The present study is a first attempt to experimentally test the impact of two specific social factors, namely social conformity pressure and a sense of being watched, on participants' judgments of the artistic quality of aesthetic objects. We manipulated conformity pressure with a test form in which a photograph of each stimulus was presented together with unanimously low (downward pressure) or...

Is the sense of smell a source of aesthetic perception? Traditional philosophical aesthetics has centered on vision and audition but eliminated smell for its subjective and inherently affective character. This article dismantles the myth that olfaction is an unsophisticated sense. It makes a case for olfactory aesthetics by integrating recent insights in neuroscience with traditional expertise ...

The practice of urban commoning continues to tickle the imagination activists and academics alike. Urban commoning’s aesthetic dimension, yet, has not been fully understood. This contribution seeks fill such gap approaches aesthetics in literal sense: That which presents itself sense perception. article thus asks: To what extent may practices that are dedicated disclosure unheard voices (hence ...

The question of aesthetic taste and its relationship to moral worth was a common subject of eighteenth-century moralists and philosophers. Hermione Lee quotes Shaftesbury, Burke and Hume to show that, in the eighteenth century, ‘it was felt that taste for art, taste for literature, and taste or nature, were related, and were all three suggestive of one's moral worth.’ Critics have varied in the...

Movement and, more particularly, kinesthesia as a modality and as a metaphor has become of interest at the intersection of phenomenology and cognitive science. In this paper I wish to combine three historically related strands, aisthêsis, kinesthesis and aesthetics, to advance an argument concerning the aesthetic value of certain somatic sensations. Firstly, by capitalizing on a recent regard f...

We argue that environmental aesthetics, and specifically the concept of aesthetic integrity, should play a central role in a public environmental philosophy designed to communicate about environmental problems in an effective manner. After developing the concept of the ‘‘aesthetic integrity’’ of the environment, we appeal to empirical research to show that it contributes significantly to people...

This article argues for an aesthetic approach to resisting oppression based on judgments of bodily unattractiveness. Philosophical theories have often suggested that appropriate aesthetic judgments should converge on sets of objects consensually found to be beautiful or ugly. The convergence of judgments about human bodies, however, is a significant source of injustice, because people judged to...

This article examines the relatively new field of everyday aesthetics and its use in artistic works. I argue anyone can have an aesthetic experience regardless of the source, in the sense that it can happen during daily activities and from the appreciation of banal objects. In addition, contemporary art explores the significance of the prosaic and how people react to a new approach that often r...

Geoaesthetics is the project of making aesthetic sense of nature through geological phenomena. The aesthetic appreciation of nature has recently become urgent because of the serious influence of the natural environment on human beings. The author’s geoaesthetical research is categorized into three problems: art in geology or geology in the arts as the close relationship between art and geology,...