美语里也可拼成esthetic. 词源: experience with the senses. aesthetics: 美学, 美语可拼成esthetics.

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art. It examines subjective and sensori-emotional values, or sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste.

Aesthetics considers what happens in our minds when we engage with aesthetic objects or environments such as in viewing visual art, listening to music, reading poetry, experiencing a play, exploring nature, and so on. The philosophy of art specifically studies how artists imagine, create, and perform works of art, as well as how people use, enjoy, and criticize their art. It deals with how one feels about art in general, why they like some works of art and not others, and how art can affect our moods or even our beliefs. Both aesthetics generally and philosophy of art especially ask questions like "What is art?," "What is a work of art?," and "What makes good art?"

Aesthetics and science

The Mandelbrot set with continuously coloured environment

In the 1990s, Jürgen Schmidhuber described an algorithmic theory of beauty which takes the subjectivity of the observer into account and postulates: among several observations classified as comparable by a given subjective observer, the aesthetically most pleasing one is the one with the shortest description, given the observer's previous knowledge and his particular method for encoding the data. This is closely related to the principles of algorithmic information theory and minimum description length. One of his examples: mathematicians enjoy simple proofs with a short description in their formal language. Another very concrete example describes an aesthetically pleasing human face whose proportions can be described by very few bits of information, drawing inspiration from less detailed 15th century proportion studies by Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer.

Truth in beauty and mathematics

Mathematical considerations, such as symmetry and complexity, are used for analysis in theoretical aesthetics. This is different from the aesthetic considerations of applied aesthetics used in the study of mathematical beauty. Aesthetic considerations such as symmetry and simplicity are used in areas of philosophy, such as ethics and theoretical physics and cosmology to define truth, outside of empirical considerations. Beauty and Truth have been argued to be nearly synonymous,] as reflected in the statement "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" in the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats, or by the Hindu motto "Satyam Shivam Sundaram" (Satya (Truth) is Shiva (God), and Shiva is Sundaram (Beautiful)).

Computational approaches

Since about 2005, computer scientists have attempted to develop automated methods to infer aesthetic quality of images. Typically, these approaches follow a machine learning approach, where large numbers of manually rated photographs are used to "teach" a computer about what visual properties are of relevance to aesthetic quality. A study by Y. Li and C.J. Hu employed Birkhoff's measurement in their statistical learning approach where order and complexity of an image determined aesthetic value. The image complexity was computed using information theory while the order was determined using fractal compression. There is also the case of the Acquine engine, developed at Penn State University, that rates natural photographs uploaded by users.

Evolutionary aesthetics

Evolutionary aesthetics refers to evolutionary psychology theories in which the basic aesthetic preferences of Homo sapiens are argued to have evolved in order to enhance survival and reproductive success. One example being that humans are argued to find beautiful and prefer landscapes which were good habitats in the ancestral environment. Another example is that body symmetry and proportion are important aspects of physical attractiveness which may be due to this indicating good health during body growth.

六级/考研单词: aesthetic, subjective, sentiment, engage, poet, affection, mood, classify, data, mathematics, inspire, symmetry, ethic, physics, empirical, synonym, gorgeous, compute, automate, infer, manual, upload, psychology, evolve, reproduce, habitat, ancestor, heal