Philosophy & ThoughtGreek → English
Aesthetics
/ɛsˈθɛtɪks/noun
The study of beauty and taste, and the set of principles behind a particular style.
The Greek roots
αἰσθητικός
aisthētikós
of sense perception
Literally: “matters of perception”
Follow a root:αἰσθητικός2 words
The story of the word
In Greek the word was about the five senses and nothing else. Alexander Baumgarten redirected it in the 1750s to name a science of how things are judged beautiful, and Kant grumbled in print that the Germans were misusing a perfectly good term. Put the negative prefix on the same root and you get anesthesia, the sense of nothing, named for English by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1846 when ether made surgery survivable.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → German coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1790s
Same family
anesthesiasynesthesiaaesthetekinesthetic
In a sentence
Her whole flat runs on one aesthetic: bare wood and no colour.
He teaches aesthetics, which mostly means arguing about what counts as art.