ABSTRACT
Environmental aesthetics is one of the major new fields of aesthetics that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. It focuses on philosophical issues concerning aesthetic appreciation of the world at large and, moreover, the world as constituted not simply by objects but also by environments. Thus, environmental aesthetics extends beyond the confines of the artworld and appreciation of works of art to aesthetic appreciation of environments, not only natural ones, but also human-influenced and human-constructed environments. However, although the field has come into its own relatively recently and treats human as well as natural environments, it has historical roots in earlier work on aesthetic appreciation of nature. To understand the current state of the field, it is useful to examine briefly this background and the developments that followed from it.
