The Education of Desire: Can Beauty Teach Us What to Love?

Can recognising goodness as beautiful make us want to be good? Join the Edgar Wind Society for a conversation between Dr Panos Paris, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University, whose research explores beauty, ethics and moral character, and Professor Mark McInroy, Associate Professor of Contemporary and Systematic Theology at the University of Oxford, whose work examines the relationship between beauty, spiritual perception and the good. Bringing philosophical aesthetics into dialogue with theology, the conversation will explore whether beauty does more than simply give us pleasure: whether it can shape our moral judgements, cultivate our desires and draw us towards what is good. Can virtue itself be beautiful? Must our capacity to recognise beauty be educated? And what happens when beauty and goodness seem to come apart?