Against Aesthetic/Sensory Dependence

In his book The Metaphysics of Beauty (2001) Nick Zangwill argues for the claim that aesthetic properties metaphysically necessarily depend on sensory properties. This claim plays a role in his argument against physicalist aesthetic realism as well as in the formulation of his own response- dependence view. In this article, I offer reasons to resist the aesthetic/ sensory dependence claim by a discussion of the case of theories, theorems, proofs, and similar theoretical objects, which do possess genuinely aesthetic properties, while these do not depend on any sensory properties. I argue against Zangwill’s claim that such attributions of aesthetic properties are merely metaphorical