aesthetics the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of art and the character of our experience of art and of the natural environment. It emerged as a separate field of philosophical inquiry during the eighteenth century in England and on the Continent. Recognition of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy coincided with the development of theories of art that grouped together painting, poetry, sculpture, music, and dance (and often landscape gardening) as the same kind of thing, les beaux arts, or the fine arts. Baumgarten coined the term ‘aesthetics’ in his Reflections on Poetry (1735) as the name for one of the two branches of the study of knowledge, i.e., for the study of sensory experience coupled with feeling, which he argued provided a different type of knowledge from the distinct, abstract ideas studied by ‘logic.’ He derived it from the ancient Greek aisthanomai (‘to perceive’), and ‘the aesthetic’ has always been intimately connected with sensory experience and the kinds of feelings it arouses.
Questions specific to the field of aesthetics are: Is there a special attitude, the aesthetic attitude, which we should take toward works of art and the natural environment, and what is it like? Is there a distinctive type of experience, an aesthetic experience, and what is it? Is there a special object of attention that we can call the aesthetic object? Finally, is there a distinctive value, aesthetic value, comparable with moral, epistemic, and religious values? Some questions overlap with those in the philosophy of art, such as those concerning the nature of beauty, and whether there is a faculty of taste that is exercised in judging the aesthetic character and value of natural objects or works of art.
Aesthetics also encompasses the philosophy of art. The most central issue in the philosophy of art has been how to define ‘art’. Not all cultures have, or have had, a concept of art that coincides with the one that emerged in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What justifies our applying our concept to the things people in these other cultures have produced? There are also many pictures (including paintings), songs, buildings, and bits of writing, that are not art. What distinguishes those pictures, musical works, etc., that are art from those that are not? Various answers have been proposed that identify the distinguishing features of art in terms of form, expressiveness, intentions of the maker, and social roles or uses of the object.
Since the eighteenth century there have been debates about what kinds of things count as ‘art.’ Some have argued that architecture and ceramics are not art because their functions are primarily utilitarian, and novels were for a long time not listed among the ‘fine arts’ because they are not embodied in a sensuous medium. Debates continue to arise over new media and what may be new art forms, such as film, video, photography, performance art, found art, furniture, posters, earthworks, and computer and electronic art. Sculptures these days may be made out of dirt, feces, or various discarded and mass-produced objects, rather than marble or bronze. There is often an explicit rejection of craft and technique by twentieth-century artists, and the subject matter has expanded to include the banal and everyday, and not merely mythological, historical, and religious subjects as in years past. All of these developments raise questions about the relevance of the category of ‘fine’ or ‘high’ art. Another set of issues in philosophy of art concerns how artworks are to be interpreted, appreciated, and understood. Some views emphasize that artworks are products of individual efforts, so that a work should be understood in light of the producer’s knowledge, skill, and intentions. Others see the meaning of a work as established by social conventions and practices of the artist’s own time, but which may not be known or understood by the producer. Still others see meaning as established by the practices of the users, even if they were not in effect when the work was produced. Are there objective criteria or standards for evaluating individual artworks? There has been much disagreement over whether value judgments have universal validity, or whether there can be no disputing about taste, if value judgments are relative to the tastes and interests of each individual (or to some group of individuals who share the same tastes and interests). A judgment such as ‘This is good’ certainly seems to make a claim about the work itself, though such a claim is often based on the sort of feeling, understanding, or experience a person has obtained from the work. A work’s aesthetic or artistic value is generally distinguished from simply liking it. But is it possible to establish what sort(s) of knowledge or experience(s) any given work should provide to any suitably prepared perceiver, and what would it be to be suitably prepared? It is a matter of contention whether a work’s aesthetic and artistic values are independent of its moral, political, or epistemic stance or impact. Philosophy of art has also dealt with the nature of taste, beauty, imagination, creativity, representation, expression, and expressiveness; style; whether artworks convey knowledge or truth; the nature of narrative and metaphor; the importance of genre; the ontological status of artworks; and the character of our emotional responses to art.
Work in the field has always been influenced by philosophical theories of language or meaning, and theories of knowledge and perception, and continues to be heavily influenced by psychological and cultural theory, including versions of semiotics, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, feminism, and Marxism. Some theorists in the late twentieth century have denied that the aesthetic and the ‘fine arts’ can legitimately be separated out and understood as separate, autonomous human phenomena; they argue instead that these conceptual categories themselves manifest and reinforce certain kinds of cultural attitudes and power relationships. These theorists urge that aesthetics can and should be eliminated as a separate field of study, and that ‘the aesthetic’ should not be conceived as a special kind of value. They favor instead a critique of the roles that images (not only painting, but film, photography, and advertising), sounds, narrative, and three-dimensional constructions have in expressing and shaping human attitudes and experiences.
See also AESTHETIC ATTITUDE , AESTHETIC PROPERTY , BEAUTY , EXPRESSION THEORY OF ART , INSTITUTIONAL THEORY OF AR. S.L.F.