What follows is a guest post by Rafe McGregor (Leeds Trinity University) ‘Aesthetic’ is a vague and frustrating term with a profligate and confused history. During the Enlightenment, the term was employed as a synonym for beauty, which was understood as taking many apparently unrelated forms, from the natural world to gardens to art to interior decorating and even mathematics. In the last two hundred years, it has frequently been conflated with the concept of the artistic. Consequently, philosophical aesthetics has been understood as sharing the same subject matter as art criticism. Both of these conceptions are too restrictive when it comes to the contemporary discipline. Bence Nanay offers a refreshingly simply definition in Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception when he states that aesthetics is “about ways of perceiving the world that are really rewarding and special” (p. 1). Nanay distinguishes the particular type of perception involved as FODP – Focused … Continue reading →