ABSTRACT
The fact that aesthetic experience is often pleasurable may seem to imply that
its value is also best analyzed as a type of pleasure. The expanded reasoning
would proceed: if aesthetic experience is valuable, and if it is pleasurable, and if
pleasure is avalue, then it follows that the value of aesthetic experience lies in its
particular brand of pleasure. Nowhere would this reasoning appear more appropriate than with activities whose pleasures seem obvious success cri-
teria-such as tasting, eating, and drinking. The aesthetic standing of gus-
tatory activity is debatable, of course; but if eating affords aesthetic
experience, then it would seem that it should be evaluated by hedonic criteria.
