# aesthetics as philosophy of perception **Opening (not a real abstract):** Distributed Attention 2.1 Varieties of Aesthetic Experience This chapter is about aesthetic experience. Which is a little awkward, because I don’t think that there is such a thing as aesthetic experience. Or, rather, I don’t think that there is one and only one kind of aesthetic experience; that it is a monolithic category. My suspicion is that we tend to call any strong (or intense, or emotionally significant) experience that we have in an aesthetic context ‘aesthetic experience’. But this can mean very different things: experiences of overwhelming beauty, experiences of strong emotions, experiences of strong identification with a fictional character, musical frissons, and so on. Do we have any principled reasons to call some of these strong experiences encountered in an aesthetic context ‘aesthetic experiences’ **Authors:** [[Nanay chapter 2]]