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Aesthetics is commonly known as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgment of sentiment and taste. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical reflection on art, culture and nature." Aesthetics is a subdiscipline of axiology, a branch of philosophy, and is closely associated with the philosophy of art. Aesthetics studies new ways of seeing and of perceiving the world. Judgments of aesthetic value clearly rely on our ability to discriminate at a sensory level. Aesthetics examines what makes something beautiful, sublime, disgust, fun, cute, silly, entertaining, pretentious, discordant, harmonious, boring, humor, or tragic. Immanuel Kant, writing in 1790, observes of a man "If he says that canary wine is agreeable he is quite content if someone else corrects his terms and reminds him to say instead: It is agreeable to me," because "Everyone has his own (sense of) taste". The case of "beauty" is different from mere "agreeableness"...
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Created by Metaweb Oct 22, 2006
Last edited by philosophygeek May 2, 2008
 

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