Drama, at least according to the Aristotelian view, is effective inasmuch as it successfully mirrors real aspects of human behavior. This leads to the hypothesis that successful dramas will portray fictional social networks that have the same properties as those typical of human beings across ages and cultures. We outline a methodology for investigating this hypothesis and use it to examine ten of Shakespeare’s plays. The cliques and groups portrayed in the plays correspond closely to those which have been observed (...) in spontaneous human interaction, including in hunter-gatherer societies, and the networks of the plays exhibit “small world” properties of the type which have been observed in many human-made and natural systems. (shrink)

This paper considers religion in relation to four recurrent traits: belief systems incorporating supernatural agents and counterintuitive concepts, communal ritual, separation of the sacred and the profane, and adolescence as a preferred developmental period for religious transmission. These co-occurring traits are viewed as an adaptive complex that offers clues to the evolution of religion from its nonhuman ritual roots. We consider the critical element differentiating religious from non-human ritual to be the conditioned association of emotion and abstract symbols. We propose (...) neurophysiological mechanisms underlying such associations and argue that the brain plasticity of human adolescence constitutes an “experience expectant” developmental period for ritual conditioning of sacred symbols. We suggest that such symbols evolved to solve an ecological problem by extending communication and coordination of social relations across time and space. (shrink)

This paper presents a pilot study in the "epidemiological" program for cultural research put forward by Dan Sperber. Theory is offered to argue that verse form is so disabling that its worldwide distribution must be explained by functions other than the broad communicative, or ideological, power traditionally attributed to it. The theoretical case is confirmed by numerical data showing that in matched texts of English prose and verse the latter contain words of a lower mean length (measured in syllables). Candidate (...) hypotheses for the epidemiology of verse are offered, including design for mnemonic properties, the registration of differences in verbal intelligence, the presentation of gestures of commitment, and the introduction of levels of quasi-randomness that lead to an impression of semantic richness and the illusion of profound and powerful communication. (shrink)

Desde una perspectiva matricial de la cultura, la autora aborda el estudio de las identidades sociales en su dimensión estética. La presentación dramatúrgica de la persona propuesta por Goffman adquiere un perfil más concreto al enfocar a las identidades a partir de sus procesos de gestación y proyección, pues nunca brotan en el vacío sino a través de matrices que ineludiblemente las conforman. Mandoki explora identidades colectivas religiosas como la cristiana, la musulmana y la judía, así como prácticas familiares, escolares, (...) artísticas y médicas donde la estética opera con todo su poder de seducción, repulsión, cohesión o distinción. Ello implica no sólo que cada sujeto despliega identidades diferentes según las matrices en que se ubique y con cuyos símbolos se identifica, sino que lo realiza por medio de estrategias estéticas que suministran la adherencia efectiva. (shrink)

Experimental research with human infants has demonstrated a level of sensitivity to music comparable to that of musically unsophisticated adults. This evidence points to the biologically hard‐wired nature of musical responsivity, and further raises the question of the evolutionary roots of the phenomenon. The question is addressed by examining (1) the ontogenetic and phylogenetic order in which speech and music are acquired, (2) the possible adaptive properties of music and dance, and (3) cognitive evolutionary retrodictions about the period in prehistory (...) when art began. Much uncertainty continues to surround these issues, but there is a strong indication that the performing and visual arts are natural phenomena with distinctively different evolutionary roots. (shrink)

Human Progress is often understood to be a rather natural and obvious truth of human existence. That this is not necessarily so, is indicative of the pervasive social, psychological, and educational inculcation that sustains its ubiquitous acceptance. Moreover, the uncritical and ill‐informed understanding of Progress as an unquestioned expression of human beneficence has serious consequences for those concerned with the health and welfare of people. It is argued in this paper that, much of what we might consider deleterious in the (...) socio‐political milieu that now confronts us is, to a significant extent, a matter of progressive ideological epistemology and its ensuing manner of human institutionalization. Part one contends that the current socio‐political structure of the current postmodern affairs is in reality that of a pervasive postmodern economic ideology. Part two provides a brief overview of the historical and philosophical development of Progress as an idea, including some of the profound effects wrought by it on human affairs in the contemporary world. Finally, Part three presents a discussion of the influential effects of the philosophy of Progress on the epistemology of human health and welfare intervention, specifically that of nursing and its claim to a holistic ethic of Caring. (shrink)

The interaction between the recovery of the artist’s intentions and the perception of an artwork is a classic topic for philosophy and history of art. It also frequently, albeit sometimes implicitly, comes up in everyday thought and conversation about art and artworks. Since recent work in cognitive science can help us understand how we perceive and understand the intentions of others, this discipline could fruitfully participate in a multidisciplinary investigation of the role of intention recovery in art perception. The method (...) I propose is to look for cases where recovery of the artist’s intentions interacts with perception of a work of art, and this cannot be explain by a simple top-down influence of conscious propositional knowledge on perception. I will focus on drawing and show that recovery of the draftsman’s intentional actions is handled by a psychological process shaped by the motor system of the observer. (shrink)

Vivian Maier’s street photography shows us a sudden transfiguration of reality, by which persons, scenes and things become faerical (neologism that also receives one of the senses of the French féerie , a play where supernatural, or, in this case, also infranatural creatures appear). We propose that this transfiguration is an apparition – a faerical epiphany (always earthy and fleshy) that follows two ways, one sunny and luminous, the other obscure and subterranean. We will examine Maier’s body, reflected in her (...) self-portraits in order to propose that her sight (therefore her photography) is a daemonic one, an intermediary between our and other worlds. -/- La fotografía callejera de Vivian Maier nos hace ver una súbita transfiguración de la realidad por la cual las personas, las escenas y las cosas devienen féricas , neologismo que nos permitimos para recoger del inglés el universo de las faeries y traducir a la vez uno de los sentidos del francés féerie , pieza de teatro en la que aparecen seres sobrenaturales (o, en este caso, infranaturales). Esa transfiguración, proponemos, es en rigor una verdadera aparición: una epifanía feérica (siempre carnal) que se despliega en dos direcciones, solar y subterránea. Nos detendremos en el cuerpo de Maier, reflejado en sus autorretratos, para proponer, finalmente, que su mirada es un daimon, intermediaria entre éste y otros mundos. (shrink)

The ‘music appreciation as contemplation’ paradigm of traditional aesthetics and music education assumes that music exists to be contemplated for itself. The resulting distantiation of music and music education from life creates a legitimation crisis for music education. Failing to make a noteworthy musical difference for society, a politics of advocacy attempts to justify music education. Praxial theories of music, instead, see music as pragmatically social in origin, meaning, and value. A praxial approach to music education stresses that appreciation is (...) seen in use; thus, it seeks to ‘make a difference’ that students and society find musically noteworthy. (shrink)

The cultural project is a therapeutic melding of emotion, symbols, and knowledge. In this paper, I describe how spiritual emotions engendered through encounters in imaginative culture enable fixation of metaphysical beliefs. Evolved affective systems are domesticated through the social practices of imaginative culture so as to adapt people to live in culturally defined cooperative groups. Conditioning, as well as tertiary-level cognitive capacities such as symbols and language are enlisted to bond groups through the imaginative formats of myth and participatory ritual. (...) These cultural materializations can be shared by communities both synchronically and diachronically in works of art. Art is thus a form of self-knowledge that equips us with a motivated understanding of ourselves in the world. In the sacred state produced through the arts and in religious acts, the sense of meaning becomes noetically distinct because affect infuses the experience of immanence, and one's memory of it, with salience. The quality imbued thereby makes humans attentive to subtle signs and broad “truths.” Saturated by emotions and the experience of alterity in the immanent encounter of imaginative culture, information made salient in the sacred experience can become the basis for belief fixation. Using examples drawn from mimetic arts and arts of immanence, I put forward a theory about how sensible affective knowledge is mediated through affective systems, direct perception, and the imagination. (shrink)

Over the last several decades Ellen Dissanayake has developed an evolutionary theory of art that views all art as having evolved for the function of promoting group cohesion. This theory is not without its critics, yet it has received little empirical attention. In this article I propose a more modest formulation of Dissanayake’s hypothesis and proceed to test it using a cross-cultural analysis. I rely on the ethnographic databases of the electronic Human Relations Area Files as well as the Standard (...) Cross-Cultural Sample to compare proxies for group cohesion with measures of ritual art, a subset of art that I theoretically define. While my results cannot decisively prove or disprove Dissanayake’s hypothesis, they do lend empirical support to her views. This is promising not only for her views but for outlining ways of empirically testing other views in evolutionary aesthetics. (shrink)

Over four decades, my ideas about the arts in human evolution have themselves evolved, from an original notion of art as a human behaviour of “making special” to a full-fledged hypothesis of artification. A summary of the gradual developmental path (or route) of the hypothesis, based on ethological principles and concepts, is given, and an argument presented in which artification is described as an exaptation whose roots lie in adaptive features of ancestral mother–infant interaction that contributed to infant survival and (...) maternal reproductive success. I show how the interaction displays features of a ritualised behavior whose operations (formalization, repetition, exaggeration, and elaboration) can be regarded as characteristic elements of human ritual ceremonies as well as of art (including song, dance, performance, literary language, altered surroundings, and other examples of making ordinary sounds, movement, language, environments, objects, and bodies extraordinary). Participation in these behaviours in ritual practices served adaptive ends in early Homo by coordinating brain and body states, and thereby emotionally bonding members of a group in common cause as well as reducing existential anxiety in individuals. A final section situates artification within contemporary philosophical and popular ideas of art, claiming that artifying is not a synonym for or definition of art but foundational to any evolutionary discussion of artistic/aesthetic behaviour. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to create a naturalistic philosophical picture of creative capacities that are specific to our species, focusing on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study. By integrating data from diverse domains within a philosophical anthropological framework, I have presented a cognitive and evolutionary approach to the question of why humans, but not other animals engage in such activities. Through an application of cognitive and evolutionary perspectives to the study of these behaviors, I have sought to (...) provide a more solid footing for philosophical anthropological discussions of uniquely human behavior. In particular, I have argued that art, religion and science, which are usually seen as achievements that are quite remote from ordinary modes of reasoning, are subserved by evolved cognitive processes that serve functions in everyday cognitive tasks, that arise early and spontaneously in cognitive development, that are shared cross-culturally, and that have evolved in response to selective pressures in our ancestral past. These mundane cognitive processes provide a measuring rod with which we can assess a diversity of cultural phenomena; they form a unified explanatory framework to approach human culture. I have argued that we can explain uncommon thoughts in terms of interactions between common minds. This dissertation is subdivided into four parts. Part I outlines the problem of human uniqueness, examining theories on how humans conceptualize the world, and what their mental tool box looks like. Part II discusses the evolutionary and cognitive origins of human artistic behavior. Part III focuses on the cognitive science of religion, especially on how it can be applied to the reasoning of theologians and philosophers of religion. Part IV considers the cognitive basis of scientific practice. (shrink)

In this paper, I review arguments that have been offered in favor of the view that humans' art and/or aesthetic behaviors are (in part) a product of our biologically evolved human nature, either as adaptations in their own right or as incidental byproducts of adaptations with non-art and non-aesthetic functions. I present an overview of the main positions and options, critically evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and outline their presuppositions.

The current form and transformation of artistic practice in the 20th and 21st century caused some estrangement of the recipient and the art. The current discourse is therefore dominated by some distrust in defining the criteria of contemporary art, or even the dilemma of whether or not art has to be defined at all, mostly under the influence of Morris Weitz. Arthur Danto very aptly reminds that there is currently no way to distinguish art from objects that are not art, (...) even though many theorists have tried to come up with a solution. The need to distinguish different objects in order to carry out the theoretical examination or to have a functional defining apparatus for criticism, or the exhibition practice is not necessary only on the semantic level. The aim of the submitted paper is therefore to offer a brief cross-section of theories, which, over the past sixty years, dealt with the problem of the definition of art and appreciate/re-think the need for a functional definition of art as the determinant of adequate aesthetic theory. (shrink)

Several recent books have claimed to integrate literary study with evolutionary biology. All of the books here considered, except Robert Storey’s, adopt conceptions of evolutionary theory that are in some way marginal to the Darwinian adaptationist program. All the works attempt to connect evolutionary study with various other disciplines or methodologies: for example, with cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, the psychology of emotion, neurobiology, chaos theory, or structuralist linguistics. No empirical paradigm has yet been established for this field, but important steps (...) have been taken, especially by Storey, in formulating basic principles, identifying appropriate disciplinary connections, and marking out lines of inquiry. Reciprocal efforts are needed from biologists and social scientists. (shrink)

Argument of this text is that: to develop aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with aesthetics as philosophy of art but with aesthetics of everyday life; to start with aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with beautiful of ‘pure aesthetics’ but with the dramatic; to analyze the dramatic in sport, we should not open the analysis with analogy between theater and sport, but with sport as a sort of performance; to get at the meaning of sport as a (...) drama, we have to discuss different meanings ‘drama’ has in theory and everyday communication; to map the dramatic in sport as performance, we have to discuss some features of sport which determine its dramatics first, and its potential as spectacle later. To proceed with the argument, we have to take into account contemporary state of aesthetics, recent development of aesthetics of everyday life, and theory of performance, together with Bernard Suits’ definition of game, Gadamer’s idea of play, and Lévy-Strauss’ account on conjunctive and disjunctive ritual. (shrink)

This paper argues that an explanation of the role of aesthetic patterning in human action needs to be part of any “qualitative” social theory. It urges the social sciences to move beyond contextualism and to see art as visual, acoustic and other media that lead to heightened sensory perception and the coordination of feelings through symbols. The article surveys the argument that art provides a basic model of how the self learns to interact with external environments; and the complementary thesis (...) that art could be seen as integral to the emergence of systems of human knowledge, communication and economy. Ornamentation and stylization are advanced as two concrete devices through which human attention is captured and experience is ordered through aesthetic patterns. The conclusion is drawn that art offers the social sciences a meaningful account of the perceptual or “qualitative” dimensions of social interactions; and that this is much needed today. (shrink)

In this paper, key concepts from the philosophy of critical realism and meta-Reality are used to develop an art education research project that can enhance the freedom of art students in their art work and, potentially, contribute to the promotion of emancipation beyond the world of art work. In the process of developing this project, the author engages in a two-way interrogation of both concepts and empirical research. The stratified model of reality, the ontological status of absence and the concepts (...) of transcendental identification, transcendental agency and the ground-state have informed decisions about data collection and contributed to the analysis of data in this study. The research results offer some empirical support for the philosophy of critical realism and meta-Reality, whilst also identifying potential inconsistencies. A further original feature of the paper is that it draws on the flow theory of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to complement Roy Bhaskar's account of the ground-state and of the nature of free-flowing activity; also using neuroscience to provide some neurological evidence for the differences between mindful and spontaneous activity. It is anticipated that the cross-analysis between cases resulting from the two-way interchange between theory and empirical evidence could help to generate a model for ‘unblocking the creative block’, experienced not only by students practising art-making, but also by the wider community. (shrink)

Based on the field of aesthetics, for centuries philosophers and more recently scientists have been concerned with understanding the artistic experience focusing on emotional responses to the perception of artworks. By contrast, in the last decades, evolutionary biology has been concerned with explaining the artistic experience by focusing on the cognitive processes underlying this experience. Up until now, the cognitive mechanisms that allow humans to experience objects and events as art remain largely unexplored and there is still no conventional use (...) of terms for referring to the processes which may explain why the artistic experience is characteristically human and universal to human beings (Dissanayake, 1992, p. 24; Donald, 2006, p. 4). In this paper, I will first question whether it is productive to understand the artistic experience in terms of perception and emotion, and I will subsequently propose a possible alternative explanation to understand this experience. Drawing upon the work of Ellen Dissanayake (1992, 2000, 2015), Merlin Donald (2001, 2006, 2013), Antonio Damasio (1994, 2000, 2003, 2010), Barend van Heusden (2004, 2009, 2010), and Alejandra Wah (2014), I will argue that this experience is characterized by particular degrees of imagination and consciousness. (shrink)

When Władysław Tatarkiewicz wrote that there are only two things that can be said about art: that it is a human activity, not a product of nature, and that it is a conscious activity (or its product), adding that every statement about art different from the ones mentioned above was always finally overthrown (Tatarkiewicz, 1980, p. 37), he probably did not think that the first claim could be questioned by anyone. In the following paper, I will trace the history of (...) observations of “artistic behaviors” that were made by animal ethologists and then processed by evolutionary art philosophers who may lead to the hypothesis about the validity of assigning artistic abilities to animals. In respect to this article is aimed at a wide audience. I will also demonstrate that the question: whether, and in what sense, animals create art is in fact a question about a definition of art that could include this type of intentional animal acts. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the origins of banality and the reasons why some phenomena appear banal to us. I discuss the issue by analysing three interrelated areas of aesthetic investigation: artworks, everyday objects, and banal things. By identifying the source of banality, my goal is to understand what makes banal things different from other kinds of things. I consider the following questions: 1) when, why, and how does an object become banal?; 2) what happens when something becomes banal?; 3) (...) are banal things aesthetically appealing? Drawing on Wolfgang Welsch’s notion of anesthetization and Walter Benjamin’s account of aura, I argue that banality consists in the absence of both an ontological and an axiological character in objects, which makes them appear trivial or insignificant to us. I conclude by showing that although art, everydayness, and banality represent different aesthetic dimensions, objects constantly move from one of these dimensions to the other. (shrink)

The paper offers a semantic and pragmatic analysis of statements of the form ‘x is beautiful’ as involving a double speech act: first, a report that x is beautiful relative to the speaker’s aesthetic standard, along the lines of naive contextualism; second, the speaker’s recommendation that her audience comes to share her appraisal of x as beautiful. We suggest that attributions of beauty tend to convey such a recommendation due to the role that aesthetic practices play in fostering and enhancing (...) interpersonal coordination. Aesthetic practices are driven by a disposition towards the attunement of attitudes and aesthetic recommendations contribute to forwarding such attunement. Our view is motivated by an attempt to satisfy the following set of desiderata: to account for the experiential nature of aesthetic judgments, disagreements in aesthetic debates, and the normative aspirations of aesthetic discourse, as well as to avoid appealing to error theory and realist ontological commitments. (shrink)

In recent years, the field of virtual reality (VR) has shown tremendous advancements and is utilized in fields ranging from entertainment, scientific research, social networks, artistic creation as well as numerous approaches to employ VR for psychotherapy. While the use of VR in psychotherapy has been widely discussed, little attention has been given to the potential of this new medium for art therapy. Artistic expression in virtual reality is a novel medium which offers unique possibilities, extending beyond classical expressive art (...) mediums. Creation in virtual reality includes options such as three-dimensional painting, an immersive creative experience, dynamic scaling and embodied expression. In this perspective paper, we present the potentials and challenges of virtual reality for art therapy and outline basic principles for its implementation. We focus on the novel qualities offered by this creative medium (the virtual environment, virtual materials and unreal characteristics) and on the core aspects of virtual reality (such as presence, Immersivity, point of view and perspective) for the practice of art therapy. (shrink)

While interest in the emotion of awe has surged in psychology, philosophers have yet to devote a single self-standing article to awe’s conceptual contours and moral standing. The present article aims to rectify this imbalance and begin to make up for the unwarranted philosophical neglect. In order to do so, awe is given the standard Aristotelian treatment to uncover its conceptual contours and moral relevance. Aristotelianism typically provides the most useful entry point to ‘size up’ any emotion – more problematically (...) here, however, as Aristotle did not himself explicitly identify awe. The article critiques and proposes to improve upon existing psychological conceptual analyses of awe, probes the question why Aristotle ignored it and addresses an often-presumed link between awe and humility which bears on its moral status. (shrink)

My hypothesis is that art reflects and exploits patterns of differential interest shaped by natural selection.Swan Lake demonstrates how little plot material is required for an evening-long work of art. Examination of this and other ballets suggests that the scenario is closer to the core of a production than the more changeable music and dance are. This narrative minimum is composed of different behavioral tendencies familiar to sociobiological inquiry. Set into a matrix of counterpoising forces, these biases generate enormous interest, (...) helping us to account for the ritualistic status of the artistic canon. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the emergent neo-Jamesian perspective concerning the phenomenology of art and aesthetic experience. Starting from the distinction between nucleus and fringe in the stream of thought described by William James, it can be argued that our appreciation of a work of art is guided by a vague and blurred perception of a much more powerful content, of which we are not fully aware. Accordingly, a work of art is seen as a kind of metaphor of our mental (...) life, objectified to be able to reach out to a much larger audience. However, it is a “realistic” theory rooted in evolutionary psychology, which claims that our mind developed within a framework shaped by environmental pressures. The aesthetics illustrated by several novelists develops a paradigm for this theory. The search for the neuronal correlates of stream of consciousness allows to make a comparison with the recent findings of neuroaesthetics and to reject its claim that it is unnecessary to take phenomenology and psychology into account. (shrink)

Artistic images, of a universal nature and validated by global culture, are carriers of an emotional potential that can be used for therapeutic purposes in cultural centers as well as in clinical spaces. Esthetic studies reveal the mobilizing power in their contemplation and the capacity to bring out personal stories with healing potential. The general objective of this paper is to design and validate the PROJECTA instrument, consisting of the therapeutic use of artistic images to approach trauma or difficult conditions (...) in therapy, by means of the association between art images and emotions, feelings or states of mind related with a traumatic experience. A mixed approach of investigation with a concurrent triangulation design has been used for the integration of qualitative and quantitative results, where qualitative research outweighs quantitative, but both have been QUAL → quan sequentially developed. The study was carried out in two phases. The first was a systematic review of the literature. The second, divided into five steps, consisted of the validation of artworks and the associated emotions with the participation of students, experts in art therapy, psychologists and educators through focus groups, interviews and an online questionnaire. The analysis techniques were qualitative and quantitative. A set of 220 artistic images linked to emotional states were proposed by experts in education, psychology and art therapy, and validated through an online questionnaire. The respondents included 228 students and professionals and for 64.55% of these images a consensus of over 80% was obtained. These images and their associated emotions were again reviewed by a confirmatory focus group. Finally, 92 artistic works were linked to primary, secondary and tertiary emotions such as love, joy, victory, surprise, balance, sense of humor, anger, sadness, fear, and emptiness. In addition, there are mobilizing images that have not been related to any emotion because of the polysemy of their meanings. It concludes that PROJECTA is a visual art therapy tool that provides professionals with a resource that helps facilitate the identification, expression or demonstration of emotions or feelings related with trauma, and in challenging situations of vulnerability, psychological discomfort or post-traumatic stress. (shrink)

Bullot & Reber (B&R) put forth a design stance to fuse psychological and art historical accounts of visual thinking into a single theory. We argue that this aspect of their proposal needs further fine-tuning. Issues of transgression and coherence are necessary to provide stability to the design stance. We advocate looking to Art Education for such fundamentals of picture understanding.

In every known human society, some kind—usually many kinds—of art is practiced, frequently with much vigor and pleasure, so that one could at least hypothesize that “artifying” or “artification” is a characteristic behavior of our species. Yet human ethologists and sociobiologists have been conspicuously unforthcoming about this observably widespread and valued practice, for a number of stated and unstated reasons. The present essay is a position paper that offers an overview and analysis of conceptual issues and problems inherent in viewing (...) art and/or aesthetics as adaptive, and it presents a speculative account of a human behavior of art. (shrink)

Dissanayake argues that art behaviors – which she characterizes first as patterns or syndromes of creation and response and later as rhythms and modes of mutuality – are universal, innate, old, and a source of intrinsic pleasure, these being hallmarks of biological adaptation. Art behaviors proved to enhance survival by reinforcing cooperation, interdependence, and community, and, hence, became selected for at the genetic level. Indeed, she claims that art is essential to the fullest realization of our human nature. I make (...) three criticisms: Dissanayake’s theory cannot account adequately for differences in the aesthetic value of artworks; the connections drawn between art and reproductive success are too stretched to account for art's production, nature, and reception; indeed, art enters the picture only because it is so thinly characterized that it remains in doubt that her topic is art as we understand it. (shrink)

A recent paradigm shift in music research has allowed scholars to examine the macro- and micro-processes taking place within musical performance and underlying cognitive processes. Tying in with phenomenological theories of embodied perception and cognition, this paper focuses on bodily musical activity relevant to the acquisition of instrumental musical skills—the process of learning music. Dynamic interaction with musical instruments, accompanied by the interplay of action and passion, involves body image and body schema, whose status oscillates in different phases of the (...) acquisition of instrumental musical skills; this interaction allows humans to direct attention from their bodily states—the proximal—to the quality of musical sounds and a unity of musical experience—the distal. It is thus argued that shaping music by means of playing a musical instrument can be conceived of as an embodied process, of understanding the forms of one’s own experience as related to the musical world that is created by one’s bodily activity. (shrink)

The role of the arts has become crucial to understanding the origins of “modern human behavior,” but continues to be highly controversial as it is not always clear why the arts evolved and persisted. This issue is often addressed by appealing to adaptive biological explanations. However, we will argue that the arts have evolved culturally rather than biologically, exploiting biological adaptations rather than extending them. In order to support this line of inquiry, evidence from a number of disciplines will be (...) presented showing how the relationship between the arts, evolution, and adaptation can be better understood by regarding cultural transmission as an important second inheritance system. This will allow an alternative proposal to be formulated as to the proper place of the arts in human evolution. However, in order for the role of the arts to be fully addressed, the relationship of culture to genes and adaptation will be explored. Based on an assessment of the cognitive, biological, and cultural aspects of the arts, and their close relationship with ritual and associated activities, we will conclude with the null hypothesis that the arts evolved as a necessary but nonfunctional concomitant of other traits that cannot currently be refuted. (shrink)

In this essay, I defend a bi-constructivist approach to ethology—a constructivist ethology assuming that each animal adopts constructivist strategies. I put it in opposition to what I call a realist-Cartesian approach, which is currently the dominant approach to ethology and comparative psychology. The starting point of the bi-constructivist approach can be formulated as a shift from the classical Aristotelian question “What is an animal?” to the Spinozean question, which is much less classical but which seems to me to be much (...) stronger: “What are the capacities of the animal?”. Is it possible to conceptualize an ethology which insists on interpretation and therefore on invention, innovation and creativity, rather than on causality, the monotony of behavioural routines, and/or genetic or environmental determination? Such an ethology would be based not on the fiction of an absent observer but on fully recognizing the necessity of an observer, who is effectively present in order to get an observation. A pluralistic ethology does not dissociate itself from the marginal epistemologies of practitioners like animal trainers, hunters, stockbreeders etc., or, moreover, non-western experts. An ethology of this kind is not clamped within the boundaries of purely academic epistemology, obsessed by demarcation lines between the human and the animal. My work on the bi-constructivist approach represents a contribution towards the elaboration of an authentically biosemiotic ethology, one which is significantly different from the mechanical ethology of today. (shrink)

This article combines critical, visual and aesthetic theory to argue that the very act of design is a Utopian process. Crucially, the Utopian dimension is not simply a matter of subject matter or utility. Rather, it lies in the act of formal arrangement and composition, and therefore can apply to visual texts with no apparent subject matter at all. The argument is grounded in Ernst Bloch’s critical theory of Utopia, which sees Utopia as a process rather than a destination. It (...) is illustrated with a case study of Navajo weaving, in tandem with an analysis of Navajo creation mythology. It concludes by arguing that we need to go beyond creation theory to a critical theory of creativity. Utopia is not something that we can delegate either to nature or to the supernatural because, as Bloch declares in The Spirit of Utopia, ‘Life has been put into our hands’. (shrink)

Over the last decades, disciplines such as cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology and the neurosciences have shown an increasing interest for art. It remains unclear what kind of relation these "young disciplines" should have with more traditional endeavors and, more generally, in which way they can enrich our understanding of art. In this paper, I lay down the foundations of a methodological framework which distinguishes between three basic topics: the investigation of the cognitive phenomena elicited by the experience of things that (...) we call 'artworks', the investigation of the psychological structures determining the intuitive categorization of something as art and the study of the intuitions and arguments used to build justifications about whether something is a work of art. Each of these topics can benefit from the cognitive approaches, provided that some specific methodological recommendations are respected. (shrink)

Creativity has become an oft-used word in UK public policy, but perhaps it is also under-imagined. This paper contends that there is an instrumental tendency to narrowly frame creativity as innovation, implying a reproducible product, instead of more openly as improvisation, a situational, embodied and temporal process. This is not a simple dichotomy (innovation and improvisation, product and process, can be mutually informing concepts), nor is it specifically a question of definition; rather, it relates to an ontological orientation, and related (...) to that are issues of epistemological implications. In particular the paper is concerned with the value of the arts in public policy, as situated in the social, and therefore human, spaces of health and care; and more generally the arts in society. The paper brings together a broad discussion from across disciplines, not in an interdisciplinary attempt to solve a problem, or to be reductive in the analysis, but to begin to approach a reorienting of understandings of creativity and the human value and foundation of the arts in society. (shrink)