One of the aims of Aesthetics is to understand aesthetic experience, that of our own and that of others. Yet, the underlying question of how_ _we can get information about other people’s aesthetic experience has not been granted enough attention. This article contributes to bridging this gap. The main argument is that by resorting to aesthetic judging, we can get information about other people’s aesthetic experience without sharing it. This article outlines how aesthetic judging works as an interface to aesthetic (...) experience. Aesthetic judging allows us to access aesthetic experience indirectly: with it, we can get some information about aesthetic experience. Aesthetic judging thus positions us in relation to someone else’s aesthetic experience. In a nutshell, learning about aesthetic experience happens via aesthetic judging in at least three ways proposed and analyzed here: “aesthetic participation”, “affective appropriation”, and “distanced aesthetic empathy”. (shrink)

Evolutionary aesthetics (EA) is often associated with the rise of evolutionary psychology, from roughly the 1980s until the 2010s. Yet that was neither the beginning nor the end of the field but rather a middle wave after the first and before the third. How has the field evolved? What are the epistemic and methodological problems it has addressed, and how? What is the field heading towards in the current scholarly environment? A self-reflexive conception of the history of EA is still (...) lacking, although EA research is acquiring more and more perspectives from different disciplinary viewpoints. I will present a bird’s-eye view of EA by identifying and positioning three of its major currents in relation to each other. This state-of-the-art article also serves as an up-to-date introduction to the field for the non-initiated. (shrink)