S. W. Barrett

In recent aesthetics, the historic focus on beauty has given way to a focus on aesthetic properties more generally. Nick Zangwill’s theory of aesthetic judgements aims to ‘stick up for beauty’ (2001, p. 9) by restoring its exceptional status in aesthetics. Zangwill argues that beauty and ugliness are exceptional among aesthetic properties in being verdictive, with the former consisting in overall aesthetic merit and the latter overall aesthetic demerit. These supervene upon substantive aesthetic properties that attribute or deduct instances of aesthetic value which, in turn, supervene upon an artwork’s non-aesthetic properties. In this dissertation, I explore and defend Zangwill’s theory of aesthetic judgements from various objections. Having defended Zangwill’s theory, I explore the concept of the sublime and a novel objection, concerning how accurately it is able to capture the nature and role of another aesthetic property that was historically regarded as distinctive: the sublime. I argue that Zangwill’s theory fails to give the sublime an adequately distinctive role and conclude that there must be an alteration made to do so. Finally, I propose an expansion to Zangwill’s theory in order to accurately organise our experience of beauty and the sublime in art and defend the expanded version of Zangwill’s theory from proposed objections.