Hello, Callum; thanks for your question. Before Kant, there was a tradition in Enlightenment thinking about the nature of beauty and how we are able to perceive it. This tradition often referred to what was called the "faculty of taste" to distinguish this form of perception from other so-called faculties. The history runs roughly from Lord Shaftesbury, through Hutcheson, Burke, Hume, and then through Kant to Schopenhauer. A useful overview of this trajectory is in a book by George Dickie called _Evaluating Art_. Yours, Mitch Green

You ask, first of all, whether the idea that languages can be judged and praised/scorned is rooted in a theory of linguistic aesthetics. Well, that might be one basis on which to evaluate a language; there may be others, such as those I'll mention below. Also, I don't know of any substantial theory of linguistic aesthetics. However, one can imagine some of what such a theory might say. For instance, just as we can find a line of a poem beautiful because of its sonic properties, we might want to say such a thing of a sentence of a certain language. If a language L is one in which such sentences are commonly found, while another language L' has sentences line that rarely, but a lot of other sentences are are percussive, gutteral, or in some other way less beautiful, that would be a reason for judging L to be superior to L' on aesthetic grounds. That would not for a moment prejudge the relative merits of the two languages on other dimensions, such as clarity. For hints of a line of thought along...

Your question has many dimensions. First of all, it might be taken as asking why our species seeks out beauty while others do not. If that is the question, then one point to note is that it might be the case that other species seek beauty as well. For instance, males in other species of animals produce exotic ornamentation in order to gain an advantage with females in sexual selection. Do those females seek out beauty? I would be hard pressed to show that they don't. Second, and leaving that question aside, one might take this question as asking why we like things that are beautiful. But if you reflect on that for a moment, it might seem a bit strange. Imagine someone trying to figure out why we don't like pain. Perhaps all that can be said is that painful things hurt, which by definition we don't like. On the other hand, assuming that beauy is pleasant, one may still ask the question: Why do we find beautiful the things that we do? For example, anthropologists, psychologists and...