Please can you suggest a (fairly well-known) philosopher whose work
addresses questions of beauty and ugliness?  I am interested in the
subject of "freakishness" and the way that modern day television has
started to exhibit a trend reminiscent of the Victorian fascination
with freak shows (cf. The Elephant Man) in the form of programmes such
as The House of Obsessive Compulsives (and even Big Brother to an
extent).  This is bound up with questions of schadenfreude and
voyeurism.  However, I am unsure which philosopher I could use as
a basis for exploring these issues.  Please could you suggest a
suitable philosophical theory and some texts to read that fit in with
the theme?  Just to make it clear, I'm looking for help with building
the foundation for further reasearch here, rather than asking somebody
to do the work for me!  Many thanks, your help would be much
appreciated.

Greetings,
You could start with this Wikipedia site which mentions Pythagoras and
then click on the German language version, which mentions Baumgarten,
Kant, Leibniz, and Christain Wolf.  English websites for these names
may be able to help you further.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugliness

Good luck, Myoarin

Thank you very much, I'll have a look at the site.

Best wishes,
Charante

You might find some of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to be of interest,
particularly "Rabelais and His World." Bakhtin wrote quite a bit about
man's fascination with the grotesque.

http://mtsu32.mtsu.edu:11090/Grotesque/Major%20Practitioners/Theorists/bakhtin.html

Thanks for your reply.  Unfortunately, the site doesn't seem to be
working at present.  I like Bakhtin as a theorist but sadly he doesn't
qualify as a philosopher for this course. :-(  It'll still be useful
though, so thanks!

Charante

Hmmm, Where do I start...

You could try the Jewish philosophy and phenomeologist Levinas and his
idea of the radical other...That is something so other that we
experince is as monstrous or alien...(At least I think it was
levinas...the other is a concept common in phenomenology)

However the concept of Beauty and Ugliness themsleves are from
Asethetic theory which goes back to Plato and thus so does our
predjuice. For Plato Beauty is a form and all forms come from the
perfect form of goodness. Therefore ugly is associated with
bad....Later theories about noumenial disclosure will simply lead you
further away from what I think is your real interest the treament of
the ugly...

Therefore with regard to division of society into 'beutiful' and
'ugly' I would look at the work of Michel Foucault who expolored a
similar theme through madness...

Also Check out Nietzsche..the idea of Appolline forms v Dionsyian Frenzy...

Of course look at Marxism and critical theroy as this is a rich
reserve...The problem of glamour and envy as means of social
contriol...The cultural industry, modernism and post-modernism, check
out Feminist views of the other, etc.

Wow, there is just so much you could be looking at...Though I think
you need to be looking at power and the relationship to the radical
other than asethetic theroy.