Aesthetics

Aesthetics also spelled esthetics or asthetics is a branch of value theory which studies sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment or taste. What makes something beautiful, sublime, disgusting, fun, cute, silly, entertaining, pretentious, discordant, harmonious, boring, humorous, or tragic. Aesthetics is closely allied with, or perhaps synonymous with, the philosophy of art.

Judgments of aesthetic value seem to often involve many other kinds of issues as well. In disgust it seems clear that sensory detection is linked in instinctual ways to facial expressions, and even behaviors like the gag reflex. Yet disgust can often be a learned or cultural issue too; as Darwin pointed out, seeing a stripe of soup in a man's beard is disgusting even though soup is not itself disgusting. Aesthetic judgments may be linked to emotions or, like emotions, partially embodied in our physical reactions. Seeing a sublime view of a landscape may make us stop and softly say "wow" while our heart skips a beat and then races faster and our eyes widen. These subconscious reactions may even be partly constitutive of what makes our judgment a judgment that the landscape is sublime.