The term comes from the Greek word αἰσθητική (aistetikê), which means "sensation, perception," created by joining two words αἴσθησις (Aisesis), "feeling, sensitivity," and - ικά (ica), "relating to") with different meanings. In common parlance 'aesthetic' denotes things related to beauty in general, while the philosophical aesthetics tries to resolve questions relating to the essence and perception of beauty, and can refer to the theory of art, or, in general, the study of perception . The aesthetic philosophy is therefore a branch of philosophy that studies and investigates:
- artistic expressions and their qualities, to define fine and bad. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1758) uses the word 'aesetic' to mean " the science of beauty, study of the art essence and its relationship with beauty and other added values";
- The origin of pure feeling and its manifestations which are Art. One could even say that the aesthetic philosophy is the science whose primary purpose is the reflection on the Art problems..
If aesthetics is the philosophical reflection on the Art, one of its problems concerns the values contained in the Art itself.
Although a number of different sciences is able to examine a work of art, aesthetics analyzes such contained values only from a philosophical perspective.
Lino Bertuzzi |
