ABSTRACT
This chapter uses a novel computational method to track the evolution of aesthetic concepts across the anglophone eighteenth century. This method was developed by the Cambridge Concept Lab and allows one to inspect the alterations in conceptual structure over time from the dataset of Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). The chapter demonstrates that the supposed distinctions between aesthetic and moral concepts in the period have often been misunderstood, and it recovers the precise lexical environments in which both moral and aesthetic concepts circulated and attained coherence.
