 Writers on aesthetics in the empiricist tradition such as Shaftsbury, Hume, and Reid thought of their contributions as broadly empirical (see Shelley 2006 [2020]), and among the very first experimental investigations in psychology were studies of aesthetic preferences and responses, for example Fechner’s attempt to discover whether the “golden section” is especially preferred to other ratios (1871). The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were rich in work of this kind, and there were more speculative studies of “embodied” responses to architectural structures, a debate that brought the term “empathy” to the English language (Vischer 1873; Lipps 1903). But for most of the twentieth century aesthetics was seen, by its proponents and its detractors, as an “armchair” project. Wittgenstein, whose conception of philosophy strongly influenced the field’s direction in the century’s latter half, said