Abstract

Experimental Philosophy (X-Phi) is now a fully-fledged methodological project with applications in almost all areas of analytic philosophy, including, as of recently, aesthetics. Another methodological project which has been attracting attention in the last few years is conceptual engineering (CE). Its areas of implementation are now diverse, but as was the case initially with experimental philosophy, aesthetics has unfortunately been left out. In this paper I argue that if conceptual engineers are interested in expanding their project to the field of aesthetics, which would greatly benefit the field, then they should rely on the existing experimental work of aestheticians. Instead of building a CE project in aesthetics from the ground up, this paper explores the potential support experimental aesthetics could provide to CE, thereby making its development more efficiently realizable. Furthermore, I argue that doing so would be beneficial to experimental aesthetics. Currently, the integration of X-Phi to the wider field of aesthetics is losing ground because certain objections, predominantly the objection that X-Phi cannot be of relevance to normative questions, have not been properly refuted. By pairing up with a normative programme like CE, experimental aestheticians could finally put these objections to rest.