# Aesthetic Experience and Intellectual Pursuits  ## Metadata - Author: [[OUP Academic]] - Full Title: Aesthetic Experience and Intellectual Pursuits - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Document Tags: [[aspection]] [[psychedelic aesthetics paper]] - Summary: The paper argues that aesthetic experiences related to intellectual pursuits should be considered important in understanding aesthetics. It challenges the traditional view that aesthetic and cognitive activities are separate, suggesting they can be interconnected. By doing so, it opens up new ways to appreciate intellectual activities as genuinely aesthetic experiences. - URL: https://academic.oup.com/aristoteliansupp/article/96/1/123/6595516 ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > What does this ‘coming-to-know’ consist of? Although an exhaustive account exceeds the remit of this paper, a sketch can be offered. The following aspects seem central: coming to see particular associations and interrelations; coming to discern how to establish new or wider connections and hypothesize about further ones; coming to feel or ascertain the weight of a specific factor or component, or of the broader implications of an idea; coming to apprehend events and phenomena in the context of a different theoretical framework. Roughly, this is a process whereby we come to perceive an order of things, grasp proportions, and recognize how individual parts can be made to fit into a whole (Tatarkiewicz 1980, pp. 126–9). Coming-to-know thus has a strong experiential character. When we speak of ‘seeing’ what someone means or ‘feeling’ that something is right, we aim to communicate not just *that* we understand, but also that this gaining of insight has a certain phenomenology, where our ‘seeing’ is analogous to a kind of process of realization.13 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jjpne0w20dayfws7nfm1fg35)) - Tags: [[psychedelic aesthetics paper]] ## New highlights added April 1, 2025 at 9:45 AM > Kant also emphasizes the importance of pleasure in direct perceptual acquaintance. Indeed, formulations of the perceptual requirement often take their starting point from Kant’s analysis of the judgement of taste, and his observations to the effect that ‘whether a dress, a house, or a flower is beautiful is a matter upon which one declines to allow one’s judgment to be swayed by any reasons or principles. We want to get a look at the object with our own eyes’ (Kant 2000, §8). Aesthetic pleasure, for Kant, is also indispensable to the equation, characterized in his account in terms of its disinterestedness.8 In contradistinction to other kinds of pleasure, which have their cause in the satisfaction of a desire (or ‘interest’), aesthetic pleasure is understood as independent of any such desire or interest on the part of the subject. Crucially, it is this disinterested pleasure which anchors our aesthetic judgement, and which in turn leads Kant to uphold a fundamental distinction between aesthetic judgements and cognitive judgements (for example, Kant 2000, §1). That is to say, for Kant the difference between cognitive and aesthetic judgement is structural, reflecting two contrasting ways in which the subject relates to the objects of its experience. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jqpey4gwmt1e91zthpey0w4y)) ## New highlights added March 16, 2026 at 1:30 PM > Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. (Russell 1919, p. 60) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kkv6r1g7dga1pr4435xbaef9)) > Cain Todd, for example, refers to them as ‘masked epistemic assessments’, and claims that if we consider rationality to be founding and guiding in scientific enterprise, ‘appeals to aesthetic factors in theory assessment look to be entirely out of place’ (Todd 2008, p. 4). Ever since Kant, Todd points out, philosophers have been ‘suspicious of the aesthetic claims of scientists’, raising the objection that because ‘aesthetic judgements are unconcerned with truth and utilitarian ends, they must not be based on cognitive interest in attaining knowledge about something nor with assessing an object in relation to some purpose which it serves’ (Todd 2008, p. 9). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kkv6t55ayqk7rrj85gyk9d9m)) ## New highlights added March 16, 2026 at 2:35 PM > On this line, such a development need not be considered the end product directly resulting from our aesthetic experience of the work—the aesthetic experience enabling the subsequent cognitive experience, so to speak—but rather, be part of that aesthetic experience itself. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kkvdmj0wv4r0wczb2a6x4ctr)) ## New highlights added April 8, 2026 at 12:35 AM > When we describe, say, philosophical reasoning, mathematical and scientific demonstrations, and certain works of conceptual art in aesthetic terms, we attribute aesthetic value to objects of experience which are knowledge-oriented and which do not have such perceptual presence.1 Let us call this aesthetic practice (b). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kkshk48y931hbs7j7qtreg5a))