Abstract

One of the distinctive features of Hume's presentation of disinterested aesthetic pleasure in the Treatise is its basis in sympathy as the communication of sentiment between a spectator and specifically an owner of a beautiful object. By tracking the recurring example of the beautiful house, which properly provides pleasure only to the owner who dwells in it, I reconsider the operation of sympathy in relation to property. My central argument is that sympathy underwrites the disinterested sociality of judgments of taste for Hume not by enabling the spectator to feel a pleasure that corresponds to the owner's pleasure in beauty but rather by rendering this pleasure as a sentiment that does not originally belong to anyone and does not exist prior to its sympathetic communication