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This short, concluding chapter sheds light on the differences between modern and ancient Greek aesthetics regarding, in particular, the conceptualization of aesthetic response. According to the author, these differences point the way for contemporary thought to further explore and redefine the aesthetic.

Researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds propose competing explanations of aesthetic response. Though sometimes heated, these disagreements are not fundamental. Fundamental disagreement occurs when researchers from different backgrounds have different, even incompatible, conceptions of the phenomenon to be explained. There is currently a great deal of fundamental disagreement in research into aesthetic response. The remedy is ideally integration, wherein researchers in the different aesthetic sciences and humanistic studies converge on a common conception of what they are trying to explain, even if they continue to disagree about how to explain it. If it is to be successful, this convergence will require that researchers in both the scientific and humanistic disciplines be sensitive to the limitations that are inherent in each of these two different approaches. On the one hand, we should not expect a conception of aesthetic response that is productive for research across disciplines to be given a precise a priori definition. Aesthetic science, by identifying the mechanisms behind our aesthetic responses, tells us a great deal about the nature of this phenomenon that we would otherwise be unable to discover. On the other hand, aesthetic science must acknowledge that aesthetic response is embedded in critical practice, about which the humanities have a lot to say.

How should the idea of the aesthetic appreciation of nature be understood? The answer proposed is: as the aesthetic appreciation of nature as nature(more precisely, as what nature actually is). I elaborate this conception by elucidating the concept of nature (which covers both pristine nature and nature affected by humanity), by distinguishing different senses of a response to nature as nature, by presenting an account of what constitutes an aesthetic response to something, and by investigating the relevance of knowledge of nature, especially scientific knowledge, to nature's aesthetic appreciation.

This chapter examines the ways in which ‘aesthetic response’ has been described and used within the philosophy, psychology, and sociology of music education, and examines relevant research that has sought to identify the nature and developmental trajectory in children's musical engagement within and across these fields. In so doing, it explores a view of aesthetic response as ‘performative’ and constitutive of identity, and considers the implications of this view for theories of children's musical development.

This chapter is an empirical psychologist’s reaction to the idea that aesthetic responses are at root a kind of emotion. It follows a natural strategy: it takes a framework that was developed to describe emotion, and asks how well it applies to aesthetic responses. Part of the aim is to offer a basis for judging how similar or different the aesthetic and the emotional are. However, the exercise also serves other purposes. Frameworks derived from emotion research offer structured ways of describing aesthetic responses, and that seems to be interesting in its own right. The approach is rooted in empirical psychology, but it breaks with the discipline in one key respect. Empirical psychology as such expects claims to be supported by controlled observation. The state of the evidence in this area makes it impossible to say very much without violating that norm. Broadly speaking, the ideas that are put forward should be considered as proposals, which ought to be followed up with empirical research. That is sometimes explicit, but often implicit. There are many points where the issues raised connect with more traditionally philosophical discussions. Some of the connections are too striking to ignore, but in general, it seems more useful for an empirical psychologist to concentrate on the issues that his home discipline is placed to clarify. Focusing on aesthetic responses rather than something more abstract is an example of that principle. Empirical psychology is not well-equipped to address traditional questions in aesthetics such as ‘what constitutes art?’; but describing aesthetic responses is something it can do. Readers are invited to consider how that project relates to other perspectives.

The study of aesthetics, involving the creation and appreciation of art and beauty, has been approached in two distinct ways. ‘Speculative aesthetics’ is concerned with high-level, abstract questions such as the meaning and nature of art, and is dealt with in the disciplines of philosophy, art history, and art criticism. ‘Empirical aesthetics’, on the other hand, is the scientific study of the nature of appreciation. Adherents of these two approaches may well differ about the suitability of the scientific approach, about what constitutes a work of art and is therefore worthy of investigation, and even about what constitutes an ‘aesthetic response’. This chapter focuses explicitly on the second approach: the central concern is to review the wide range of empirical studies that have been conducted from various theoretical points of view on the aesthetic response to music.

Empirical research on aesthetic response poses two challenges to philosophy. The more familiar challenge is that scientific explanations of aesthetic responses debunk what we take to be our reasons for those responses. One reaction to this challenge is an accommodation strategy that seeks to reconcile the scientific findings with an improved understanding of our normative reasons. This paper presents a more fundamental challenge: some empirical research challenges the role of reasoning in aesthetic response. This challenges the accommodation strategy and suggests that philosophy should adopt a more radical naturalism about aesthetic response.

This chapter identifies two aims of criticism. First, it identifies a constitutive aim. All criticism of the arts, it argues, has this aim, and having this aim is part of what makes a remark or piece of writing an instance of art criticism. It also identifies a non-constitutive aim of criticism. Both aims are related to appreciation. The chapter therefore begins by providing an account of what it is to appreciate art. The account of the aims of criticism that emerges from this discussion enables us to explain why critics do what the rival views canvassed in Chapter 1 (and the objections to them raised there) point out that they do. The chapter concludes by providing an account of the endowments that make someone good at criticism, and compares this account with Hume’s discussion of the characteristics of true judges of art.

This chapter sets out the aims and objectives of Part 4 of this book, which is to look closer at the nature of aesthetic judgment. It addresses questions such as: are listeners' judgments of music reliable? What criteria do listeners rely on in such judgments? Are there individual differences in how these criteria are weighted? Could individual differences be explained by expertise? Which aesthetic criteria tend to be most influential? How are aesthetic judgments affected by contextual factors? How do aesthetic judgment, preference, and emotion relate to one another? The chapter then discusses what a working definition of aesthetic response may look like.

This chapter considers the notion of aesthetic attitude. It asks: how can we be sure that there is such a thing as an aesthetic attitude? Is there evidence that our perception of an event or object can change depending on the attitude we adopt towards it, or that there is a change in brain activity? Few music psychologists have adopted the position that aesthetic responses are distinct or that they involve an aesthetic attitude. Therefore, to investigate these notions in more detail, and to understand the kind of perceptual dimensions that may come into play, the chapter turns to a neighbouring field for guidance, i.e. philosophical aesthetics.

This chapter focuses on empirical aesthetics, which can be regarded as one of the oldest subfields in psychology. The most important contribution to the domain was made by the scholar Daniel Berlyne, who launched the ‘New Empirical Aesthetics’. In accordance with the prevailing ‘Zeitgeist’ of the 1960s, Berlyne focuses mainly on the notion of autonomic arousal as opposed to discrete emotions; he notes that art influences its perceivers mainly by manipulating their arousal. Berlyne further suggests that listeners' preferences are related to arousal in the form of an inverted U-shaped curve, sometimes referred to as the Wundt curve. The chapter then discusses what empirical aesthetics has contributed to the understanding of aesthetic responses to music.

This chapter explores the layered status and reception of South Asian art in US culture. It begins by setting the context for museum displays, explaining both the strategies used in exhibiting cultures and the power-play that museum organizers engage in, to suggest that what the public sees is not “just art” but the careful showcasing and eliciting of aesthetic responses by “mediating between art and the visitor.” Next, using three different exhibitions curated by the Sackler Gallery—“Devi The Great Goddess,” “India Through the Lens,” and the “Chola Bronzes”—the chapter explains how the author's Asian Americanness, that is, “the politics of her own identity as an insider-outsider, an individual with a hyphenated status, and a woman” coincided with the planning and curating of the exhibitions. “Devi,” in particular, was executed as an interactive exhibition that made concrete numerous aspects of Hindu culture as the materiality of many South Asian homes in the United States.

J. S. Mill’s emotional investment in the Utilitarian program is discussed, and accounted for as an aesthetic response to Benthamism. Associationist psychology is introduced, and it is argued that the young Mill lacked the theoretical resources to explain his own commitment to and identification with the Utilitarian agenda.

This chapter asks what it is like to read Tom McCarthy’s fiction, what are its peculiar pleasures, and whether the critical instruments associated with the tradition of ‘close reading’ are of any use in describing and explaining these responses. The chapter isolates two larger questions pertinent to this collection as a whole: In what sense can McCarthy be said to be continuing the project of modernism and the rewards and demands it offers its readers? And is there an ethical dimension to reading, and writing about reading, in this way? In the course of answering these questions, the chapter appeals to the notion of the literary work as an event, taking place in the reading process and living on in memorial revisitings of that process.

J. S. Mill’s famous ‘Mental Crisis’ is argued to have been prompted by editing Jeremy Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence. The Crisis, it is suggested, was brought on by Mill’s specifically aesthetic response to Bentham’s manuscripts.