Aesthetics

This branch of philosophy focuses, first and foremost, on the nature of esthetic taste, the nature of artistic and esthetic judgments, the meaning of esthetic and artistic value, the metaphysical status of esthetic traits, the status of esthetic justification or clarification, and so on. In this context, we discuss psychological and cognitive terms, such as esthetic pleasure and experience; lack of conceptualization; the possibility of formalistic judgment; interests-free esthetic judgment; etc. A second focus of esthetics is concerned with sub-issues of esthetic judgment, such as the mutual influence between the esthetic judgment and other kinds of criticism, the differences between artistic mediums and their behavior (i.e., iconic versus non-iconic representations, visual versus textual representations, comedy versus drama), the place of the author’s intention in artwork interpretation, the nature of feelings that arise by fictional artwork, and more.