Unfortunately I don't know of any introductory aesthetics books that aren't heavy on the philosophical language. For that reason I would just recommend reading

Unfortunately I don't know of any introductory aesthetics books that aren't heavy on the philosophical language. For that reason I would just recommend reading this IEP article. It covers the standard traditional Western conception of aesthetics, the basic ideas, and so on. https://iep.utm.edu/aestheti/ https://iep.utm.edu/aestheti/ If you don't mind reading a dictionary, The Dictionary of Aesthetics by Dabney Townsend is also a good overview of many different ideas and terms. Otherwise, I am a big fan of Japanese aesthetics, which is much more "in the world" than the more abstract Western philosophical approach. For this, I really recommend the short essay A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics by Donald Richie. Also, one of my favorite novels is My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. It is about Ottoman miniature painting and has extensive discussion on aesthetics, painting, and similar topics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Red https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Red -- On your other comment, I might agree with Weisberg that we aren't really going for an aggregate opinion of everyone. Instead, we need a way to measure the opinions of a diverse group of experts, whatever that might mean specifically. A good analogue might be military strategy. If we were to ask "Who was the best general of all time?", we'd likely want to ask military historians (academic experts), actual generals (experiential experts), as well as amateur enthusiasts that are extremely knowledgeable but don't have the right credentials. We'd also probably want various other groups of people like soldiers, politicians, (resurrected) great generals like Napoleon or Hannibal themselves, etc. As long as we had a decent method for validating membership of these different groups, I think we'd get a reasonably decent answer. In terms of architecture, this expert-only approach might have some limitations and we would need to add the townspeople and library readers to our analysis. But this is more because buildings are something practical used in the world and not just art in a gallery.