way of escaping the anxiety of the concert hall. In pursuing his musical ideals, however, Gould obsessed over material objects-the qualities of a chair, the action of piano keys, the placement of splices in magnetic tape. This paper argues that for him, the detailed properties of machines and electronic media were crucial, not just as tools for pursuing disembodied aesthetic aims, but as instruments and material sites for a moral project. Locating Gould's concerns among the techniques and technologies that inspired him, the concert hall he despised, and the jazz and chance music he tolerated, the paper explores how Gould's famed philosophy of technology was rooted in a "technological self" that tied morality and aesthetics, and intimacy and isolation, to concrete ideals for the kinds of people we ought to be.

Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Rancière on art/aesthetics and politics: the origins of disagreement, 1963-1985

Rancière published two substantial criticisms of the work of Bourdieu in the early 1980s. It is possible that these were provoked by his sense that he needed to oppose what he considered to be the sociological reduction of aesthetic taste offered by Bourdieu in Distinction (Bourdieu 1986 [1979]) at precisely the moment when he (Rancière) was beginning to articulate his commitment to the potential of aesthetic expression as a mode of political resistance. Except in so far as it draws upon some of the retrospective reflections offered by Rancière in his introductions to the re-issues of his early texts, this paper examines the parallel development of the thinking of the two men up to the mid-1980s--but not beyond. The discussion is situated socio-historically and, by definition, does not seek to offer comparatively any transhistorical assessment of the values of the positions adopted by the two men. I argue that Rancière misrepresented the character of Bourdieu's sociological work by failing to recognize the underlying phenomenological orientation of his thinking. Bourdieu suppressed this orientation in the 1960s but, after the May events of 1968, it enabled him to expose the extent to which the practices of both science and art operate within constructed 'fields' in strategic distinction from popular primary experience. The challenge is to introduce an ongoing dialogue between primary and constructed cultures rather than to suppose that either social science or art possesses intrinsic autonomy.

The Rescue of the Aesthetic Character of Existence in Kierkegaard Philosophy

The intention of this article is to develop considerations regarding the unity in all that constitutes the multifaceted work of Soren Kierkegaard. The guides to the subject of this investigation are the stages of existence. His work is devoted to considering the unity of all spheres in their original place, which is concrete existence. To search for this unity, Kierkegaard resumes the aesthetic element of existence, which had been abandoned since the Greeks, passing by Christianity and radicalizing itself since philosophers of subjectivity, to show that this abandon provokes the suppression of the aesthetic element, without which oneness is not possible.

Make me wanna holler: Meshell Ndegeocello, Black queer aesthetics, and feminist critiques

This article examines the music and performance of Meshell Ndegeocello, arguing that they are part of a cross-Atlantic conversation that pushes the boundaries of Black feminist thought on masculinity and desire. From the time of her debut album in 1993, Ndegeocello has resisted categorization both in her public personae and in her music. Ndegeocello's refusal to be restricted in her stage performance and in her musical expression has created a rich text through which to read Black female masculinity. Her work has been particularly productive in rethinking (Black) feminist couplings of patriarchy with male anatomy. Ndegeocello's music challenges any one representation of female masculinity, mixing critiques of masculine privilege and violence with celebrations of pleasure and pansexual desire.

The history of aesthetic medicine and surgery

The history of beauty is as old as mankind itself--throughout history people have tried to improve their attractiveness and to enhance their beauty. The technical basis for many of nowadays procedures like lipoplasty, breast augmentation or rhinoplasty was thereby initiated more than a hundred years ago and evolved to the modern standards of today. The aim of this article is to recall the early days of aesthetic medicine and show the swift progress up to the highly specialized medical discipline of our modern time. Combining the past, present and future of aesthetic medicine, allows to incorporate this perspective and ultimately to delivery better patient care.

The aesthetics of laboratory inscription: Claude Bernard's Cahier Rouge

This essay explores the aesthetic sensibilities of the French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878). In particular, it analyzes the Cahier Rouge (1850-1860), Bernard's acclaimed laboratory notebook. In this notebook, Bernard articulates the range of his experience as an experimental physiologist, juxtaposing without differentiation details of laboratory procedure and more personal queries, doubts, and reflections on experimentation, life, and art. Bernard's insights, it is argued, offer an aesthetic and phenomenological template for considering experimentation. His physiological point of view ranges from his own bodily aesthesis or sensory perception, through personal reflections on scientific discovery as an artistic process, to a broader metaphysical conception of life as an artistic creation. Such an aesthetic approach to physiology enables Bernard to reconcile his empirical methodology and his romantic idealism; it offers the history of laboratory science a framework for considering the individual, bodily, and emotional labor inherent in physiological experimentation.

The Nazi cosmetic: medicine in the service of beauty

This paper examines how aesthetic ideals shaped the practice of Nazi medicine. It proposes that Nazi eugenics relied on the conflation of norms of health with norms of beauty determined and performed by Nazi cultures of action. Though theories of biological holism served as vehicles of Nazi ideology, they did so contingently. The anti-totalitarian thinking of biological holist Kurt Goldstein shows that the use of biological holism to promote Nazi ideology was not inevitable. This examination of aesthetic influences on Nazi medicine shows that traditionally speaking 'non-rational' factors shaped the Nazi biomedical program's aims and methods.

The bias of "music-infected consciousness": the aesthetics of listening in the laboratory and on the city streets of Fin-de-Siècle Berlin and Vienna

Shifts in the psychophysical study of sound sensation reinforced the changing status of musical expertise in the nineteenth century. The Carl Stumpf-Wilhelm Wundt debate about tone-differentiation experimentation narrowed the conception of hearing. For Stumpf, "music consciousness" (Musikbewusstsein) granted the experimental subjects exceptional insight into sound sensation. This belief reflected a cultural reevaluation of listening, exemplified in music critic Eduard Hanslick decrying the scourge of the city: the piano playing of the neighbors. Stumpf and Hanslick's defenses of subjective musical expertise both inside the laboratory and on the city streets reveal the increasingly divergent conceptions of hearing and listening.

The sciences of subjectivity

In historical and ethnographic studies of the making of scientific knowledge, there has been a long-standing fascination with deflating certain stories about objectivity. Among the resources used to achieve that deflation have been the notions of subjectivity, which has been treated more as a trouble for objectivity than as a knowledge-making mode open to systematic study. I describe notions of subjectivity implicated in that inattention; I trace potentially constructive links between contemporary science studies and resources in 18th-century philosophical aesthetics; I draw notice to available engagements with the mode of subjectivity known as taste, and, especially, gustation and olfaction; and I suggest ways in which we might study the achievement of intersubjectivity in these domains.

Inducing visibilities: an attempt at Santiago Ramón y Cajal's aesthetic epistemology

In this paper, I consider Santiago Ramón y Cajal's strategy of histological observation and imaging in terms of what I call "induction of visibility" (Fiorentini, 2011). Cajal's strategy of visibility induction drew upon both rational and aesthetic visual sensibility, and considered this interplay to be a constitutive element of knowledge production. I propose to describe Cajal's fundamental attitude towards visually inferred knowledge in terms of an "aesthetic epistemology".

Aesthetics and ethics in engineering: insights from Polanyi

Polanyi insisted that scientific knowledge was intensely personal in nature, though held with universal intent. His insights regarding the personal values of beauty and morality in science are first enunciated. These are then explored for their relevance to engineering. It is shown that the practice of engineering is also governed by aesthetics and ethics. For example, Polanyi's three spheres of morality in science--that of the individual scientist, the scientific community and the wider society--has parallel entities in engineering. The existence of shared values in engineering is also demonstrated, in aesthetics through an example that shows convergence of practitioner opinion to solutions that represent accepted models of aesthetics; and in ethics through the recognition that many professional engineering institutions hold that the safety of the public supersedes the interests of the client. Such professional consensus can be seen as justification for studying engineering aesthetics and ethics as inter-subjective disciplines.

Reconciling beauty and utility in early city planning: the contribution of John Nolen

In the history of city planning, the dichotomy between the aesthetic aspirations of the City Beautiful and City Practical movements is overstated. The aesthetic impulse did not disappear but persisted as an important thread through the development of comprehensive planning approaches into the 1920s. The nexus between beauty and utility was negotiated and expressed across four main discourses: broad social improvement, aesthetic functionality, economic rationality, and holistic design. Ultimately, beauty became wedded to utility within the very nature of the comprehensive city plan itself. The work of the leading city planner John Nolen is central to an understanding of these historic continuities and informed the early evolution of city planning theory and practice. Nolen’s challenge to the City Beautiful paradigm, while still retaining an artistic sensibility, reaestheticizes scholars’ appreciation of the City Practical.

Nietzsche's aesthetic critique of Darwin

Despite his position as one of the first philosophers to write in the "post-Darwinian" world, the critique of Darwin by Friedrich Nietzsche is often ignored for a host of unsatisfactory reasons. I argue that Nietzsche's critique of Darwin is important to the study of both Nietzsche's and Darwin's impact on philosophy. Further, I show that the central claims of Nietzsche's critique have been broadly misunderstood. I then present a new reading of Nietzsche's core criticism of Darwin. An important part of Nietzsche's response can best be understood as an aesthetic critique of Darwin, reacting to what he saw as Darwin having drained life of an essential component of objective aesthetic value. For Nietzsche, Darwin's theory is false because it is too intellectual, because it searches for rules, regulations, and uniformity in a realm where none of these are to be found - and, moreover, where they should not be found. Such a reading goes furthest toward making Nietzsche's criticism substantive and relevant. Finally, I attempt to relate this novel explanation of Nietzsche's critique to topics in contemporary philosophy of biology, particularly work on the evolutionary explanation of culture.

Planning ideology and geographic thought in the early twentieth century: Charles Whitnall's progressive era park designs for socialist Milwaukee

As Milwaukee’s chief park planner in the early to mid-twentieth century, Charles Whitnall responded to the various underlying ideologies of the period within which he worked. His preference for parks was a political and physical response to and remedy for the industrialized and heavily congested city he called home. By examining the Progressive Era discourse associated with planning, this article situates Whitnall’s work within the political, aesthetic, and environmental contexts of geographic thought that influenced his plans for Milwaukee. In promoting a physical awareness associated with the natural features of the region and responding to the sociopolitical framework of contemporaries such as Ebenezer Howard, Whitnall incorporated a sense of compassion within his planning. He responded to the preexisting beer gardens of Pabst and Schlitz, as well as Olmsted-designed park spaces, by advocating for decentralization as part of a broader socialist agenda that had swept through Milwaukee during the early 1900s.

"This immense expense of art": George Eliot and John Ruskin on consumption and the limits of sympathy

This essay attempts to better our understanding of George Eliot's conservatism by examining a body of ideas about consumption and moral obligation that she and John Ruskin share. I use a discussion of consumer ethics to explore the moral logic of their conservatism by examining the role of the aesthetic within it. Economic consumption and the aesthetic are subjects inextricably connected, not just because the discourses of political economy and aesthetics have a shared origin in eighteenth-century moral philosophy, but also because the discourse of aesthetics has long served to legitimize select modes and acts of consumption. By marking out a limit where one may reasonably cease to sympathize and instead devote energy (and money) to personal gratification, the treatment of consumption in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) offers an important articulation of moral thought. Eliot suggests that aesthetic pleasure can make consumption morally defensible, but she also anticipates Pierre Bourdieu's critique of the aesthetic: her novel represents both the display of cultural capital and the exercise of the aesthetic disposition as ways of maintaining social and economic hierarchies. She thus at once critiques and participates in the system within which the aesthetic functions to preserve social and political stasis. Using John Ruskin's economic writings to expose Middlemarch as a novel of consumer ethics, this essay examines Eliot's representation of personal economic consumption as an emergent mode of social and political agency that might operate productively within that stasis.

The golden section and American psychology, 1892-1938

The golden section has been said by many to be the most beautiful proportion. Fechner was the first to investigate it experimentally, and several late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American psychologists followed up on his work. Among these were four prominent names: Lightner Witmer (1867-1956), Edward L. Thorndike (1874-1949), Robert S. Woodworth (1869-1962), and Robert M. Ogden (1877-1959). Why did such well-known psychologists bother with the golden section? In attempting to answer this question we discovered that the golden section was surprisingly well known during this period, not only in psychology but also in advertising and design. It would have been entirely congruent with their stature for prominent psychologists to take an interest in it.

Cheerful prospects and tranquil restoration: the visual experience of landscape as part of the therapeutic regime of the British asylum, 1800-60

The early nineteenth-century asylum in Britain was generally sited upon a hill with wide-ranging rural views, surrounded by agricultural land, gardens and landscaped grounds. A number of historians have discussed the role of these features as places for patients to partake in recreation, exercise and work. This paper will add to this literature by exploring the possibility that, alongside this active participation and interaction, the passive experience of viewing the landscape and the location of the asylum within a rural setting were also expected to have a therapeutic role.

[The overview of traditional Chinese medical cosmetology in pre-Qin dynasty]

The cosmetic measures of humans emerged very early. As far back as the late Palaeolithic age related cosmetic decorations came into being. In the Shang and Zhou dynasty, there were already cosmetic people who applied rouges and powders. In the Spring and Autumn dynasty and Warring States periods, because of the increase awareness of aesthetic enjoyment and the prevalence of attention paid to cosmetology, people began to discuss aesthetics. The development of TCM also caused the fusion of the cosmetology and TCM. The records of the early ancient literature such as Shan Hai Jing and silk scrolls of Ma Wang Dui reflected the overview of TCM cosmetology in pre-Qin dynasty.

Better babies: social engineering for 'a better nation, a better world'

Across the United States in the 1910s thousands of parents entered their children in the widely popular Better Babies contests. During the competitions, physicians and other health professionals examined and scored children for their bodily measurements, and physical and mental development. The baby with the highest score won. These contests not only served as a means of identifying children with previously unknown health conditions, but also taught mothers that through scientific care they could make their children into standardized babies, and therefore productive citizens of the future.

Practicing psychology in the art gallery: Vernon Lee's aesthetics of empathy

Late nineteenth-century psychologists and aestheticians were fascinated by the study of psychological and physiological aspects of aesthetic response, and the British intellectual and aesthete Vernon Lee was a major participant in this venture. Working outside the academy, Lee conducted informal experiments with Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, recording changes in respiration, balance, emotion, and body movements in response to aesthetic form. In fashioning her aesthetics of empathy, she mined a wealth of psychological theories of the period including motor theories of mind, physiological theories of emotion, evolutionary models of the usefulness of art, and, most prominently, the empathic projection of feeling and movement into form. Lee distributed questionnaires, contributed to scientific journals, carried out her own introspective studies, and debated aesthetics with leading psychologists. This paper critiques the prevailing view of Lee's aesthetics as a displaced sign of her gender or sexuality, and questions her status as simply an amateur in the field of psychology. Instead, I argue that Lee's empirically based empathy theory of art was a significant contribution to debates on psychological aesthetics at the outset of the twentieth century, offering a synthesis of Lipps's mentalistic Einfühlung and sensation-based imitation theories of aesthetic response.

See Josephus: viewing first-century sexual drama with Victorian eyes

This article looks first at how the art of J.W. Waterhouse responds to the classical world: how complex the scene of reception is, triangulated between artist, the ancient past, and his audiences, and extended over time. Second, it looks at how this scene of reception engages with a specific Victorian problematic about male sexuality and self-control. This is not just a question of Waterhouse using classics as an alibi for thinking about desire, but also of the interference of different models of desire and different knowledges of the classical world in the reception of the painting's narrative semantics.

"To wipe a manly tear": the aesthetics of emotion in Victorian narrative painting

Over the course of the twentieth century, Victorian narrative painting became synonymous with sentimentality, melodrama, and the artificial evocation of emotion. This essay aims to complicate this familiar assessment by examining the role of emotional effect played in aesthetic evaluations of some of the most popular modern life genre paintings of the 1850s to 1870s. I argue that the critical discourse on Victorian narrative painting was marked by a persistent skepticism about the role of feeling in aesthetic response -- as excessively painful or obvious emotional impact marked the limit between artistic success and failure -- and I locate these concerns within the physical and social exhibition culture of the Royal Academy.

"Smite this sleeping world awake": Edward Burne-Jones and "The legend of the briar rose"

Challenging entrenched preconceptions about the supposed escapism and conservatism of Edward Burne-Jones's art, this paper seeks to establish his monumental painted series, "The Legend of the Briar Rose," as a fundamentally radical and confrontational work. Critics have long viewed it as an endorsement of sleepy stasis, antithetical to the political activism espoused by his friend William Morris. By unraveling the intertwining themes of the series -- the transformative dream vision, artistic labor, the decorative mode, and social egalitarianism -- the "Briar Rose" series is revealed instead to be dramatization of the struggle for personal, social, artistic, and even environmental awakening.

Biology a la mode: Charles Darwin's aesthetics of "ornament"

Historians have long noted the importance of Victorian culture for the emergence of Darwin's ideas. This paper takes this understanding one step further by illustrating a deep cultural analysis for the underlying aesthetics framework which, on the one hand, is part of Darwin's notion of sexual selection while, at the same time, serving to give rise to a new "aesthetics semantics." While evolutionary biology avoids this language, it nevertheless had far-reaching influences in the decades following the publication of Darwin's work. Additionally, evolutionary aesthetics from Darwin provides unique insights on the philosophical foundations it draws upon.

Vernon Lee in the Vatican: the uneasy alliance of aestheticism and archaeology

From the 1800s onward, aesthetic critics attempted to free the study of ancient Greek art from the frameworks of institutional education and professionalized criticism. In this process, aestheticism entered an uneasy alliance with archaeology, a discipline that was likewise challenging traditional modes of classical learning practiced in public schools and the old universities. In "The Child in the Vatican" (1881), Vernon Lee -- writing under the influence of Pater and from a position of cosmopolitan female amateurism -- examines the uses of archaeological science in the study of classical art. Her analysis of the sculptures of the Niobe Group at once relies on the archaeological method and asks readers to doubt scientific approaches to art that dim the sublime power of the art object.

The psychology of Kant's aesthetics

Contrary to both his own intentions and the views of both older and more recent commentators. I argue that Kant's aesthetics remains within the confines of eighteenth-century aesthetics as a branch of empirical psychology, as it was then practiced. Kant established a plausible connection between aesthetic experience and judgment on the one hand and cognition in general on the other, through his explanatory concept of the free play of our cognitive powers. However, there is nothing distinctly 'a priori' or 'transcendental' in his claim that this state of mind is what causes our pleasure in beauty or other aesthetic properties. Nor did Kant establish a genuinely a priori or transcendental principle that all human beings have the same disposition to experience a free play of their cognitive powers, let alone in response to the same objects. This failure, however, in no way limits the continuing significance of Kant's aesthetic theory.

[The Vitruvian Man: an anatomical drawing for proportions by Leonardo Da Vinci]

The aim of the study was to find out and to analyse the text by Vitruvius which inspired the famous drawing by Leonardo da Vinci (circa 1490) kept in the Galleria dell'Accademia, in Venezia, Italy: the man inscribed in one circle and in one square. The book "de Architectura" by Vitruvius Marcus Pollio was printed several times since the Renaissance when both the roman architecture of antiquity and this text became very popular. From a French translation by Claude Perrault in 1864, it became easy to find a French translation with the original text in Latin (Paris, 2003, Les Belles Lettres, French text by Pierre Gros). The drawing by Leonardo da Vinci illustrates with great accuracy and fidelity the quotation of Vitruvius (with the exception of two of the 12 main relationships). The genius of Leonardo da Vinci was to keep only one trunk, head and neck for two pairs of limbs: scapular and pelvic; to make the circle tangent to the lower edge of the square; to adjust a few features of the quotation for the equilibrium of the whole figure; and of course to bring his incredible skill as a drawer (one of the best of his century). The drawing was made on a sheet of paper 344x245mm, in black ink which became dark brown with time; several lines complete the figure above and below; a short caption and a horizontal scale appear just under the drawing. The celebrity of the drawing, a symbol of the Renaissance, of the equilibrium of man and mankind, of the universality of the artists and intellectuals of the time (Humanism) made it iconic and it has been constantly reproduced and adapted especially for advertisement and logos, not only in the medical field.

The pulse of modernism: experimental physiology and aesthetic avant-gardes circa 1900

When discussing the changing sense of reality around 1900 in the cultural arts the lexicon of early modernism reigns supreme. This essay contends that a critical condition for the possibility of many of the turn of the century modernist movements in the arts can be found in exchange of instruments, concepts, and media of representation between the sciences and the arts. One route of interaction came through physiological aesthetics, the attempt to 'elucidate physiologically the nature of our Aesthetic feelings' and explain how works of art achieve their effects. Physiological aesthetics provided the terms for new formalist languages of art and criticism, and in some instances suggested optimistic, even utopian, possibilities for art to remake human individuals and societies.

[Tone psychology and music research as catalysts of experimental-scientific practice and methodology in the circle of Carl Stumpf]

The study of acoustics, harmonics and of music has been providing scientific models since Greek Antiquity. Since the early modern ages, two separate cultures began to emerge out of the study of music: a technical acoustics and an aesthetically and philosophically inspired musical criticism. In the writings of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1811) a scientific approach to musical aesthetics and to music perception is taking shape that reinstalls the listening process as a highly complex and logical phenomenon. By opening music for a scientific psychological investigation, Herbart pioneered the physiologically and acoustically grounded seminal work by Hermann von Helmholtz On the sensations of tone (1863) which the author considered a prerequisite for musical aesthetics and music theory. Helmholtz in turn inspired the philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf to further investigate musical perception (beginning in 1883). To Stumpf, it provided a paradigm for experimental psychology as mental functions and phenomena could be studied in detail. These functions and phenomena are the actual objects of scientific study in Stumpf's inductive and descriptive psychology. Combining insights from statistics, ethnology, anthropology, psychoacoustics and the cultural history of mankind, Stumpf and his team developed a new blend of science which absorbs styles of reasoning, analytical procedures and academic convictions from natural history, the natural sciences and the humanities but at the same time identifies shortcomings of these approaches that fail to grasp the complexities of psychic functions. Despite their reliance on the quasi-objective phonograph and despite their commitment to objectivity, precision and measurement, mental phenomena relating to tonal perception and to music provided too complex a challenge to be easily articulated and shared by the scientific community after 1900. The essay illustrates these tensions against the background of a history of objectivity.

"A different kind of beauty": scientific and architectural style in I.M. Pei's Mesa Laboratory and Louis Kahn's Salk Institute

I.M. Pei's Mesa Laboratory for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and Louis Kahn's Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, are rare examples of laboratories as celebrated for their architecture as for their scientific contributions. Completed in the mid-1960s, these signature buildings still express the scientific style of their founding directors, Walter Roberts and Jonas Salk. yet in commissioning their laboratories, Roberts and Salk had to work with architects as strong-willed as themselves. A close reading of the two laboratories reveals the ongoing negotiations and tensions in collaborations between visionary scientist and visionary architect. Moreover, Roberts and Salk also had to become architects of atmospheric and biomedical sciences. For laboratory architecture, however flexible in theory, necessarily stabilizes scientific practice, since a philosophy of research is embedded in the very structure of the building and persists far longer than the initial vision and mission that gave it life. Roberts and Salk's experiences suggest that even the most carefully designed laboratories must successfully adapt to new disciplinary configurations, funding opportunities, and research priorities, or risk becoming mere architectural icons.

Sexual violence, marital guidance, and Victorian bodies: an aesthesiology

This essay examines some of the emotional rules, encoded in grammars of representation and framed within law and prescriptive marital advice literature, regarding the expression of male sexual aggressivity within the bedroom. Despite the general Victorian idealization of marriage, many wives suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their husbands, marital rape drawing particular attention from early feminists, psychologists, physicians, and evolutionary physiologists. In the 1870s, a belief that unrestrained sexual license was a symptom of degeneration led these commentators to consider marital rape particularly harmful to husbands. By the turn of the century, however, the focus of this harm had nominally shifted to women, who might become frigid if forced to submit to sex--a problem for wives but for husbands as well. As sexology and psychology gained greater influence, couples came to rely on the emotion-talk of commentators to negotiate mutually agreeable bedroom activity.

Orthodontics and esthetics of the face: from the "canons" of ancient times to contemporary pluralism. A critical review

Efforts to define facial esthetics and natural attraction using objective criteria go back in time. Nowadays, the abundance of available information, the evolution in our understanding, the intermeshing of the neurosciences and biology, as well as the potential of digital technology, have provided new elements for the objective definition of esthetics and shaped new perceptions and perspectives. The aim of this paper is to attempt a critical analysis from a clinical orthodontic perspective of the conventional methods assessing facial beauty as well as of the trends and viewpoints that form today's concept of an esthetically ideal face, based on a historical review from ancient times to the 21st century. It appears that the "beauty standards" formulated artificially by the mass media and the internet remain a challenge for the orthodontist, who is called upon to explore the aspirations, motives and expectations of patients in order to be able to contribute in improving their social status and quality of life.

The aesthetics of city-scale preservation policy in Beijing

Chinese cities today represent a historically important case of the relation between city-scale preservation policy and urban design, and the role they play in the rapid transformation of urban environments. This article reviews Beijing's preservation and urban design policies as they existed in 1990, and as they evolved and responded over the following fifteen years of radical change. Beijing's master plan in the 1990s ambitiously attempted to define the preservation-worthy image of the entire old city, but did so in narrowly picturesque terms. The practice of 'protecting' designated historic structures by clearing the space around them, and the dependence on a totalizing view-from-on-high to define Beijing's overall characteristic form (as opposed to an experience of the city from its myriad public and private spaces), produced a city-wide preservation policy that was particularly handicapped in its ability to accommodate change.

History and Current Concepts in the Analysis of Facial Attractiveness

BACKGROUND

Facial attractiveness research has yielded many discoveries in the past 30 years, and facial cosmetic, plastic, and reconstructive surgeons should have a thorough understanding of these findings. Many of the recent studies were conducted by social, developmental, cognitive, and evolutionary psychologists, and although the findings have been published in the psychology literature, they have not been presented in a comprehensive manner appropriate to surgeons.

METHODS

The author reviews the findings of facial attractiveness research from antiquity to the present day and highlights and analyzes important concepts necessary for a thorough understanding of facial attractiveness.

RESULTS

Four important cues emerge as being the most important determinants of attractiveness: averageness (prototypicality), sexual dimorphism, youthfulness, and symmetry.

CONCLUSIONS

A surgeon planning facial cosmetic, plastic, or reconstructive surgery can potentially gain both profound insight and better quality surgical results by appreciating these findings.

Anthropometric comparison of portraits of Korean and Japanese beauty in the late 18th and early 19th centuries

The aim of this study is to elaborate comparative portraits of Korean and Japanese beauty in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Six portraits of beauty in the Korean Joseon Dynasty (early 19th century) and 5 in Japanese Edo Dynasty (late 18th century) were analyzed. Twenty anthropometric items were applied to the measure of the features on each portrait and 18 proportional indices of the face were calculated. Among the 18 indices, Korean and Japanese beauty did not show any significant differences in 13, but in 5: 1) the ratio of eye fissure to intercanthal distance was greater in Japanese beauty; 2) eye inclination was greater in Japanese beauty; 3) the ratio of nasal width to intercanthal distance was greater in Japanese beauty; 4) the ratio of nasal and facial width was greater in Korean beauty; and 5) the ratio of vermilion size to mouth width was greater in Japanese beauty. It is assumed that Korean had narrower eye fissure, lower eye inclination, wider nasal ala, and thinner lip than what Japanese craved during that era.

Magical arts: the poetics of play

The paper argues that links between play and magic in British Object Relations point to the persistence of aesthetic concerns within psychoanalysis. Magical thinking is present in British Object Relations psychoanalysis from its beginnings in Klein's play technique and early aesthetic writings, surfacing elsewhere in Susan Isaac's educational experiments and her theories of metaphor. Marion Milner's clinical account of the overlapping areas of illusion and symbol-formation in a boy's war-games link the primitive rituals of Frazer's "The Golden Bough" with her patient's creativity. In Winnicott's concept of the transitional object, the theory of play achieves its apotheosis as a diffusive theory of culture or "private madness," and as a paradigm for psychoanalysis itself. Tracing the non-positivistic, mystical, and poetical elements in British Object Relations underlines the extent to which aesthetics is not just entangled with psychoanalysis, but constitutive of it in its mid-twentieth century manifestations.