Aesthetic Foundations

There is an explosion of works on the aesthetics of this and the aesthetics of that – sport, film, design, television, video games, atmosphere, graffiti, rap, food, etc. This contemporary diversification involves a confident and often facile use of such notions as aesthetic experience, aesthetic value, aesthetic appreciation, and so on. But this use in fact belies confusion about what these terms mean, or what we mean when we use them. The question of what makes any kind of encounter a particularly aesthetic one cuts to the heart of the discipline at its most complex. Not only are there divergent approaches to locating the aesthetic – in the properties of objects on the one hand, or the phenomenology of our experiences on the other – there is also a great deal of disagreement about what values arise from, or are involved in, these experiences, and how they differ from the ways we otherwise give our attention to the world. The VIIth International Wassard Elea Symposium is dedicated to a reconsideration of these core problems in aesthetics.