ABSTRACT
Despite its technical and relatively modern coinage by a rationalist philo-
sopher in the mid-eighteenth century, the concept of the aesthetic has proven so very vague, variable, and contested that theorists working in the field it
supposedly defines have often expressed distinct frustration and sometimes
even skepticism concerning this concept and its cognates (such as aesthetic
attitude, aesthetic judgment). One source of the concept’s blurriness is that
the aesthetic ambiguously refers not only to distinctive but diverse objects of
perception (whether these be artworks, other artifacts, natural things, or even
simply to distinctive qualities such beauty, grace, etc. that can be found in
these and other objects). It also refers to a distinctive mode of consciousness that grasps such objects-the very term ‘‘aesthetic’’ being derived from the
Greek word for sensory perception and used by Baumgarten, its inventor, to
characterize what he regarded as our lower or more sensory faculties of
cognition. To complicate things further, ‘‘aesthetic’’ also applies to the dis-
tinctive discourse used to discuss those objects and modes of perception.
