beauty is an important part of our lives. ugliness too. it is no surprise then that philosophers since antiquity have been interested in our experiences of and judgments about beauty and ugliness. they have tried to understand the nature of these experiences and judgments, and they have also wanted to know whether these experiences and judgments were legitimate. both these projects took a sharpened form in the twentieth century, when this part of our lives came under a sustained attack in both european and north american intellectual circles. much of the discourse about beauty since the eighteenth century had deployed a notion of the “aesthetic”, and so that notion in particular came in for criticism. this disdain for the aesthetic may have roots in a broader cultural puritanism, which fears the connection between the aesthetic and pleasure.