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Aesthetics

What Is Evolutionary Aesthetics? Three Waves

Profile image of Onerva KiianlinnaOnerva Kiianlinna

2023, Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics

https://doi.org/10.33134/EEJA.344
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Abstract

Evolutionary aesthetics (EA) is often associated with the rise of evolutionary psychology, from roughly the 1980s until the 2010s. Yet that was neither the beginning nor the end of the field but rather a middle wave after the first and before the third. How has the field evolved? What are the epistemic and methodological problems it has addressed, and how? What is the field heading towards in the current scholarly environment? A self-reflexive conception of the history of EA is still lacking, although EA research is acquiring more and more perspectives from different disciplinary viewpoints. I will present a bird's-eye view of EA by identifying and positioning three of its major currents in relation to each other. This state-of-the-art article also serves as an up-to-date introduction to the field for the non-initiated.

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References (73)

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