A critical reflection on Arnold Berleant's ideas on ecological aesthetics

Berleant’s participation in my research program back in 2008 inspired his turn towards ecological aesthetics, which features four components in an order of environment, aesthetics, ecology, and experience. The special order has given rise to an “ecological environmental aesthetics”, which may be viewed as a restructuring of his established “environmental aesthetics” through an ecological prism. In contrast, my own eco-aesthetics may be defined as “aesthetics based on ecology,” whose distinctively three components follow the order of ecology, aesthetics, and environment. The underlying logic for the difference lies in two different philosophical positions, i.e., phenomenology and ecological realism. Hence this article may shed some light on the unresolved problem of the relationship between environmental aesthetics and ecological aesthetics by juxtaposing and comparing these two approaches