Environmental Aesthetics: Appreciating Nature on Its Own Terms

The Scottish philosopher Ronald Hepburn's 1966 essay "Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty," published in the collection British Analytical Philosophy edited by Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore, is widely credited with founding environmental aesthetics as a distinct subfield of philosophical aesthetics. Hepburn diagnosed a near-total twentieth-century preoccupation, within academic aesthetics, with the artwork, and argued that natural objects and environments pose genuinely distinct philosophical problems that art-centered theory could not simply be extended to cover: nature has no artist, no determinate frame separating it from its surroundings, no fixed vantage point from which it is meant to be viewed, and it engages the perceiver multisensorially — through smell, touch, temperature, and bodily movement — in ways a framed painting or a performed symphony typically does not.