Emerging in the philosophical lexicon during the 18th Century, the term ‘aesthetic’ has come to be used to designate: a kind of object, a kind of judgment, a kind of attitude, a kind of experience, and a kind of value. For the most part, aesthetic theories have divided over questions about these considerations: whether artworks are necessarily aesthetic objects; how to square the sensory basis of aesthetic judgments with the fact that we attempt to justify them rationally; how best to capture the elusive contrast between an aesthetic attitude and a practical one; and whether to define aesthetic experience according to its phenomenological or representational content.
Another point of divergence arises regarding the location of aesthetic quality: Is it located in an object as a property, or actually, in the subject as a feeling? Analytic theorists, such as Edmund Burke, believe that beauty is reducible to a list of attributes or formulae inherent in an object. Uniformity amidst variety, is an example of one such recipe for beauty. But by contrast, for the intuitionists, including Francis Hutcheson, beauty is disclosed by an inner mental state, and is a subjective rather than objective fact. Immanuel Kant stepped in and tried to show how we may be able to make judgments about beauty, which are based on subjective feelings, and yet still have universal validity. Basically, he suggested that it may be possible to say, 'this is beautiful', without having to finish it this statement with 'for me'. Thoughts - Where is the quality 'beauty' located? Can we talk about beauty in reference solely to objective qualities?
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