The Disenfranchisement of Philosophical Aesthetics

Beginning with the current discontent felt by prominent aesthetic theorists over the marginalization of their field within philosophy, this paper seeks to find an explanation for the discipline's apparent neglect. A meta-aesthetic examination of approaches to the study of art and of concurrent historical trends in the art world itself reveals that a methodological emphasis on the ontology of art objects and the conditions for their perception has created a gulf between art and human life that renders it unimportant to central philosophical concerns. The disenfranchisement of the field, I argue, is thus due to factors internal to the discipline itself.