Aesthetics Without the Aesthetic?

Abstract The following paper highlights the way in which contemporary analytic or Anglo-American aesthetics neglects the topic of aesthetic experience. The paper briefly examines the historical background to this situation. It also looks at how analytic aesthetics’ preoccupation with the topic of art is largely responsible for this neglect. It concludes by arguing that most of the fundamental problems in aesthetics, including those that contemporary analytic aesthetics does concern itself with, must remain intractable without a better understanding of aesthetic experience per se.