Taking the view that aesthetics is a study grounded in perception, the essays in this volume exhibit many sides of the perceptual complex that is the aesthetic field and develop them in different ways. They reinvigorate our understanding of such arts as music and architecture; they range across the natural landscape to the urban one; they reassess the place of beauty in the modern environment and reassess the significance of the contributions to aesthetic theory of Kant and Dewey; and they broach the kinds of meanings and larger understanding that aesthetic engagement with the human environment can offer. Written over the past decade, these original and innovative essays lead to a fresh encounter with the possibilities of aesthetic experience, one which has constantly evolved, moving in recent years in the direction of what Berleant terms 'social aesthetics', which enhances human-environmental integration and sociality.

Table of contents

Preface:  Toward an Aesthetics beyond Art        

I.  The Arts as Experience

  1            Judging Architecture                                                     

  2            What Titles Don’t Tell                    

  3            What Music Isn’t             

II.  Environmental Aesthetics

  4            Art, Nature, and Environment

  5            The Re-shaping of Experience

  6            Two Ways in the Landscape       

  7            The Art in Knowing a Landscape

  8            Reconsidering Scenic Beauty

  9            Forestry Aesthetics                                                        

10           Distant Cities                                     

11           Ideas for an Ecological Aesthetics

12           Nature and Habitation in a Chinese Garden                                        

III.  Implications

13           Aesthetics without Purpose

14           The Legacy of Dewey’s Aesthetics                          

15           Evolutionary Naturalism and the
               Abandonment of Dualism                         

16           The Aesthetic Politics of Environment

17           The Changing Meaning of Landscape

18           Beauty and the Way of Modern Life