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"Aesthetic Confluences between the Everyday and Nature’s Experience"

No. 72 (2025): Thémata Revista de Filosofía

Aesthetic Confluences between Everyday Life and Nature. Introduction

DOI
https://doi.org/10.12795/themata.2025.i72.02
Submitted
December 31, 2025
Published
2025-12-31

Abstract

In the second half of the twentieth century, two new branches of aesthetics emerged in the Anglophone world: environmental aesthetics and everyday aesthetics. From different angles, both questioned the increasingly close association between aesthetics and the philosophy of art generated within the modern system of the fine arts. The latter, especially from Hegel onwards, relegated to a secondary position —if not openly rejected— both everyday aesthetic experience and the aesthetic experience of nature not artistically intervened; both were called into question insofar as they were thought to compromise disinterested pleasure, then associated primarily with the model of aesthetic experience derived from art. In different ways, both currents resonated with the seminal work of John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934), in which he defended the continuity between art and (everyday) life and argued that the living creature naturally develops an aesthetic/artistic dimension through its interaction with the environment. The multiple points of contact between these two areas of study may be synthesised in two main aspects: the rejection of art-centrism and the connection between ethics and aesthetics.

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