ABSTRACT
Does Aristotle’s analysis of poetry in his Poetics take account of specifically aesthetic emotions? The answer to this question depends in part on what one understands by “aesthetic emotion.” In this chapter, I canvas five ways in which the concept may be parsed. Of these, I dismiss one as uninteresting, and I reject three more as irrelevant to Aristotle’s view; the fifth, however, which is less commonly identified as a response to art, constitutes, I argue, an important insight on Aristotle’s part and allows for a positive answer to the question.
