Outline of aesthetics
Encyclopedia
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to aesthetics:

Aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

– branch of philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 and axiology
Axiology
Axiology is the philosophical study of value. It is either the collective term for ethics and aesthetics—philosophical fields that depend crucially on notions of value—or the foundation for these fields, and thus similar to value theory and meta-ethics...

 concerned with the nature of beauty
Beauty
Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture...

.

Nature of aesthetics

Aesthetics can be described as all of the following:
  • Branch of philosophy –
    • Branch of axiology
      Axiology
      Axiology is the philosophical study of value. It is either the collective term for ethics and aesthetics—philosophical fields that depend crucially on notions of value—or the foundation for these fields, and thus similar to value theory and meta-ethics...

       –

Related academic areas

  • Aesthetics of music
    Aesthetics of music
    Traditionally, the aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics concentrated on the quality and study of the beauty and enjoyment of music. The origin of this philosophic sub-discipline is sometimes attributed to Baumgarten in the 18th century, followed by Kant...

  • Applied aesthetics
    Applied aesthetics
    Applied aesthetics is the application of the branch of philosophy of aesthetics to cultural constructs.-Film, television, and video:Film combines many diverse disciplines, each of which may have their own rules of aesthetics...

  • Architecture
    Architecture
    Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...

  • Art
    Art
    Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

  • Arts criticism
    Arts criticism
    Arts criticism is the process of describing, analyzing, interpreting, and judging works of art . It is distinct from art criticism due to its broader remit...

  • Gastronomy
    Gastronomy
    Gastronomy is the art or science of food eating. Also, it can be defined as the study of food and culture, with a particular focus on gourmet cuisine...

  • History of aesthetics (pre-20th-century)
    History of aesthetics (pre-20th-century)
    This description of the history of aesthetics before the twentieth century is based on an article from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition.-Greek Speculations:...

  • History of painting
    History of painting
    The history of painting reaches back in time to artifacts from pre-historic humans, and spans all cultures. It represents a continuous, though periodically disrupted tradition from Antiquity. Across cultures, and spanning continents and millennia, the history of painting is an ongoing river of...

  • Painting
    Painting
    Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

  • Philosophy of film
    Philosophy of film
    The philosophy of film is a branch of aesthetics within the discipline of philosophy that seeks to understand the most basic questions regarding film.- History :...

  • Philosophy of music
    Philosophy of music
    Philosophy of music is the study of fundamental questions regarding music. The philosophical study of music has many connections with philosophical questions in metaphysics and aesthetics.Some basic questions in the philosophy of music are:...

  • Poetry
    Poetry
    Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

  • Sculpture
    Sculpture
    Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...

  • Theory of painting
    Theory of painting
    The idea of founding a theory of painting after the model of music theory, was famously suggested by Goethe in 1807, and gained much regard among the avant-garde artists of 1920s, the Weimar culture period, like Paul Klee.-From Goethe to Klee:...


Concepts in aesthetics

  • Aesthetic emotions
    Aesthetic emotions
    Aesthetic emotions refer to emotions that are felt during aesthetic activity and/or appreciation. These emotions may be of the everyday variety or may be specific to aesthetic contexts. Examples of the latter include the sublime, the beautiful, and the kitsch...

  • Art manifesto
    Art manifesto
    The art manifesto has been a recurrent feature associated with the avant-garde in Modernism. Art manifestos are mostly extreme in their rhetoric and intended for shock value to achieve a revolutionary effect. They often address wider issues, such as the political system...

  • Art object
    Work of art
    A work of art, artwork, art piece, or art object is an aesthetic item or artistic creation.The term "a work of art" can apply to:*an example of fine art, such as a painting or sculpture*a fine work of architecture or landscape design...

  • Avant-garde
    Avant-garde
    Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....

  • Beauty
    Beauty
    Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture...

  • Boring
    Boredom
    Boredom is an emotional state experienced when an individual is without any activity or is not interested in their surroundings. The first recorded use of the word boredom is in the novel Bleak House by Charles Dickens, written in 1852, in which it appears six times, although the expression to be a...

  • Comedy
    Comedy
    Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...

  • Camp
    Camp (style)
    Camp is an aesthetic sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its taste and ironic value. The concept is closely related to kitsch, and things with camp appeal may also be described as being "cheesy"...

  • Creativity
    Creativity
    Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs...

  • Cute
    Cuteness
    Cuteness is the appeal commonly associated with neoteny.- Cuteness effects :Humans respond favorably to a neotenized appearance A neotenized appearance elicits sympathy from humans as well as protective urges...

  • Discordant
  • Disgust
    Disgust
    Disgust is a type of aversion that involves withdrawing from a person or object with strong expressions of revulsion whether real or pretended. It is one of the basic emotions and is typically associated with things that are regarded as unclean, inedible, infectious, gory or otherwise offensive...

    ing
  • Ecstasy
    Ecstasy (philosophy)
    Ecstasy, from the Ancient Greek, έκ-στασις , "to be or stand outside oneself, a removal to elsewhere ."-Hellenic philosophy:...

  • Elegance
    Elegance
    Elegance is a synonym for beauty that has come to acquire the additional connotations of unusual effectiveness and simplicity. It is frequently used as a standard of tastefulness particularly in the areas of visual design, decoration, the sciences, and the esthetics of mathematics...

  • Eroticism
    Eroticism
    Eroticism is generally understood to refer to a state of sexual arousal or anticipation of such – an insistent sexual impulse, desire, or pattern of thoughts, as well as a philosophical contemplation concerning the aesthetics of sexual desire, sensuality and romantic love...

  • Entertainment
    Entertainment
    Entertainment consists of any activity which provides a diversion or permits people to amuse themselves in their leisure time. Entertainment is generally passive, such as watching opera or a movie. Active forms of amusement, such as sports, are more often considered to be recreation...

  • Fun
    Recreation
    Recreation is an activity of leisure, leisure being discretionary time. The "need to do something for recreation" is an essential element of human biology and psychology. Recreational activities are often done for enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure and are considered to be "fun"...

  • Gaze
    Gaze
    Gaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses some sense of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object...

  • Harmony
    Harmony
    In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...

  • Humour
    Humour
    Humour or humor is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement...

  • Interpretation
    Interpretation (aesthetics)
    An interpretation in philosophy of art, is an explanation of the meaning of some work of art. An interpretation expresses an understanding of a work of art, a poem, performance, or piece of literature.- One or many :...

  • Judgment
    Judgment
    A judgment , in a legal context, is synonymous with the formal decision made by a court following a lawsuit. At the same time the court may also make a range of court orders, such as imposing a sentence upon a guilty defendant in a criminal matter, or providing a remedy for the plaintiff in a civil...

  • Kitsch
    Kitsch
    Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that...

  • Literary merit
    Literary merit
    Literary merit is a quality generally applied to the genre of literary fiction. A work is said to have literary merit if it is a work of quality, that is if it has some aesthetic value....

  • Mathematics and art
    Mathematics and art
    Mathematics and art have a long historical relationship. The ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks knew about the golden ratio, regarded as an aesthetically pleasing ratio, and incorporated it into the design of monuments including the Great Pyramid, the Parthenon, the Colosseum...

  • Mathematical beauty
    Mathematical beauty
    Many mathematicians derive aesthetic pleasure from their work, and from mathematics in general. They express this pleasure by describing mathematics as beautiful. Sometimes mathematicians describe mathematics as an art form or, at a minimum, as a creative activity...

  • Perception
    Perception
    Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...

  • Pretentious
    Pretentious
    Pretentious person means a person pretending to be someone who he is not just for the sake of showing that he is a higher intellectual than others....

  • Rasa
  • Style
  • Sublime
    Sublime (philosophy)
    In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic...

  • Taste
    Taste (sociology)
    Taste as an aesthetic, sociological, economic and anthropological concept refers to a cultural patterns of choice and preference. While taste is often understood as a biological concept, it can also be reasonably studied as a social or cultural phenomenon. Taste is about drawing distinctions...

  • Tragedy
    Tragedy
    Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...


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Theories of aesthetics and art movements

  • Symbolism
    Symbolism (arts)
    Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...

  • Romanticism
    Romanticism
    Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

  • Historicism
    Historicism (art)
    Historicism refers to artistic styles that draw their inspiration from copying historic styles or artisans. After neo-classicism, which could itself be considered a historicist movement, the 19th century saw a new historicist phase marked by a return to a more ancient classicism, in particular in...

  • Classicism
    Classicism
    Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...

  • Modernism
    Modernism
    Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

  • Postmodernism
    Postmodernism
    Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...

  • Psychoanalytic theory
    Psychoanalytic theory
    Psychoanalytic theory refers to the definition and dynamics of personality development which underlie and guide psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy. First laid out by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work...


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Philosophers of art and aestheticians

  • Theodor W. Adorno
    Theodor W. Adorno
    Theodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist known for his critical theory of society....

  • Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
    Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
    Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten was a German philosopher.-Biography:Baumgarten was born in Berlin as the fifth of seven sons of the pietist pastor of the garrison, Jacob Baumgarten and his wife Rosina Elisabeth....

  • Arthur Schopenhauer
    Arthur Schopenhauer
    Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...

  • David Hume
    David Hume
    David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...

  • Friedrich Nietzsche
    Friedrich Nietzsche
    Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...

  • G. W. F. Hegel
    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...

  • Immanuel Kant
    Immanuel Kant
    Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....

  • Paul Klee
    Paul Klee
    Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism...

  • Jean-François Lyotard
    Jean-François Lyotard
    Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...

  • Joseph Margolis
    Joseph Margolis
    Joseph Zalman Margolis is an American philosopher. A radical historicist, he has published many books critical of the central assumptions of Western philosophy, and has elaborated a robust form of relativism....

  • Martin Heidegger
    Martin Heidegger
    Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...

  • Nelson Goodman
    Nelson Goodman
    Henry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism and aesthetics.-Career:...

  • Richard Wollheim
    Richard Wollheim
    Richard Arthur Wollheim was a British philosopher noted for original work on mind and emotions, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting...

  • Thierry de Duve
    Thierry de Duve
    Thierry de Duve is a Belgian professor of modern art theory and contemporary art theory, and both actively teaches and publishes books in the field...

  • George Santayana
    George Santayana
    George Santayana was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. A lifelong Spanish citizen, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States and identified himself as an American. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters...

  • Hubert Dreyfus
    Hubert Dreyfus
    Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley....

  • John Dewey
    John Dewey
    John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...

  • Friedrich Schiller
    Friedrich Schiller
    Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life , Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe...

  • György Lukács
  • Jacques Maritain
    Jacques Maritain
    Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher. Raised as a Protestant, he converted to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times and is a prominent drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...

  • Bernard Bosanquet
    Bernard Bosanquet (philosopher)
    Bernard Bosanquet was an English philosopher and political theorist, and an influential figure on matters of political and social policy in late 19th and early 20th century Britain...

  • Clive Bell
    Clive Bell
    Arthur Clive Heward Bell was an English Art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group.- Origins :Clive Bell was born in East Shefford, Berkshire, in 1881...

  • I. A. Richards
    I. A. Richards
    Ivor Armstrong Richards was an influential English literary critic and rhetorician....

  • José Ortega y Gasset
    José Ortega y Gasset
    José Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist working during the first half of the 20th century while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism and dictatorship. He was, along with Nietzsche, a proponent of the idea of perspectivism.-Biography:José Ortega y Gasset was...

  • R. G. Collingwood
    R. G. Collingwood
    Robin George Collingwood was a British philosopher and historian. He was born at Cartmel, Grange-over-Sands in Lancashire, the son of the academic W. G. Collingwood, and was educated at Rugby School and at University College, Oxford, where he read Greats...

  • David Prall
    David Prall
    David Wight Prall was a philosopher of art at the University of California.- Publications :* Concerning the Nature of Philosophy Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 15 :127-130...

  • Dewitt H. Parker
    Dewitt H. Parker
    Dewitt H. Parker was a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. He published works on metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics.-Books:* The self and nature*The Principles of Aesthetics -Journal articles:...

  • Edward Bullough
    Edward Bullough
    Edward Bullough was a psychologist and philosopher of art. He was a lecturer at Cambridge on modern languages and ultimately was named Serena Professor of Italian in 1933. He is most noted for the idea of psychical distance.- Publications :...

  • Irving Singer
    Irving Singer
    Irving Singer is Professor of Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Singer is the author of numerous books on a diverse range of topics, but his major interests are cinema, love, sexuality, and the philosophy of George Santayana...

  • Roger Fry
    Roger Fry
    Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism...

  • Stephen Pepper
    Stephen Pepper
    Stephen C. Pepper was an American philosopher.-References:*http://people.sunyit.edu/~harrell/Pepper/Index.htm*http://people.sunyit.edu/~harrell/Pepper/pep_efron.htm-External Links:...

  • Susanne Langer
    Susanne Langer
    Susanne Katherina Langer was an American philosopher of mind and of art who was influenced by Ernst Cassirer and Alfred North Whitehead. She was one of the first women to achieve an academic career in philosophy and the first to be popularly and professionally recognized as an American philosopher...

  • Theodor Lipps
    Theodor Lipps
    Theodor Lipps was a German philosopher. Lipps was one of the most influential German university professors of his time, attracting many students from other countries. Lipps was very concerned with conceptions of art and the aesthetic, focusing much of his philosophy around such issues...

  • Thomas Munro
    Thomas Munro
    Major-general Sir Thomas Munro, 1st Baronet KCB was a Scottish soldier and colonial administrator. He was an East India Company Army officer and statesman.-Lineage:...

  • Curt John Ducasse
    Curt John Ducasse
    Curt John Ducasse was a philosopher who taught at the University of Washington and Brown University.Ducasse was born in Angoulême, France. He is most notable for his work in philosophy of mind and aesthetics, and his influence can be seen in the work of Roderick Chisholm and Wilfrid Sellars...

  • Arthur Danto
    Arthur Danto
    Arthur Coleman Danto Arthur Coleman Danto Arthur Coleman Danto (born January 1, 1924 is an American art critic, and professor of philosophy. He is best known as the influential, long-time art critic for The Nation and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he...

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External links

  • Aesthetics
  • Aesthetics, Outline of
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