Aesthetics

The Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the concept of the aesthetic is somewhat heavy going, but anyone interested in theories of art (e.g., Caveman fans) might want to take a look. If nothing else, you'll like this explanation of "taste":

Mainly British philosophers working mainly within an empiricist framework began to develop theories of taste. The fundamental idea behind any such theory—which we may call the immediacy thesis—is that judgments of beauty are not (or at least not primarily) mediated by inferences from principles or applications of concepts, but rather have all the immediacy of straightforwardly sensory judgments; it is the idea, in other words, that we do not reason to the conclusion that things are beautiful, but rather “taste” that they are. More...