Empirical Aesthetics: An overview

This chapter offers a general overview of Empirical Aesthetics. It begins with a definition of the field’s main goals, a summary of its history from its modern foundations to the 1990s, and an introduction to contemporary accounts of aesthetic appreciation. We then highlight the key components of Empirical Aesthetics (object, person, and context), which provide the basic organization for the book, and summarize the field’s basic methods. We end by presenting the subdomains of Empirical Aesthetics, and the neighboring fields it interacts with.