Introduction

This chapter demonstrates the relevance of the philosophical analysis of aesthetic experience or judgment to understanding the extended mind and pluralism. It also demonstrates a way of doing aesthetics and philosophy of art that contributes to conceptions of mind and arguably key to contemporary philosophical enquiry, both theoretical and applied. The chapter provides the concept of aesthetic reflective judgment that emerges a theoretical basis for a social aesthetics which diametrically opposed to aesthetic judgment conceived as a final verdict. Nanay's focus on experience continues this move away from aesthetic judgment conceived as some kind of ultimate standard, and is given further illumination by Kneller's account of the particular communicative capacity facilitated by the structure of aesthetic reflective judgment. Valid aesthetic pleasures emerge in the life of a community through a process of comparative aesthetic reflective judgment facilitating the possibility of shared experience.