That which was new was a refusal to credit the higher status of certain types, where in fact the taxonomy implied a preference for tragedy and the sublime to comedy and the Rococo. Scholars in the field have defined aesthetics as “critical reflection on art, culture and nature”. In modern English, the word “aesthetic” can…
Likewise aesthetic judgments seem often to be at the very least partly intellectual and interpretative. Modern aestheticians have asserted that may and desire were almost dormant in aesthetic experience, yet preference and choice have seemed important aesthetics to some 20th-century thinkers. The point is already made by Hume, but see Mary Mothersill, “Beauty and the…