- branch of philosophy studying beauty, art, taste, and sensory experience
- questions: what is beauty, is aesthetic judgment objective or subjective, what is the purpose of art
- Plato: beauty as ideal form; Aristotle: beauty as proportion and order; Kant: beauty as disinterested pleasure
- categories: the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the comic, the grotesque
- music exemplifies aesthetic structure: mathematical ratios (frequency, harmony) perceived as beauty
- architecture unites aesthetic and functional design in physical space
- Japanese aesthetics: wabi-sabi (imperfection), mono no aware (impermanence), ma (negative space)
- neuroaesthetics: the brain processes beauty through reward circuits shared with truth recognition
- aesthetic experience is a form of knowledge: pattern recognition at the boundary of order and complexity