IS THERE A NEED FOR PHILOSOPHICAL AESTHETICS

Text topic: Aesthetics Today

Text author: Милош Миладинов

The author examines whether philosophical aesthetic insights are relevant in our historical situation. This question was raised in the context of the more and more frequent contemporary attempts to establish aesthetics as a specialized empirical science or attempts to incorporate aesthetics in the already existing specialized sciences. The first chapter gives a brief overview of the (pre)history of aesthetics from its founding to the contemporary time. Then, using the teachings of Milan Damnjanović, the author examines some of the key assumptions of the empirically oriented ideas of aesthetics on the one hand, and the contemporary philosophical concepts of aesthetics, on the other. The third chapter examines the significance of philosophical aesthetics in relation to other non-philosophical aesthetic conceptions, and concludes that the problems of aesthetics, in addition to the empirical approach, also need philosophical enquiries and foundations.