Can an aesthetic judgment be regarded as a statement of truth? The philosopher Malcolm Budd, who has died aged 84, made significant theoretical advances in defence of the objectivity of such an assessment.

The central question of aesthetics that emerged from the Enlightenment, particularly in the work of Hume and Kant, was how an aesthetic judgment could be both grounded in an individual’s particular reaction to an object and yet be “intersubjectively valid”; that is, make a claim to truth. In his collection Aesthetic Essays (2008), Budd worked on different ways into this problem. He claimed that the aesthetic merit of a work could be found in the nature of the experience to which that work gave rise, provided that experience is had with understanding.

If person A claimed that a work was beautiful and person B denied the claim, they could dispute person A’s understanding of the picture: should the features of the picture that underpinned the experience be understood in the way person A understood them? If yes, person A’s claim could be defended – a difficult job, which is why criticism is so hard.

What kind of features are we talking about? The traditional answer is that these are “aesthetic properties’” such as grace, balance and unity. One concern for philosophers is to say what type of thing aesthetic properties are; how they differ in essence from non-aesthetic properties such as being red, square or curved.

On Budd’s approach, this is the wrong question. The features in question are just the properties of the work, whatever they are, that give us the right kind of experience. Questions remain about how to think about some of these features – what, for example, is it to call a picture “melancholy”? – about which Budd had plenty to say. However, the whole package he gives us makes formerly intractable questions a great deal more tractable.

In a further series of essays, in The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature (2002), Budd bucked the prevailing trend in thoughts about the beauty of nature by claiming that, in this area, such a notion of “correct understanding” does not fully apply and hence that judgments on the beauty of nature do not fully share the objectivity of judgments on the beauty of art. In judging something as art we are answerable to certain background conditions, such as those provided by an artist’s intentions. As nobody intended nature to be as it is, the grip of these conditions is, as a consequence, weaker. Together these essays provide the most sophisticated contribution to “the abstract core” of aesthetics since Frank Sibley’s work in the 1950s and 60s.

Born in Whitton, south-west London, Malcolm was the son of Hilare (nee Campbell), a school kitchen assistant, and Ted Budd, a petrol station manager. He won a scholarship to Latymer Upper school, Hammersmith, where he excelled at cricket and football.

In 1961 he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, to study mathematics. After one year, injury curtailed what had been a successful university sporting career and he changed to moral sciences, as philosophy was known. His partner for tutorials was Roger Scruton, and their stellar exam results brought their tutor, AC Ewing, a fellowship.

The two went on to Peterhouse, with research fellowships supporting their PhD studies. Despite their political differences, Scruton remained a lifelong friend.

In 1970 Budd became a lecturer at University College London. At Cambridge, his interests had been in Wittgenstein and perception, but, under the influence of the then Grote professor at UCL, Richard Wollheim, he shifted to work in aesthetics.

His book Music and the Emotions (1985) provided a comprehensive demolition of all extant accounts of expression in music. Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (1989) downplayed the mystic, poetic side of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and found plenty of hard, and therefore assessable, arguments.

While the former is dated in the sense that it moved the argument on, the latter has a secure place in Wittgenstein scholarship. Values of Art (1995) was the result of Budd completing a book originally started by a former student, Flint Schier, following Schier’s unexpected death.

Budd became a fellow of the British Academy in 1995, and Grote professor in 1998. However brilliant the work he did at UCL, Budd had not yet fully developed a corpus of positive views, but his early retirement, in 2001, was followed by the flurry of aesthetic essays.

Unusually for an academic, Budd was extraordinarily modest and had no interest in academic politics or self-promotion. He took no pleasure in the cut-and-thrust of academic debate and, unless supporting a colleague or former student, did not go to talks or attend conferences.

When the philosophy department in Murcia, Spain, organised a conference on his work, he seemed to find the experience amusing and baffling in equal measure. His exceptionally high standards occasionally led him to express puzzlement at rushed or shoddy work by others, but he remained kind and generous.

In 1997 he married Liz Kenrick, and they entertained friends in Cambridge or at the converted barn they had bought near Toulouse, in south-west France. He collected and made himself an expert in Japanese prints, some of which are now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

He is survived by Liz and her children, Tom and Maisie, from a previous marriage.

• Malcolm John Budd, philosopher, born 23 December 1941; died 17 February 2026