ABSTRACT
Aesthetic experience has been approached from the naturalistic standpoint by Dewey, Prall, and Langfeld, from the analytic by Beardsley and Aldrich, from the phenomenological by Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne. Drawing from some of these sources, this chapter develops some ideas that have significant implications for aesthetics of environment. It elaborates three models of aesthetic experience, two of which have appeared after aesthetics emerged as a discipline and the third of which is still nascent. Environmental perception offers an especially rich opportunity for illuminating aesthetic experience. Paintings of landscapes offer particularly effective illustrations of environmental action, for they contain the same kinds of features that environmental designers must fashion, and this makes them instructive models. Phenomenological views as these treat space in its relation to the body and the environment, not as an independent quantity but as an intentional object in association with the perceiving body.
