期刊名称：Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics
电子版ISSN：1664-5278
出版年度：2010
卷号：2
页码：125-142
出版社：European Society for Aesthetics
摘要：central theoretical task of philosophical aesthetics consists of providingan answer to the question of defining art. Despite the fact that in the 1950sphilosophers like Morris Weitz already regarded this task as impossible,the question how to define art today is a major topic within the philosophyof art again ¡ª one only has to think of the currently discussed possibili-ties of disjunctive and historical definitions or the cluster concept of art.1According to Stephen Davies,2we can distinguish procedural definitions,whose main exponent is George Dickie with his institutional theory, fromfunctional definitions, as in the analytic context most prominently devel-oped by Monroe C. Beardsley. Similiar to Beardsley's definition accordingto which art is a source of aesthetic experience, the mainstream of Germanaesthetics has tried to give a definition by means of a concept of aestheticexperience. Even though it has to be mentioned that the conceptual con-tent of aesthetic experience given by the latter tradition based on readingsof Kant di.ers considerably from Beardsley's account, which is based onDewey's aesthetics, it is nevertheless possible to also understand this tra-dition as a contribution to a functional account
