My PhD: Aesthetic Perception, Nature and Experience
My thesis presents an argument for the perceptual nature of aesthetic experience and the importance of nature as a paradigm of aesthetic experience. Embedding the aesthetic in perception helps make sense of the idea that the aesthetic forms part of our daily lives and is not only linked to rarefied objects. Nature is important in this regard because its intentionality is non-human and therefore our aesthetic experience of it need not require a kind of higher order intellectualism that artistic objects might be thought to require. The perceptual account put forward is based on a realist account of aesthetic properties, in the sense that they are based on non-aesthetic, objective features. The thesis also presents an argument that considers aesthetic experience to be perceptually rich. Perceptual, aesthetic experience is thus not reduced to an austere account of aesthetic formalism. Rather, aesthetic perception is a kind of whole formalism which captures the Kantian ideas of perceptual order, unity, harmony and diversity that integrate to form the object that's experienced aesthetically and perceptually. Aesthetic perception thus defined is linked disjunctively with non-perceptual and non-aesthetic subjective response, integrating affective and cognitive elements in wider aesthetic experience.
My Phd was supervised by Emily Brady, Peter Lewis, Matt Nudds and Dave Ward.
My Phd was supervised by Emily Brady, Peter Lewis, Matt Nudds and Dave Ward.