Of the Standard of Taste
by David Hume · Hume Texts Online
This is the foundational empiricist text on taste and judgement: Hume's 1757 essay asks whether judgements of beauty can be correct or incorrect when taste is grounded in sentiment. It sets out the qualities of the 'true judge': delicacy, practice, comparison, freedom from prejudice and good sense. Full text with paragraph numbering.
More resources on Aesthetics & Philosophy of Art
Aesthetics for Birds
Blog run by working academic aestheticians publishing essays, interviews and multi-author roundtables that apply philosophy of art to games, film, music, memes and AI-generated images. Shows what the field currently disputes and how its arguments are made on live cases.
The Definition of Art (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Peer-reviewed survey by Thomas Adajian, revised 2024, mapping constraints on definitions of art, Wittgensteinian skepticism, and the institutional, historical, aesthetic, disjunctive and evolutionary definitions, each with its standard objections plus a bibliography that gives you the field's reading list. Free, current and written by a specialist rather than an encyclopaedia generalist.
Critique of the Power of Judgment
No substitute exists: the whole vocabulary of taste, judgement and the sublime comes from this text. Kant's 1790 third Critique in the standard scholarly translation, including the suppressed first introduction. The Analytic of the Beautiful and of the Sublime establish disinterestedness, free play of the faculties and the antinomy of taste, the framework later aesthetics still argues against. Edition matters, so the Guyer/Matthews Cambridge translation is specified rather than a public-domain Bernard or Meredith rendering whose terminology is now misleading.
The Artworld (1964)
Source Truth for the most-cited move in twentieth-century philosophy of art; every later definition (Dickie, Levinson, Carroll) responds to it. Danto's fourteen-page Journal of Philosophy paper that began the institutional turn in analytic aesthetics. Arguing from Warhol's Brillo Boxes, he concludes that what makes an object art is an atmosphere of theory and art history, not any perceptible property.
Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction
The standard analytic textbook, working through representational theory, formalism, neo-formalism, aesthetic theories of art, neo-Wittgensteinian skepticism and the institutional theory. Each position is stated, defended, then attacked, so you finish able to reconstruct and criticise every major definition of art. It teaches the argumentative machinery, necessary and sufficient conditions, counterexamples, the move from aesthetic to institutional to historical definitions.
Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction
A short Oxford introduction arguing that aesthetics covers ordinary experience, not only museum art. Treats aesthetic judgement, attention, emotion and the charge of elitism, leaving you with a working vocabulary for arguing about taste before tackling longer primary texts. The lowest-cognitive-load entry point that is still written by a first-rank researcher rather than a populariser.