In case you didn't already figure it out from the address, this blog is about aesthetics, the philosophy of beauty and art. Diotima is a character from Plato's "Symposium." Socrates, desiring the truth about love, visited Diotima before "Symposium" starts, and he repeats her wisdom to the other men at the feast.
According to Diotima, love is the desire that springs from the absence of the good. The good desired by love is "Birth in Beauty." Artistic beauty, furthermore, is a thing that is made by the artist for the purpose of immortalizing some goodness.
Through a profound pun on Diotima's thought, we can extend her definition of beauty by including "Agape," the love of giving one's self to others, as a form of love. The birth in beauty that is desired by agape is the birth in beauty of the thing made: the beautifier desires a thing to be good, and makes it so by a birth in beauty.
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