This is an alphabetical index of articles about aesthetics.
- A Mathematician's Apology - A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful - Abhinavagupta - Aesthetic atrophy - Aesthetic emotions - Aesthetic interpretation - Aesthetic Realism - Aesthetic realism (metaphysics) - Aesthetic relativism - Aestheticism - Aestheticization of politics - Aesthetics - Aesthetics of music - Affect (philosophy) - Albert Hofstadter - Aleksei Losev - Alexander Gerard - Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten - Alexander Nehamas - American Society for Aesthetics - Anandavardhana - André Malraux - Anti-art - Applied aesthetics - Architectural design values - Aristotle - Art - Art and morality - Art as Experience - Art criticism - Art for art's sake - Arthur Danto - Arthur Schopenhauer - Arthur Schopenhauer's aesthetics - Artistic inspiration - August Wilhelm Schlegel - Authenticity (philosophy) - Authorial intent - Avant-garde - Avant-Garde and Kitsch - Axiology - Beauty - Béla Balázs - Benedetto Croce - Bernhard Alexander - British Society of Aesthetics - Calvin Seerveld - Camp (style) - Carl Dahlhaus - Catharsis - Christopher Janaway - Classicism - Classificatory disputes about art - Clive Bell - Comedy - Communication aesthetics - Conceptual art - Creativity - Critique of Judgment - Cultural sensibility - David Hume - David Prall - The Death of the Author - Decadence - Depiction - Dewitt H. Parker - Didacticism - Disgust - Distancing effect - Ecstasy (emotion) - Ecstasy (philosophy) - Edmund Burke - Eduard Hanslick - Edward Bullough - Either/Or - Elegance - Eli Siegel - Encyclopedia of Aesthetics - Entertainment - Eroticism - Essentialism - Essentially contested concept
- Fact-value distinction - Ferdinand Gotthelf Hand - Ferruccio Busoni - Fine art - Form follows function - Formalism (art) - Formalism (philosophy) - Found object - Four Dissertations - Francesco de Sanctis - Francis Hutcheson (philosopher) - François Hemsterhuis - Frank Sibley (philosopher) - Friedrich Nietzsche - Friedrich Schiller - Friedrich Schlegel - Georg Anton Friedrich Ast - Georg Brandes - Georg Friedrich Meier - Georg Mehlis - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - George Dickie (philosopher) - George Lansing Raymond - George Santayana - Georges Bataille - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - Gregory Currie - Grotesque body - Guy Sircello - Heinrich Gustav Hotho - Hermann Theodor Hettner - Hippias Major - Historicism - History of aesthetics - Humour - Iki (aesthetic ideal) - Immanuel Kant - Inherently funny word - International Association of Empirical Aesthetics - Irrealism (philosophy) - Jacques Derrida - Jacques Maritain - Jan Mukařovský - Japanese aesthetics - Jean-Baptiste Dubos - Jean-François Lyotard - Jerrold Levinson - Jo-ha-kyū - Johann Friedrich Herbart - Johann Gottfried Herder - John Dewey - John Hospers - José María Valverde - Joseph Margolis - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism - Józef Kremer - Judgement - Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger - Kendall Walton - Kitsch - Kunstreligion - Lectures on Aesthetics - Leo Tolstoy - Leonid Stolovich - Life imitating art - Line of beauty - List of aestheticians - List of art movements - List of culturally linked qualities of music - List of French artistic movements - List of Stuckist artists - Literary criticism - Liu Xie
- Madeleine Doran - Magnificence (History of ideas) - Martin Foss - Martin Heidegger - Marxist aesthetics - Masakazu Nakai - Mathematical beauty - Maurice Blanchot - Max Black - Metaphor in philosophy - Michael Sprinker - Mikhail Bakhtin - Milan Damnjanović (philosopher) - Mimesis - Miyabi - Modernism - Monroe Beardsley - Morris Weitz - Music - Musicology - Naivety - Nelson Goodman - Neo-romanticism - Neuroesthetics - Noël Carroll - Notes on "Camp" - Novalis - Objectivism - Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime - On the Genealogy of Morality - On the Sublime - Oscar Wilde - Outline of aesthetics - Paragone - Paul de Man - Perception - Performing arts - Philistinism - Philosophy and Literature (journal) - Philosophy and literature - Philosophy in a New Key - Philosophy of design - Philosophy of film - Philosophy of music - Phonaesthetics - Poetics - Poetics (Aristotle) - Poetry - Poshlost - Psychical distance - R. G. Collingwood - Rachida Triki - Rasa (aesthetics) - Relational Art - René Huyghe - Representation (arts) - Rhetoric (Aristotle) - Rhyme - Richard Meltzer - Richard Shusterman - Richard Wollheim - Roger de Piles - Roger North (17th century) - Roger Scruton - Roland Barthes - Roman Ingarden - Romanticism - Ronald Paulson - Rotation method - Rudolf Arnheim
- Semiotics - Sexual attraction - Sexual selection - Sexual selection in humans - Shibui - Social realism - Socialist realism - Sociological art - Sociology of art - Sophistication - Søren Kierkegaard - Sound poetry - Sound symbolism - Stanley Cavell - Stephen Pepper - Style (visual arts) - Sublime (philosophy) - Susanne Langer - Symbolism (arts) - Symposium (Plato) - Taruho Inagaki - Tasos Zembylas - Taste (sociology) - The Aesthetic Dimension - The Analysis of Beauty - The Art Movements - The arts and politics - The Book of Tea - The Critic as Artist - The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons - The medium is the message - The Origin of the Work of Art - The Romantic Manifesto - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - Theodor Lipps - Theodor Mundt - Theodor W. Adorno - Theological aesthetics - Theories of humor - Thomas Munro - Thomas Reid - Tomonobu Imamichi - Tudor Vianu - Umberto Eco - Vernon Lee - Victor Cousin - Virgil Aldrich - Vissarion Belinsky - Visual literacy - Visual rhetoric - Vulgarity - Wabi-sabi - Walter Benjamin - Walter Pater - Warren Shibles - What Is Art? - Wiener Moderne - William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr. - Władysław Tatarkiewicz - Wolfgang Fritz Haug - Work of art - Xiaozi - Yabo - Yiannis Psychopedis - Yusuf Balasaghuni - Zeami Motokiyo
Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and the nature of taste and, in a broad sense, incorporates the philosophy of art. Aesthetics examines the philosophy of aesthetic value, which is determined by critical judgments of artistic taste; thus, the function of aesthetics is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature".
"Bruces' Philosophers Song", also known as "The Bruces' Song", is a Monty Python song written and composed by Eric Idle that was a feature of the group's stage appearances and its recordings.
Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy, often witnessed within Western canon along with some postmodernist theory.
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
German philosophy, meaning philosophy in the German language or philosophy by German people, in its diversity, is fundamental for both the analytic and continental traditions. It covers figures such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and the Frankfurt School, who now count among the most famous and studied philosophers of all time. They are central to major philosophical movements such as rationalism, German idealism, Romanticism, dialectical materialism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, logical positivism, and critical theory. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is often also included in surveys of German philosophy due to his extensive engagement with German thinkers.
German Romanticism was the dominant intellectual movement of German-speaking countries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, influencing philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and criticism. Compared to English Romanticism, the German variety developed relatively early, and, in the opening years, coincided with Weimar Classicism (1772–1805).
Arthur Schopenhauer's aesthetics result from his philosophical doctrine of the primacy of the metaphysical Will as the Kantian thing-in-itself, the ground of life and all being. In his chief work, The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer thought that if consciousness or attention is fully engrossed, absorbed, or occupied with the world as painless representations or images, then there is no consciousness of the world as painful willing. Aesthetic contemplation of a work of art provides just such a state—a temporary liberation from the suffering that results from enslavement to the will [need, craving, urge, striving] by becoming a will-less spectator of "the world as representation" [mental image or idea]. Art, according to Schopenhauer, also provides essential knowledge of the world's objects in a way that is more profound than science or everyday experience.
In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.
Romantic poetry is the poetry of the Romantic era, an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. It involved a reaction against prevailing Enlightenment ideas of the 18th century, and lasted approximately from 1800 to 1850. Romantic poets rebelled against the style of poetry from the eighteenth century which was based around epics, odes, satires, elegies, epistles and songs.
Aesthetics of music is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of art, beauty and taste in music, and with the creation or appreciation of beauty in music. In the pre-modern tradition, the aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics explored the mathematical and cosmological dimensions of rhythmic and harmonic organization. In the eighteenth century, focus shifted to the experience of hearing music, and thus to questions about its beauty and human enjoyment of music. The origin of this philosophic shift is sometimes attributed to Baumgarten in the 18th century, followed by Kant.
This is a history of aesthetics.
Christopher Janaway is a philosopher and author. He earned degrees from the University of Oxford. Before moving to Southampton in 2005, Janaway taught at the University of Sydney and Birkbeck, University of London. His recent research has been on Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and aesthetics. His 2007 book Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy focuses on a critical examination of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Janaway currently lectures at the University of Southampton.
Philosophy of music is the study of "fundamental questions about the nature and value of music and our experience of it". The philosophical study of music has many connections with philosophical questions in metaphysics and aesthetics. The expression was born in the 19th century and has been used especially as the name of a discipline since the 1980s.
Lebensphilosophie was a dominant philosophical movement of German-speaking countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which had developed out of German Romanticism. Lebensphilosophie emphasised the meaning, value and purpose of life as the foremost focus of philosophy.
This is a list of articles in modern philosophy.
This is a list of articles in continental philosophy.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to aesthetics:
Andrew S. Bowie is Professor of Philosophy and German at Royal Holloway, University of London and Founding Director of the Humanities and Arts Research Centre (HARC).
The philosophical ideas and thoughts of Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner have been frequently described as Romantic.
