Alan J. CainDenis Diderot (1713–84) criticized Hutcheson's application of uniformity amidst variety to geometrical objects and to theorems in his article on ‘Beautiful’ in the ‘Encyclopédie’.
Diderot preferred the system of Yves-Marie André (1675–1764), whose book ‘Essai sur le Beau’ was famous in its time. (I produced an open-access annotated translation in 2010; see the references in the next post.) André thought that in mathematics there was an essential geometrical beauty that was prior even to God and which had been used in the creation of the world. André saw beauty as a motivation for mathematicians from Euclid and Archimedes to Kepler and Huygens:
‘In a word, there is no academy in Europe where the love of mathematical beauty has not given in our days new conquests to the kingdom of truth.’
The attention paid to mathematical beauty in philosophical aesthetics seems to have dwindled in the 19th century with the domination in aesthetics of the philosophy of *art*, rather than of *beauty*, especially under G.W.F. Hegel's (1770–1831) influence. It revived in the first half of the 20th century in the work of philosophers like David Wight Prall (1886–1940) and Louis Arnaud Reid (1895–1986).
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