"Beauty, sooner or later, brings us into contact with our own capacity for making errors," she writes.

According to her notion, a person contemplating a beautiful object is "decentered" by their awareness of beauty outside of themselves. This helps them act ethically toward others.

The book, which is pitched for a more general audience that her other books, has sold well--it is in its second printing--but has faced mixed reviews.

Some critics claim that Scarry does not face the opposition head-on--feminist criticisms of beauty, for instance, are only mentioned obliquely, critics say, and she does not respond to their best arguments.

Others say that Scarry is just out of touch.

Since Scarry says beauty is a personal experience, tied up with the act of noticing, she relates anecdotes from her own life.

In On Beauty, Scarry provides a list of delicate, pastel pleasures: waving palm trees, vases, gardens, poems. But her critics ask, isn't there more to beauty than that? Isn't there beauty not only in symmetry but in roughness? Perhaps Scarry is mislabeling a particular brand of beauty as the universal type, they say.

New York University professor Suzie Linfield says that Scarry is just sketching a personal ideal. Although pleasant, Scarry's book "has no connection to the real world that we inhabit," Linfield wrote in The L.A. Times.