Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts (with Dr. Daniel McInerny)

Dr. Daniel McInerny Daniel McInerny is associate professor and chair of the philosophy department at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. He is also a novelist and dramatist. As a scholar, he is foremost interested in reactivating an Aristotelian understanding of art as imitation, long out of favor among philosophers.

The human person is a truth seeker, and one of the most compelling ways human beings pursue truth is through the arts. In Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts, Dr. McInerny argues for an understanding of art as a form of inquiry into truth that proceeds by way of sensible beauty. Drawing upon the thought of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, McInerny argues for the unfashionable yet philosophically compelling view that art is essentially “mimetic,” imitative of human action. But what does it mean for art to imitate human action? It means that art imitates the way human beings by nature quest for fulfillment, or happiness. In questing for fulfillment, human life takes the form of a story, and so the arts—all the arts, from painting to music, from fiction to film—are storytelling arts whose beauty reveals the truth about human happiness.

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