Aesthetic ideals

My point of departure in this chapter is a claim about aesthetic properties that seems hard to deny in the light of twentieth-century post-formalist aesthetics (as represented by, for example, Walton’s ‘Categories of Art’). The claim is this: what aesthetic properties an object has depends not just on what non-aesthetic, accidental (e.g., perceptual) properties it has but also on what kind of object it is, that is under what sortal it falls (e.g. ‘man’, ‘animal’). Using the concept of supervenience to single out the relevant sense of dependence, this claim can also be put as follows: any adequate supervenience base for aesthetic properties minimally includes a number of essential properties.