Teaching aesthetics is not so much imparting a body of knowledge as teaching how to experience perceptually, aesthetic experience. This is a reciprocal process, not one- way. The arts have a place in this and so does environmental experience. Aesthetics may be thought of, then, as first philosophy, the tarting point of philosophical inquiry.. This involves bodily experience, perceptual engagement, that I call aesthetic engagement. Aesthetic experience as that of a perceptual body engaged within a context, considered as a continuity It is a prerequisite that anything we say in aesthetics be based on perceptual experience. Therefore, a principal goal in teaching aesthetics is to reveal, articulate, and communicate such experience. This means turning to those contexts that embody perceptual experience: the fine arts, the practical arts, environmental situations, and everyday life, i.e. all human experience. This is not easy to do, since the obvious is often the most recondite. Methods in teaching aesthetics according to the interests and skills and predilections of individual teachers have their own particular interests, skills,. For many, it would be obvious that experiencing and studying different works of art from various schools and periods, with an emphasis on recent and contemporary innovations, would be high on the list. To study the aesthetics of environments requires engaging in different environmental situations, an essential and imaginative process. Here the interests and ingenuity of individual teachers can inform the process.

BIO: Arnold Berleant is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Long Island University, former Secretary-General and Past President of the International Association of Aesthetics, former Secretary-Treasurer of the American Society for Aesthetics, and the founding editor of Contemporary Aesthetics. His books and articles in philosophy focus on aesthetics, environmental aesthetics, and ethics.

  • John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934. Ch.3 “Having An Experience”

    Arnold Berleant, "What Is Aesthetic Engagement? Contemporary Aesthetics, 12 (2013)

    Arnold Berleant, Objects into Persons: The Way to Social Aesthetics, in Aesthetics Between Art and Society: Perspectives of Arnold Berleant’s Postkantian Aesthetics of Engagement, Espes Vol 6, No 2 (2017), 9-18.

    Arnold Berleant, Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010). Polish trans. 2011.