ABSTRACT
Aesthetics is natural for anyone embarking on a study to want to know his terms of reference, but we should not insist on having them made precise at the outset, when that will prejudice the results of our enquiries. Since the eighteenth century, when people started writing full-length books on aesthetics and the name itself was introduced, it is on the grounds of aesthetic judgement and the nature of aesthetic experience that aestheticians have chiefly concentrated. The aesthetician can group various works of art and pleasing or displeasing products of nature under various heads, and may try to account raptures over Botticelli's Birth of Venus by showing that they fall under a law relating wavy shapes, colour combinations. If aesthetics is the study of the things we assess aesthetically, and of our aesthetic assessment of them, what contribution has philosophy to make to it.
