doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00098 Aesthetic emotions, what are their cognitive functions?

A huge number of publications are devoted to aesthetic emotions; Google Scholar gives 319,000 references. Nevertheless, finding a definition of what is aesthetic is not easy. Most authors use no definitions. Wikipedia (2013) gives a cir-cular definition: “aesthetic emotions... are felt during aesthetic activity. ” This is sim-ilar to the “institutional theory of art” that defines art as what is considered so by an accepted art institution (Dickie, 1974). In 70 years of discussions in the Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism this theory, despite its obvious flaws, remains accepted among philosophers o