The two most prominent current philosophical methods-Phenomenology and conceptual analysis-tend to regard this aim as distinct from, and (at least in part) prior to, the aim of science. In effect, the aim of the philosopher is to give the broadest possible description of the things themselves, so as to show how we must understand them and how we ought to value them. It is an a priori or conceptual investigation, the underlying concern of which is to identify rather than to explain. Philosophy is not a science, because it does not investigate the causes of phenomena. In considering these theories (some of which are discussed below) a crucial distinction must be borne in mind: that between philosophy of mind and empirical psychology. Hegel, the Phenomenologists, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (more precisely, the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations ). More recently, philosophers-distrustful of Kant's theory of the faculties-have tried to express the notions of an “aesthetic attitude” and “aesthetic experience” in other ways, relying upon developments in philosophical psychology that owe much to G.W.F. The study invariably has a dual purpose: to show how (if at all) these descriptions might be justified, and to show what is distinctive in the human experiences that are expressed in them. In more recent times, philosophers have tended to concentrate on the concepts of modern literary theory-namely, those such as representation, expression, form, style, and sentimentality. Burke's distinction between the sublime and the beautiful was extremely influential, reflecting as it did the prevailing style of contemporary criticism. In his famous treatise On the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke ( Burke, Edmund) attempted to draw a distinction between two aesthetic concepts, and, by studying the qualities that they denoted, to analyze the separate human attitudes that are directed toward them. The study of the aesthetic concepts ( concept), or, more specifically, the analysis of the “language of criticism,” in which particular judgments are singled out and their logic and justification displayed. It may also be, however, that the term beautiful has no sense except as the expression of an attitude, which is in turn attached by different people to quite different states of affairs.ġ. It may be that there is some single underlying belief that motivates all of their judgments. Almost anything might be seen as beautiful by someone or from some point of view and different people apply the word to quite disparate objects for reasons that often seem to have little or nothing in common. A problem is encountered at the outset, however, for terms such as beautiful and ugly seem too vague in their application and too subjective in their meaning to divide the world successfully into those things that do, and those that do not, exemplify them.
It deals not only with the nature and value of the arts but also with those responses to natural objects that find expression in the language of the beautiful and the ugly. Aesthetics is broader in scope than the philosophy of art, which comprises one of its branches.
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