Talk:Aesthetics

The 'Esthetic' spelling is demonstrably incorrect

It’s spelt aesthetic because it’s an ‘ae’ sound at the start of the word not a ‘e’ sound. The correct character is this ‘æ’ related article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dr zoidberg590 (talk • contribs) 19:41, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

Changes to the article

I was thinking about implementing changes to this article with the hope of moving it in the direction of GA status. The article has several unreferenced paragraphs and the maintenance tags 5x citation needed and 1x further explanation needed. As already pointed out by Patrick Welsh in an earlier discussion, the selection, relative weight, and organization of topics are odd, like a history section talking only about Aristotle.

I think it would be good to have a central section to give a concise presentation of the most important basic concepts of aesthetics, such as aesthetic property, aesthetic value (including but not limited to beauty), universals, aesthetic object, aesthetic experience, aesthetic attitude, aesthetic judgment, and taste. Some of these concepts are currently not discussed at all while the discussion of others is spread around various sections without a clear organizing principle. For example, aesthetic experience is discussed in the section "Aesthetics and the philosophy of art" even though this concept is not particularly relevant for distinguishing the two terms. Another helpful reorganization might be to have a section called "Definition" to address the nature of the field and cover the topics of the sections "Aesthetics and the philosophy of art" and "Etymology" (which is not important enough to merit a separate section per WP:BALANCE).

I think the article should have a separate section called "Art" since it is such a central topic. It could include a discussion of the definition and ontology of art and the problems of creation, representation, meaning, and interpretation of works of art. Some of these topics are currently only covered in a one-sided manner in the section "New Criticism and "The Intentional Fallacy"". It probably should also give a short explanation of the most important forms of "the arts", like visual arts, literature, and performance arts, maybe in a subsection. There are various schools of thought that should be discussed somewhere, like realism, relativism, essentialism, contextualism, constructivism, aestheticism, feminism, Marxism, and postmodernism.

The term "derivative" in the section title "Derivative forms of aesthetics" is odd and possibly WP:NPOV. Since several subsections discuss aesthetics in specific fields, like science and mathematics, it could be renamed to "In various fields". It should include additional information on psychology, sociology, religion, politics, education, and everyday life. The subsection "Aesthetic ethics" could be moved there as well.

Apologies for the lengthy explanation. There are more things to consider, but they can be addressed later since the ones mentioned so far will already involve a lot of work to implement. I was hoping to get some feedback on these ideas and possibly other suggestions. Phlsph7 (talk) 16:21, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

I strongly support this. In current form, it's difficult to make even incremental improvements to the article, which needs structural attention. Revisions along the lines suggested here would be a huge improvement.

Cheers, Patrick 🐈‍⬛ (talk) 18:31, 19 June 2025 (UTC)