Edward Bullough was a British aesthetician and literary scholar. He taught modern languages at Cambridge University, holding University lectureships in German and then Italia. He never held a philosophy fellowship or chair, but he gave the first lectures on aesthetics at Cambridge, beginning in 1907, and was widely read in aesthetics. He also conducted psychological research on aesthetic responses in collaboration with Cambridge psychologists.

Bullough is known in aesthetics primarily on the basis of a single article, "'Psychical Distance' as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle," originally published in The British Journal of Psychology in 1912, in which he maintains that aesthetic experience depends on a distancing from "our practical, actual self," thereby "permitting only such reactions on our part as emphasise the 'objective' features of the experience." By means of such distance, we can escape what is merely idiosyncratic but still experience a...