Philosophy of Beauty: The Best Books, Ranked

For most of the twentieth century, beauty was the embarrassing relative of philosophy of art. Modern artists had shown that a work could be powerful, important and even great without being beautiful, and critics learned to treat the word as a sign of naivety or of a sales pitch. Then, around the turn of the millennium, philosophers started taking it seriously again. Some defended beauty as a real value. Others asked what it does to us, why it makes us want to share it, and what happens to it when everything around us is designed to please.

This ranking covers the best of that revival, mostly books by living or recent philosophers. It weighs the originality of each book’s argument, how readable it is for non-specialists, and how well it helps you notice beauty, and its counterfeits, in everyday life.

Where to start

Start with On Beauty and Being Just for the case that beauty matters, then Only a Promise of Happiness for what loving beautiful things involves. Saving Beauty and Beauty offer two diagnoses of what contemporary culture has lost; The Abuse of Beauty and Games: Agency as Art take the question past modern art and into what we do.

1. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (1999)

The book that restarted the conversation. On Beauty and Being Just, based on Scarry’s Tanner Lectures at Yale, makes two connected claims. First, beauty prompts replication: when we see something beautiful we want to draw it, describe it, photograph it, bring others to see it. Second, beauty decenters us. Borrowing Iris Murdoch’s idea of “unselfing,” Scarry argues that beauty pulls our attention away from ourselves, and in doing so trains the kind of attention justice requires. Her hinge is the double meaning of “fair.” It’s short, lyrical and full of examples. You don’t have to accept the whole argument to come away seeing differently.

2. Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2007)

The best philosophical defense of loving beautiful things. Only a Promise of Happiness takes its title from Stendhal’s line that beauty is only the promise of happiness, and argues that this is exactly right: finding something beautiful is a bet that getting to know it better will make our lives better, without knowing in advance how. Against Kant’s ideal of disinterested contemplation, Nehamas insists that beauty is bound up with desire and with the communities of taste we form around what we love. His long reading of Manet’s Olympia is a model of how to look at a picture. Elegant and personal, it’s the best book here for anyone who loves art and is tired of being told that such love is unsophisticated.

3. Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty (2015; English 2018)

The most provocative book on the list. Saving Beauty opens with the smooth: Jeff Koons’s polished sculptures, the iPhone, the depilated body. For Han, today’s culture has replaced beauty with the pleasing, surfaces that offer no resistance and simply invite a “like.” Real beauty, he argues, involves negativity: it unsettles, wounds and makes us linger rather than consume. As usual with Han, the book is aphoristic, short and more suggestive than rigorous. It’s also the sharpest account of why so much contemporary design feels pleasant and empty at the same time.

4. Roger Scruton, Beauty (2009)

The conservative case, made with real learning. In Beauty, Scruton moves from human beauty and natural beauty to everyday beauty (a well-laid table, for example) and artistic beauty, arguing that beauty is a real value, as important as truth and goodness, and that our culture’s flight from it into shock and kitsch is a moral loss as well as an aesthetic one. Readers who don’t share his politics will balk at some of the cultural pessimism. The philosophy is careful and clearly written, and the same year he made the case for a television audience in the BBC documentary Why Beauty Matters.

5. Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (2003)

The view from the art world. The Abuse of Beauty, from Danto’s Paul Carus Lectures, comes from the philosopher who argued that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box changed what art could be. Here he asks what role beauty can still play once we accept that art need not be beautiful at all. His answer distinguishes beauty that merely decorates a work from beauty that is part of its meaning, as when beauty helps a work express grief. It’s the essential counterweight to Scruton, from someone who welcomed the modern art Scruton distrusted.

6. C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art (2020)

The freshest idea in recent aesthetics. In Games: Agency as Art, Nguyen argues that games are the art form that works in the medium of agency: designers don’t just give us stories or images, they give us goals, abilities and obstacles, and the beauty lies in the shape of our own striving. A climbing route or a well-designed board game can be beautiful the way a dance is. The book also warns about gamification, where simplified scores and metrics crowd out richer values. It’s the best book here for thinking about beauty in what we do, not just what we look at.

7. Dominic McIver Lopes, Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value (2018)

The most technical book on the list, and a rewarding one. Being for Beauty challenges the long tradition that ties aesthetic value to pleasure. Lopes proposes instead a “network theory,” on which aesthetic values are reasons for action within practices: the choices of people working within aesthetic practices, from curators to designers. It is written for professional philosophers, but it takes seriously something the other books often skip, that beauty is made and judged by communities of people doing things.

8. Umberto Eco, ed., History of Beauty (2004)

The best book to browse. History of Beauty, edited by Eco, pairs hundreds of images with texts from Plato to the present, tracing how ideals of beauty changed across the history of the West: proportion, light, the sublime, the machine. It’s less an argument than an illustrated anthology, and it’s wonderful for that. Its companion volume, On Ugliness (2007), is just as good.

Honorable mentions

Six Names of Beauty by Crispin Sartwell (2004): beauty explored through six words for it from six languages and traditions.
The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han (2012; English 2017): Han’s companion argument that we have lost the capacity to encounter the other, in love as in art.

Worth subscribing

Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker: a newsletter that calls itself “a trustworthy guide to music, books, arts, media & culture,” by a critic and historian who is also the author of 12 books. His essay “The Most Dangerous Thing in Culture Right Now is Beauty” is a perfect companion to this list, and his Music: A Subversive History is a good place to start with his books. 298K+ subscribers on Substack.
Ellie Anderson, Ellie Anderson: a “philosophy professor, writer, and Overthink podcast co-host” whose Substack hosts video lecture courses and written reflections on Barthes, Kierkegaard and authenticity. Try “Re-reading Barthes after losing my dad” (a paid post with a public preview). 5.3K+ subscribers on Substack.

Conclusion: a reading order on beauty

On Beauty and Being Just: the case for why beauty matters.
Only a Promise of Happiness: what loving beautiful things involves.
Saving Beauty and Beauty: two diagnoses of what we’ve lost.
The Abuse of Beauty and Games: Agency as Art: beauty after modern art, and beyond it.

The revival these books represent is not nostalgia. Each of them, in its own way, argues that paying attention to beauty is a form of paying attention to the world, and that a culture built to please us is not the same as a culture that can move us.

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