Planet Landscapes By Edgar Moskopp

The term landscape aesthetics or just aesthetics is frequently used in the literature. Aesthetics has a more controversial origin than landscape. It derived from the Greek aisthesis meaning "sense perception". The term was used as the title the book Aesthetica (1750-58) by Alexander Baumgarten (1714 - 62), a minor German philosopher who incorrectly applied the Greek term to a critique the beautiful or the theory taste (sociology). Thus the term which originally applied to the broad field sense perception was restricted to the area taste. Immanuel Kant in 1781 criticised this use and applied it in accordance with its classical meaning "the philosophy sensuous perception". However, the corrupted term aesthetics gained popular acceptance entering England after 1830 and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, within a century the coining the meaning by Baumgarten, it was in use widely throughout Europe.
The dictionary definition aesthetic perpetuates Baumgarten's error and defines it as "things perceptible by the senses as opposed to things thinkable or immaterial", "pertaining to the sense the beautiful or the science aesthetics"Macquarie Dictionary, 1981., or ", relating to, or dealing with aesthetics or the beautiful". Aesthetics is regarded as a branch philosophy, that which "deduces from nature and taste the rules and principles art, the theory the fine arts; the science the beautiful..." or "that dealing with the nature the beautiful and with judgements concerning beauty".
Thus landscapes have ten been the subject inquiry within the broad framework aesthetics in the quest for an understanding beauty.