Mapping The Concept of Experience

Abstract: This essay tries to show how the experiences the arts compose can prove fundamental to shaping desirable human values, as well as the powers necessary to develop and support them. I rely on four concepts: 1) stressing the differences between treating experience as primarily a verb or a noun; 2) analyzing the kinds of judgment that help establish the experience the noun refers to; 3) developing the difference between "experience of" and "experience as" to separate the arts from conversations about cognition through interpretation; 4) focusing on exemplification to link aesthetic contemplation to the world by correlating "of" and "as" in practical domains.