History of science
The history of science is the study of the development of science and scientific knowledge, including both the natural and social sciences. Science is a body of empirical and practical knowledge about the natural world, produced by scientists who emphasize the observation and prediction of real-world phenomena. Historiography of science, in contrast, studies the methods employed by historians of science; the English word scientist is recent—first coined by William Whewell in the 19th century. Investigators of nature called themselves "natural philosophers". While empirical investigations of the natural world have been described since classical antiquity, the scientific method has been employed since the Middle Ages, modern science began to develop in the early modern period, in particular in the scientific revolution of 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Traditionally, historians of science have defined science sufficiently broadly to include those earlier inquiries. From the 18th through the late 20th century, the history of science of the physical and biological sciences, was presented as a progressive accumulation of knowledge, in which true theories replaced false beliefs.
More recent historical interpretations, such as those of Thomas Kuhn, tend to portray the history of science in terms of competing paradigms or conceptual systems within a wider matrix of intellectual, cultural and political trends. These interpretations, have met with opposition for they portray the history of science as an incoherent system of incommensurable paradigms, not leading to any actual scientific progress but only to the illusion that it has occurred. In prehistoric times and technique were passed from generation to generation in an oral tradition. For example, the domestication of maize for agriculture has been dated to about 9,000 years ago in southern Mexico, before the development of writing systems. Archaeological evidence indicates the development of astronomical knowledge in preliterate societies; the development of writing enabled knowledge to be stored and communicated across generations with much greater fidelity. Many ancient civilizations systematically collected astronomical observations.
Rather than speculate on the material nature of the planets and stars, the ancients charted the relative positions of celestial bodies inferring their influence on human society. This demonstrates how ancient investigators employed a holistic intuition, assuming the interconnectedness of all things, whereas modern science rejects such conceptual leaps. Basic facts about human physiology were known in some places, alchemy was practiced in several civilizations. Considerable observation of macroscopic flora and fauna was performed; the ancient Mesopotamians had no distinction between magic. When a person became ill, doctors prescribed magical formulas to be recited as well as medicinal treatments; the earliest medical prescriptions appear in Sumerian during the Third Dynasty of Ur. The most extensive Babylonian medical text, however, is the Diagnostic Handbook written by the ummânū, or chief scholar, Esagil-kin-apli of Borsippa, during the reign of the Babylonian king Adad-apla-iddina. In East Semitic cultures, the main medicinal authority was a kind of exorcist-healer known as an āšipu.
The profession was passed down from father to son and was held in high regard. Of less frequent recourse was another kind of healer known as an asu, who corresponds more to a modern physician and treated physical symptoms using folk remedies composed of various herbs, animal products, minerals, as well as potions and ointments or poultices; these physicians, who could be either male or female dressed wounds, set limbs, performed simple surgeries. The ancient Mesopotamians practiced prophylaxis and took measures to prevent the spread of disease; the ancient Mesopotamians had extensive knowledge about the chemical properties of clay, metal ore, bitumen and other natural materials, applied this knowledge to practical use in manufacturing pottery, glass, metals, lime plaster, waterproofing. Metallurgy required scientific knowledge about the properties of metals. Nonetheless, the Mesopotamians seem to have had little interest in gathering information about the natural world for the mere sake of gathering information and were far more interested in studying the manner in which the gods had ordered the universe.
Biology of non-human organisms was only written about in the context of mainstream academic disciplines. Animal physiology was studied extensively for the purpose of divination. Animal behavior was studied for divinatory purposes. Most information about the training and domestication of animals was transmitted orally without being written down, but one text dealing with the training of horses has survived; the Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet Plimpton 322, dating to the eighteenth century BC, records a number of Pythagorean triplets... hinting that the ancient Mesopotamians might have been aware of the Pythagorean theorem over a millennium before Pythagoras. In Babylonian astronomy, records of the motions of the stars and the moon are left on thousands of clay tablets created by scribes. Today, astronomical periods identified by Mesopotamian proto-scientists are still used in We
Idealism
In philosophy, Idealism is the group of metaphysical philosophies that assert that reality, or reality as humans can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, Idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In contrast to Materialism, Idealism asserts the primacy of consciousness as the origin and prerequisite of material phenomena. According to this view, consciousness is the pre-condition of material existence. Consciousness determines the material and not vice versa. Idealism believes consciousness and mind to be the origin of the material world and aims to explain the existing world according to these principles. Idealism theories are divided into two groups. Subjective idealism takes as its starting point the given fact of human consciousness seeing the existing world as a combination of sensation. Objective idealism posits the existence of an objective consciousness which exists before and, in some sense, independently of human ones.
In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes how human ideas—especially beliefs and values—shape society. As an ontological doctrine, idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed of mind or spirit. Idealism thus rejects dualist theories that fail to ascribe priority to the mind; the earliest extant arguments that the world of experience is grounded in the mental derive from India and Greece. The Hindu idealists in India and the Greek Neoplatonists gave panentheistic arguments for an all-pervading consciousness as the ground or true nature of reality. In contrast, the Yogācāra school, which arose within Mahayana Buddhism in India in the 4th century CE, based its "mind-only" idealism to a greater extent on phenomenological analyses of personal experience; this turn toward the subjective anticipated empiricists such as George Berkeley, who revived idealism in 18th-century Europe by employing skeptical arguments against materialism. Beginning with Immanuel Kant, German idealists such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Arthur Schopenhauer dominated 19th-century philosophy.
This tradition, which emphasized the mental or "ideal" character of all phenomena, gave birth to idealistic and subjectivist schools ranging from British idealism to phenomenalism to existentialism. Idealism as a philosophy came under heavy attack in the West at the turn of the 20th century; the most influential critics of both epistemological and ontological idealism were G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, but its critics included the New Realists. According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the attacks by Moore and Russell were so influential that more than 100 years "any acknowledgment of idealistic tendencies is viewed in the English-speaking world with reservation". However, many aspects and paradigms of idealism did still have a large influence on subsequent philosophy. Idealism is a term with several related meanings, it comes via idea from the Greek idein, meaning "to see". The term entered the English language by 1743. In ordinary use, as when speaking of Woodrow Wilson's political idealism, it suggests the priority of ideals, principles and goals over concrete realities.
Idealists are understood to represent the world as it might or should be, unlike pragmatists, who focus on the world as it presently is. In the arts idealism affirms imagination and attempts to realize a mental conception of beauty, a standard of perfection, juxtaposed to aesthetic naturalism and realism. Any philosophy that assigns crucial importance to the ideal or spiritual realm in its account of human existence may be termed "idealist". Metaphysical idealism is an ontological doctrine that holds that reality itself is incorporeal or experiential at its core. Beyond this, idealists disagree. Platonic idealism affirms that abstractions are more basic to reality than the things we perceive, while subjective idealists and phenomenalists tend to privilege sensory experience over abstract reasoning. Epistemological idealism is the view that reality can only be known through ideas, that only psychological experience can be apprehended by the mind. Subjective idealists like George Berkeley are anti-realists in terms of a mind-independent world, whereas transcendental idealists like Immanuel Kant are strong skeptics of such a world, affirming epistemological and not metaphysical idealism.
Thus Kant defines idealism as "the assertion that we can never be certain whether all of our putative outer experience is not mere imagining". He claimed that, according to idealism, "the reality of external objects does not admit of strict proof. On the contrary, the reality of the object of our internal sense is clear through consciousness". However, not all idealists restrict the real or the knowable to our immediate subjective experience. Objective idealists make claims about a transempirical world, but deny that this world is divorced from or ontologically prior to the mental, thus and Gottfried Leibniz affirm an objective and knowable reality transcending our subjective awareness—a rejection of epistemological idealism—but propose that this reality is grounded in ideal entities, a form of metaphysical idealism. Nor do all metaphysical idealists agree on the nature of the ideal; as a rule, transcendental idealists like Kant affirm idealism's epistemic side without committing themselves to whether reality is mental.
Thesis
A thesis or dissertation is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings. In some contexts, the word "thesis" or a cognate is used for part of a bachelor's or master's course, while "dissertation" is applied to a doctorate, while in other contexts, the reverse is true; the term graduate thesis is sometimes used to refer to both master's theses and doctoral dissertations. The required complexity or quality of research of a thesis or dissertation can vary by country, university, or program, the required minimum study period may thus vary in duration; the word "dissertation" can at times be used to describe a treatise without relation to obtaining an academic degree. The term "thesis" is used to refer to the general claim of an essay or similar work; the term "thesis" comes from the Greek θέσις, meaning "something put forth", refers to an intellectual proposition. "Dissertation" comes from the Latin dissertātiō, meaning "discussion".
Aristotle was the first philosopher to define the term thesis. "A'thesis' is a supposition of some eminent philosopher that conflicts with the general opinion...for to take notice when any ordinary person expresses views contrary to men's usual opinions would be silly". For Aristotle, a thesis would therefore be a supposition, stated in contradiction with general opinion or express disagreement with other philosophers. A supposition is a statement or opinion that may or may not be true depending on the evidence and/or proof, offered; the purpose of the dissertation is thus to outline the proofs of why the author disagrees with other philosophers or the general opinion. A thesis may be arranged as a thesis by publication or a monograph, with or without appended papers though many graduate programs allow candidates to submit a curated collection of published papers. An ordinary monograph has a title page, an abstract, a table of contents, comprising the various chapters, a bibliography or a references section.
They differ in their structure in accordance with the many different areas of study and the differences between them. In a thesis by publication, the chapters constitute an introductory and comprehensive review of the appended published and unpublished article documents. Dissertations report on a research project or study, or an extended analysis of a topic; the structure of a thesis or dissertation explains the purpose, the previous research literature impinging on the topic of the study, the methods used, the findings of the project. Most world universities use a multiple chapter format: a) an introduction, which introduces the research topic, the methodology, as well as its scope and significance. Degree-awarding institutions define their own house style that candidates have to follow when preparing a thesis document. In addition to institution-specific house styles, there exist a number of field-specific and international standards and recommendations for the presentation of theses, for instance ISO 7144.
Other applicable international standards include ISO 2145 on section numbers, ISO 690 on bibliographic references, ISO 31 on quantities or units. Some older house styles specify that front matter must use a separate page number sequence from the main text, using Roman numerals; the relevant international standard and many newer style guides recognize that this book design practice can cause confusion where electronic document viewers number all pages of a document continuously from the first page, independent of any printed page numbers. They, avoid the traditional separate number sequence for front matter and require a single sequence of Arabic numerals starting with 1 for the first printed page. Presentation requirements, including pagination, layout and color of paper, use of acid-free paper, paper size, order of components, citation style, will be checked page by page by the accepting officer before the thesis is accepted and a receipt is issued. However, strict standards are not always required.
Most Italian universities, for example, have only general requirements on the character size and the page formatting, leave much freedom for the actual typographic details. A thesis or dissertation committee is a committee. In the US, these committees consist of a primary supervisor or advisor and two or more committee members, who supervise the progress of the dissertation and may act as the examining committee, or jury, at the oral examination of the thesis. At most universities, the committee is chosen by the student in conjunction with his or her primary adviser after completion of the comprehensive examinations or prospectus meeting, may consist of members of the comps committee; the committee members are doctors in their field (whether a PhD or other des
Yale University
Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the "Collegiate School" was established by clergy to educate Congregational ministers, it moved to New Haven in 1716 and shortly after was renamed Yale College in recognition of a gift from British East India Company governor Elihu Yale. Restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first Ph. D. in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Its faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research. Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools.
While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school's faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven and forest and nature preserves throughout New England; the university's assets include an endowment valued at $29.4 billion as of October 2018, the second largest endowment of any educational institution in the world. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Yale College undergraduates follow a liberal arts curriculum with departmental majors and are organized into a social system of residential colleges. All members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—and some members of other faculties—teach undergraduate courses, more than 2,000 of which are offered annually. Students compete intercollegiately as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.
As of October 2018, 61 Nobel laureates, 5 Fields Medalists and 3 Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U. S. Presidents, 19 U. S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U. S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 247 Rhodes Scholars and 119 Marshall Scholars have been affiliated with the university. Its wealth and influence have led to Yale being reported as amoungst the most prestigious universities in the United States. Yale traces its beginnings to "An Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School", passed by the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut on October 9, 1701, while meeting in New Haven; the Act was an effort to create an institution to train ministers and lay leadership for Connecticut. Soon thereafter, a group of ten Congregational ministers, Samuel Andrew, Thomas Buckingham, Israel Chauncy, Samuel Mather, Rev. James Noyes II, James Pierpont, Abraham Pierson, Noadiah Russell, Joseph Webb, Timothy Woodbridge, all alumni of Harvard, met in the study of Reverend Samuel Russell in Branford, Connecticut, to pool their books to form the school's library.
The group, led by James Pierpont, is now known as "The Founders". Known as the "Collegiate School", the institution opened in the home of its first rector, Abraham Pierson, today considered the first president of Yale. Pierson lived in Killingworth; the school moved to Saybrook and Wethersfield. In 1716, it moved to Connecticut. Meanwhile, there was a rift forming at Harvard between its sixth president, Increase Mather, the rest of the Harvard clergy, whom Mather viewed as liberal, ecclesiastically lax, overly broad in Church polity; the feud caused the Mathers to champion the success of the Collegiate School in the hope that it would maintain the Puritan religious orthodoxy in a way that Harvard had not. In 1718, at the behest of either Rector Samuel Andrew or the colony's Governor Gurdon Saltonstall, Cotton Mather contacted the successful Boston born businessman Elihu Yale to ask him for financial help in constructing a new building for the college. Through the persuasion of Jeremiah Dummer, Elihu "Eli" Yale, who had made a fortune through trade while living in Madras as a representative of the East India Company, donated nine bales of goods, which were sold for more than £560, a substantial sum at the time.
Cotton Mather suggested that the school change its name to "Yale College".. Meanwhile, a Harvard graduate working in England convinced some 180 prominent intellectuals that they should donate books to Yale; the 1714 shipment of 500 books represented the best of modern English literature, science and theology. It had a profound effect on intellectuals at Yale. Undergraduate Jonathan Edwards discovered John Locke's works and developed his original theology known as the "new divinity". In 1722 the Rector and six of his friends, who had a study group to discuss the new ideas, announced that they had given up Calvinism, become Arminians and joined the Church of England, they were returned to the colonies as missionaries for the Anglican faith. Thomas Clapp became president in 1745 and struggled to return the college to Calvinist orthodoxy, but he did not close the library. Other students found Deist books in the library. Yale was swept up by the great intellectual movements of the peri
Philosophy of science
Philosophy of science is a sub-field of philosophy concerned with the foundations and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, the ultimate purpose of science; this discipline overlaps with metaphysics and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship between science and truth. There is no consensus among philosophers about many of the central problems concerned with the philosophy of science, including whether science can reveal the truth about unobservable things and whether scientific reasoning can be justified at all. In addition to these general questions about science as a whole, philosophers of science consider problems that apply to particular sciences; some philosophers of science use contemporary results in science to reach conclusions about philosophy itself. While philosophical thought pertaining to science dates back at least to the time of Aristotle, philosophy of science emerged as a distinct discipline only in the 20th century in the wake of the logical positivism movement, which aimed to formulate criteria for ensuring all philosophical statements' meaningfulness and objectively assessing them.
Thomas Kuhn's 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was formative, challenging the view of scientific progress as steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge based on a fixed method of systematic experimentation and instead arguing that any progress is relative to a "paradigm," the set of questions and practices that define a scientific discipline in a particular historical period. Karl Popper and Charles Sanders Peirce moved on from positivism to establish a modern set of standards for scientific methodology. Subsequently, the coherentist approach to science, in which a theory is validated if it makes sense of observations as part of a coherent whole, became prominent due to W. V. Quine and others; some thinkers such as Stephen Jay Gould seek to ground science in axiomatic assumptions, such as the uniformity of nature. A vocal minority of philosophers, Paul Feyerabend in particular, argue that there is no such thing as the "scientific method", so all approaches to science should be allowed, including explicitly supernatural ones.
Another approach to thinking about science involves studying how knowledge is created from a sociological perspective, an approach represented by scholars like David Bloor and Barry Barnes. A tradition in continental philosophy approaches science from the perspective of a rigorous analysis of human experience. Philosophies of the particular sciences range from questions about the nature of time raised by Einstein's general relativity, to the implications of economics for public policy. A central theme is; that is, can chemistry be reduced to physics, or can sociology be reduced to individual psychology? The general questions of philosophy of science arise with greater specificity in some particular sciences. For instance, the question of the validity of scientific reasoning is seen in a different guise in the foundations of statistics; the question of what counts as science and what should be excluded arises as a life-or-death matter in the philosophy of medicine. Additionally, the philosophies of biology, of psychology, of the social sciences explore whether the scientific studies of human nature can achieve objectivity or are shaped by values and by social relations.
Distinguishing between science and non-science is referred to as the demarcation problem. For example, should psychoanalysis be considered science? How about so-called creation science, the inflationary multiverse hypothesis, or macroeconomics? Karl Popper called this the central question in the philosophy of science. However, no unified account of the problem has won acceptance among philosophers, some regard the problem as unsolvable or uninteresting. Martin Gardner has argued for the use of a Potter Stewart standard for recognizing pseudoscience. Early attempts by the logical positivists grounded science in observation while non-science was non-observational and hence meaningless. Popper argued; that is, every genuinely scientific claim is capable of being proven false, at least in principle. An area of study or speculation that masquerades as science in an attempt to claim a legitimacy that it would not otherwise be able to achieve is referred to as pseudoscience, fringe science, or junk science.
Physicist Richard Feynman coined the term "cargo cult science" for cases in which researchers believe they are doing science because their activities have the outward appearance of it but lack the "kind of utter honesty" that allows their results to be rigorously evaluated. A related question is what counts as a good scientific explanation. In addition to providing predictions about future events, society takes scientific theories to provide explanations for events that occur or have occurred. Philosophers have investigated the criteria by which a scientific theory can be said to have explained a phenomenon, as well as what it means to say a scientific theory has explanatory power. One early and influential theory of scientific explanation is the deductive-nomological model, it says that a successful scientific explanation must deduce the occurrence of the phenomena in question from a scientific law. This view has been subjected to substantial criticism, resulting in several acknowledged counterexamples to the theory.
It is challenging to characterize what is meant by an explanation when the thing to be explained cannot be deduc
Columbia University
Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in Upper Manhattan, New York City. Established in 1754, Columbia is the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, it is one of nine colonial colleges founded prior to the Declaration of Independence, seven of which belong to the Ivy League. It has been ranked by numerous major education publications as among the top ten universities in the world. Columbia was established as King's College by royal charter of George II of Great Britain in reaction to the founding of Princeton University in New Jersey, it was renamed Columbia College in 1784 following the Revolutionary War and in 1787 was placed under a private board of trustees headed by former students Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. In 1896, the campus was moved from Madison Avenue to its current location in Morningside Heights and renamed Columbia University. Columbia scientists and scholars have played an important role in the development of notable scientific fields and breakthroughs including: brain-computer interface.
The Columbia University Physics Department has been affiliated with 33 Nobel Prize winners as alumni, faculty or research staff, the third most of any American institution behind MIT and Harvard. In addition, 22 Nobel Prize winners in Physiology and Medicine have been affiliated with Columbia, the third most of any American institution; the university's research efforts include the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Goddard Institute for Space Studies and accelerator laboratories with major technology firms such as IBM. Columbia is one of the fourteen founding members of the Association of American Universities and was the first school in the United States to grant the M. D. degree. The university administers the Pulitzer Prize annually. Columbia is organized into twenty schools, including three undergraduate schools and numerous graduate schools, it maintains research centers outside of the United States known as Columbia Global Centers. In 2018, Columbia's undergraduate acceptance rate was 5.1%, making it one of the most selective colleges in the United States, the second most selective in the Ivy League after Harvard.
Columbia is ranked as the 3rd best university in the United States by U. S. News & World Report behind Princeton and Harvard. In athletics, the Lions field varsity teams in 29 sports as a member of the NCAA Division I Ivy League conference; the university's endowment stood at $10.9 billion in 2018, among the largest of any academic institution. As of 2018, Columbia's alumni and affiliates include: five Founding Fathers of the United States — among them an author of the United States Constitution and co-author of the Declaration of Independence. S. presidents. Discussions regarding the founding of a college in the Province of New York began as early as 1704, at which time Colonel Lewis Morris wrote to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the missionary arm of the Church of England, persuading the society that New York City was an ideal community in which to establish a college. However, it was not until the founding of the College of New Jersey across the Hudson River in New Jersey that the City of New York considered founding a college.
In 1746, an act was passed by the general assembly of New York to raise funds for the foundation of a new college. In 1751, the assembly appointed a commission of ten New York residents, seven of whom were members of the Church of England, to direct the funds accrued by the state lottery towards the foundation of a college. Classes were held in July 1754 and were presided over by the college's first president, Dr. Samuel Johnson. Dr. Johnson was the only instructor of the college's first class, which consisted of a mere eight students. Instruction was held in a new schoolhouse adjoining Trinity Church, located on what is now lower Broadway in Manhattan; the college was founded on October 31, 1754, as King's College by royal charter of King George II, making it the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York and the fifth oldest in the United States. In 1763, Dr. Johnson was succeeded in the presidency by Myles Cooper, a graduate of The Queen's College, an ardent Tory. In the charged political climate of the American Revolution, his chief opponent in discussions at the college was an undergraduate of the class of 1777, Alexander Hamilton.
The American Revolutionary War broke out in 1776, was catastrophic for the operation of King's College, which suspended instruction for eight years beginning in 1776 with the arrival of the Continental Army. The suspension continued through the military occupation of New York City by British troops until their departure in 1783; the college's library was looted and its sole building requisitioned for use as a military hospital first by American and British forces. Loyalists were forced to abandon their King's College in New York, seized by the rebels and renamed Columbia College; the Loyalists, led by Bishop Charles Inglis fled to Windsor, Nova Scotia, where the
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of art and taste and with the creation or appreciation of beauty. In its more technical epistemological perspective, it is defined as the study of subjective and sensori-emotional values, or sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste. Aesthetics studies how artists imagine and perform works of art, it studies how they feel about art—why they like some works and not others, how art can affect their moods and attitude toward life. The phrase was coined in English in the 18th century. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical reflection on art and nature". In modern English, the term aesthetic can refer to a set of principles underlying the works of a particular art movement or theory: one speaks, for example, of the Cubist aesthetic; the word aesthetic is derived from the Greek αἰσθητικός, which in turn was derived from αἰσθάνομαι (aisthanomai, meaning "I perceive, sense" and related to αἴσθησις. Aesthetics in this central sense has been said to start with the series of articles on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” which the journalist Joseph Addison wrote in the early issues of the magazine The Spectator in 1712.
The term "aesthetics" was appropriated and coined with new meaning by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in his dissertation Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus in 1735. Aesthetics, a not tidy intellectual discipline, is a heterogeneous collection of problems that concern the arts but relate to nature. Even though his definition in the fragment Aesthetica is more referred to as the first definition of modern aesthetics. Aesthetics is for the artist; some separate aesthetics and philosophy of art, claiming that the former is the study of beauty while the latter is the study of works of art. However, most Aesthetics encompasses both questions around beauty as well as questions about art, it examines topics such as aesthetic objects, aesthetic experience, aesthetic judgments. For some, aesthetics is considered a synonym for the philosophy of art since Hegel, while others insist that there is a significant distinction between these related fields. In practice, aesthetic judgement refers to the sensory contemplation or appreciation of an object, while artistic judgement refers to the recognition, appreciation or criticism of art or an art work.
Philosophical aesthetics has not only to speak about art and to produce judgments about art works, but has to give a definition of what art is. Art is an autonomous entity for philosophy, because art deals with the senses and art is as such free of any moral or political purpose. Hence, there are two different conceptions of art in aesthetics: art as knowledge or art as action, but aesthetics is neither epistemology nor ethics. Aestheticians compare historical developments with theoretical approaches to the arts of many periods, they study the varieties of art in relation to their physical and culture environments. Aestheticians use psychology to understand how people see, imagine, think and act in relation to the materials and problems of art. Aesthetic psychology studies the creative process and the aesthetic experience. Aesthetics examines our affective domain response to an object or phenomenon Judgments of aesthetic value rely on our ability to discriminate at a sensory level. However, aesthetic judgments go beyond sensory discrimination.
For David Hume, delicacy of taste is not "the ability to detect all the ingredients in a composition", but our sensitivity "to pains as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind." Thus, the sensory discrimination is linked to capacity for pleasure. For Immanuel Kant, "enjoyment" is the result when pleasure arises from sensation, but judging something to be "beautiful" has a third requirement: sensation must give rise to pleasure by engaging our capacities of reflective contemplation. Judgments of beauty are sensory and intellectual all at once. Kant observed of a man "If he says that canary wine is agreeable he is quite content if someone else corrects his terms and reminds him to say instead: It is agreeable to me," because "Everyone has his own taste"; the case of "beauty" is different from mere "agreeableness" because, "If he proclaims something to be beautiful he requires the same liking from others. Roger Scruton has argued similarly. Viewer interpretations of beauty may on occasion be observed to possess two concepts of value: aesthetics and taste.
Aesthetics is the philosophical notion of beauty. Taste is a result of an education process and awareness of elite cultural values learned through exposure to mass culture. Bourdieu examined how the elite in society define the aesthetic values like taste and how varying levels of exposure to these values can result in variations by class, cultural background, education. According to Kant, beauty is universal. In the opinion of Władysław Tatarkiewicz, there are
