ABSTRACT
Introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the eighteenth century, the term aesthetic has come to apply to a variety of items, including judgments, attitudes, experiences, qualities, objects and values. These items – and any others that belong on the list – make up the aesthetic. Though philosophical questions particular to each of these items have arisen, this chapter will address the general question of what makes any of them aesthetic. Suppose we say that a general aesthetic theory is a theory capable of answering that
general question. Suppose we say that an aesthetically basic item is an item whose aesthetic status can be explained without appeal to any other aesthetic item, and which can therefore be appealed to in explanation of the aesthetic status of other aesthetic items. This will allow us to divide up general aesthetic theories according to which item or items each takes to be aesthetically basic. A judgment theory, for instance, will be a general aesthetic theory holding judgment to be aesthetically basic, an experience theory a general aesthetic theory holding experience to be aesthetically basic and so on. It will also allow us to divide up the history of theorizing about the aesthetic from the eighteenth century to the present day in the following way. The first general aesthetic theories were judgment theories. These were the theories of taste predominant mainly in Great Britain throughout the whole of the eighteenth century. Such theories reached a culmination, though arguably also an impasse, in Kant’s theory of taste, and were supplanted thereafter by attitude theories and experience theories. These latter held sway until the second half of the twentieth century, when George Dickie unleashed a series of celebrated attacks on attitude theories in general and on the variety of experience theory then prevalent. Soon thereafter aestheticians began gravitating to a variety of experience theory that survived Dickie’s attacks, and it is this theory that supplies the notion of the aesthetic commonly presupposed in present-day discussions of aesthetic matters. The distance traveled from the original eighteenth-century notion of the aesthetic
to this present-day one is considerable. That we have made progress in traveling it is not obvious.
