In the last few years, a remarkable convergence of interests and results has emerged between scholars interested in the arts and aesthetics from a variety of perspectives and cognitive scientists studying the mind and brain within the predictive processing (PP) framework. This convergence has so far proven fruitful for both sides: while PP is increasingly adopted as a framework for understanding aesthetic phenomena, the arts and aesthetics, examined under the lens of PP, are starting to be seen as (...) important windows into our mental functioning. The result is a vast and fast-growing research programme that promises to deliver important insights into our aesthetic encounters as well as a wide range of psychological phenomena of general interest. Here, we present this developing research programme, describing its grounds and highlighting its prospects. We start by clarifying how the study of the arts and aesthetics encounters the PP picture of mental functioning (§1). We then go on to outline the prospects of this encounter for the fields involved: philosophy and history of art (§2), psychology of aesthetics and neuroaesthetics (§3) and psychology and neuroscience more generally (§4). The upshot is an ambitious but well-defined framework within which aesthetics and cognitive science can partner up to illuminate crucial aspects of the human mind. -/- This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’. -/- . (shrink)

There seems to be a deep tension between two aspects of aesthetic appreciation. On the one hand, we care about getting things right. On the other hand, we demand autonomy. We want appreciators to arrive at their aesthetic judgments through their own cognitive efforts, rather than deferring to experts. These two demands seem to be in tension; after all, if we want to get the right judgments, we should defer to the judgments of experts. The best explanation, I suggest, is (...) that aesthetic appreciation is something like a game. When we play a game, we try to win. But often, winning isn’t the point; playing is. Aesthetic appreciation involves the same flipped motivational structure: we aim at the goal of correctness, but having correct judgments isn’t the point. The point is the engaged process of interpreting, investigating, and exploring the aesthetic object. Deferring to aesthetic testimony, then, makes the same mistake as looking up the answer to a puzzle, rather than solving it for oneself. The shortcut defeats the whole point. This suggests a new account of aesthetic value: the engagement account. The primary value of the activity of aesthetic appreciation lies in the process of trying to generate correct judgments, and not in having correct judgments. -/- *There is an audio version available: look for the Soundcloud link, below.*. (shrink)

This paper assesses the aesthetic components of the experience of forgiveness to develop a procedural model of the phenomenological process that negotiates cognitive judgments and understanding with emotional affective states. By bringing the Greek concepts of kalokagathia and eudaimonia into conversation with Ricoeur’s “solicitude,” I suggest that the impetus for engaging in the process of forgiveness is best understood narratively as the pursuit of a life well lived (in terms of beauty). Consequently, forgiveness is revealed as a technique (...) for developing both an optimal personal and public character (in both moral and aesthetic terms). (shrink)

Book review of Dadejík, O., Kaplický, M., Ševčík, M., and Zuska, V. (2021) Process and Aesthetics: An Outline of Whiteheadian Aesthetics and Beyond. Prague: Karolinum Press. ISBN 978-80-246-4726-5.

The aesthetics of tea, in some practices, seems to focus on appreciating the mental effects of tea — the altered states of mind. Wine aesthetics, on the other hand, seems to actively exclude any inebriative effects. Wine experts are supposed to spit, in order to avoid inebriation when they judge wine. Why? The answer, I suggest, lies deep in several key suppositions in the traditional model of aesthetic experience: that aesthetic experience needs to be accurate of its object, (...) and that it needs to be inseparable from the particular details of its object. But, I argue, that model is not really incompatible with an aesthetics of drugs. The problematic presupposition is that the aesthetics of drugs is either an aesthetics of the world, as experienced while drugged, or an aesthetics of the physical substance itself. The aesthetics of some drugs, such as LSD, will turn out, instead, to be a self-reflective aesthetics — one in which the primary object of appreciation is the alteration of one’s own cognitive faculties. This can be valuable as a humbling aesthetic vision, of one’s own cognitive fragility. But the aesthetics of gastronomical drugs, such as wine and tea, will turn out to be even more complicated. Gastronomical drugs demand that we bridge the inwardly-focused aesthetics of inebriation and an outwardly focused gastronomical aesthetics. They open the door to the possibility of an aesthetic reconciliation between our capacity to get onto the world, and our fears about the fragility of that capacity. (shrink)

Is the sense of smell a source of aesthetic perception? Traditional philosophical aesthetics has centered on vision and audition but eliminated smell for its subjective and inherently affective character. This article dismantles the myth that olfaction is an unsophisticated sense. It makes a case for olfactory aesthetics by integrating recent insights in neuroscience with traditional expertise about flavor and fragrance assessment in perfumery and wine tasting. My analysis concerns the importance of observational refinement in aesthetic experience. I argue (...) that the active engagement with stimulus features in perceptual processing shapes the phenomenological content, so much so that the perceptual structure of trained smelling varies significantly from naive smelling. In a second step, I interpret the processes that determine such perceptual refinement in the context of neural decision-making processes, and I end with a positive outlook on how research in neuroscience can be used to benefit philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

Evolutionary aesthetics (EA) investigates the origins and evolution of aesthetic preferences and artistic behaviors, along with the underlying capacities that support these preferences and behaviors. EA is a multidisciplinary approach that intersects various disciplines – e.g. evolutionary psychology, biology, neurosciences, art history, archeology, anthropology, philosophical aesthetics – providing a comprehensive framework for understanding the deep-rooted biological and evolutionary underpinnings of human aesthetic preferences and artistic expressions. Central to EA, in fact, is the exploration of when, how and why (...) aesthetic preferences and artistic behaviors originated in human history, as well as understanding whether these behaviors are evolutionary adaptations, by-products of evolutionary processes, or nonbiological cultural products (Killin 2021; Richards 2022). (shrink)

One aim of this essay is to contribute to understanding aesthetic communication—the process by which agents aim to convey thoughts and transmit knowledge about aesthetic matters to others. Our focus will be on the use of aesthetic adjectives in aesthetic communication. Although theorists working on the semantics of adjectives have developed sophisticated theories about gradable adjectives, they have tended to avoid studying aesthetic adjectives—the class of adjectives that play a central role in expressing aesthetic evaluations. And despite the wealth (...) of attention paid to aesthetic adjectives by philosophical aestheticians, they have paid little attention to contemporary linguistic theories of adjectives. We take our work to be a first step in remedying these lacunae. In this paper, we present four experiments that examine one aspect of how aesthetic adjectives ordinarily function: the context-sensitivity of their application standards. Our results present a prima facie empirical challenge to a common distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives because aesthetic adjectives are found to behave differently from both. Our results thus also constitute a prima facie vindication of some philosophical aestheticians’ contention that aesthetic adjectives constitute a particularly interesting segment of natural language, even if the boundaries of this segment might turn out to be different from what they had in mind. (shrink)

What does it mean to be an aesthetic beholder? Is it different than simply being a perceiver? Most theories of aesthetic perception focus on 1) features of the perceived object and its presentation or 2) on psychological evaluative or emotional responses and intentions of perceiver and artist. In this chapter I propose that we need to look at the process of engaged perception itself, and further that this temporal process of be- coming a beholder must be understood in (...) its embodied, contextual and dynamic speci- ficity. Through both phenomenological and neuroscientific explorations I analyze what is characteristic about a more “aesthetic stance” and argue that there is a certain asym- metry between beholder and beheld, which has to do with a disengagement of goal- directed action, and which allows for other kinds of perceptual involvement than in a more “practical stance”. It is a multi-disciplinary project integrating a sensorimotor no- tion of aesthetic affordances, 18th century philosophy, and large-scale brain network findings. What ensues is a new dynamic framework for future empirical and theoretical research on aesthetic perception. (shrink)

The dynamism between otherness and differences with identity and equivalence provides key ideas for analyzing the process of gender individuation by artistic works. In this article I discuss the problem of artistic and aesthetic reactions to homogeneous cultural patterns of masculinity, which is characterized by the concept of "toxic masculinity" in pop-cultural, sociological, psychological and gender studies discourses. One common theme is that "toxic masculinity" encompasses harmful standards that generate antagonisms and diminish multi-figure masculinity to a singular "socially acceptable" (...) level at the expense of children, women and men - and thus society as a whole. The artist's task is to reveal this noxiousness, and to highlight the value of the coexistence of a variety of forms of masculinity in terms of its diversity, thereby helping to mitigate the consequences of disruptive gender relations. (shrink)

How to account for the power that art holds over us? Why do artworks touch us deeply, consoling, transforming or invigorating us in the process? In this paper, we argue that an answer to this question might emerge from a fecund framework in cognitive science known as predictive processing (a.k.a. active inference). We unpack how this approach connects sense-making and aesthetic experiences through the idea of an ‘epistemic arc’, consisting of three parts (curiosity, epistemic action and aha experiences), which (...) we cast as aspects of active inference. We then show how epistemic arcs are built and sustained by artworks to provide us with those satisfying experiences that we tend to call ‘aesthetic’. Next, we defuse two key objections to this approach; namely, that it places undue emphasis on the cognitive component of our aesthetic encounters—at the expense of affective aspects—and on closure and uncertainty minimization (order)—at the expense of openness and lingering uncertainty (change). We show that the approach offers crucial resources to account for the open-ended, free and playful behaviour inherent in aesthetic experiences. The upshot is a promising but deflationary approach, both philosophically informed and psychologically sound, that opens new empirical avenues for understanding our aesthetic encounters. -/- This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’. (shrink)

On several current views, including those of Matthew Kieran, Gary Iseminger, Jerrold Levinson, and Noël Carroll, aesthetic appreciation or experience involves second-order awareness of one’s own mental processes. But what if it turns out that we don’t have introspective access to the processes by which our aesthetic responses are produced? I summarize several problems for introspective accounts that emerge from the psychological literature: aesthetic responses are affected by irrelevant conditions; they fail to be affected by relevant conditions; we are ignorant (...) of their causes and thus confabulate in explaining them; our attempts to offer explanations change our preferences; and the preferences we form after explanation are lower in quality. I suggest that by distinguishing introspective awareness of mental processes from introspective awareness of mental states, we can safeguard a worthwhile concept of aesthetic experience. In addition, we should recognize that theoretical, rather than introspective, understanding of our mental processes may play a valuable role in aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

This article presents a new approach to studying aesthetics by weaving together a thread of ideas based on investigating the problematics of the philosophy of art from a behavioral paradigm in order to exceed the margins of aesthetics. I claim that it makes no sense to ask if something is art, but rather we should be looking out into the manners in which art subsists, consists, and insists itself. Several notions of what I call behavioral aesthetics are (...) proposed such as observation, aesthetic experience and aesthetic conditioning, behavioral materialism, out-comes, behavioral memory and replication or acquisition, interaction and intra-action, emotional engineering, artificial instincts, aesthetic dissonance, and the problem of measurement. The proposed goal of behavioral aesthetics consists in studying the process of individuation as constitutive of art with the methods of Bernard Stiegler’s general organology and genealogy of the sensible. The article presents a behavioral stance as a borderline mode for approaching the genealogy of aesthetics. I mostly refer to Tania Bruguera’s Behavior Art School and Wright Judson’s Behavioral Art, and the paradigm of new materialism, notably agential realism of Karan Barad. (shrink)

Following C. S. Peirce’s claim that aesthetics precedes ethics and logic, I argue for reconceiving aesthetics as a normative science. The deteriorated relations between these links in the ‘modern mythology’ is associated with art’s decline and apparent indistinguishability from the ‘general aesthetic’ (aided by ‘aesthetics as theory’). ‘Naturalizing’ art, according to F. W. Schelling’s system, is proposed to ameliorate this. Bringing together Peircian semiotics with Schelling’s ‘process metaphysics’ suggests how to restore the historicized split between Art (...) ‘as principle’ and the Person (two ‘perfect signs’) by attending to the ‘ethical phenomenology’ of artworks. An argument is then made for how modern ethics and ‘morals’ may be reconnected. (shrink)

Monists and pluralists disagree concerning how many ordinary objects there are in a single situation. For instance, pluralists argue that a statue and the clay it is made of have different properties, and thereby are different. The standard monist’s response is to hold that there is just a single object, and that, under the description “being a statue”, this object is, e.g., aesthetically valuable, and that, under the description “being a piece of clay”, it is not aesthetically valuable. However, Fine (...) provided an ontological reading of the expression “an object under a description”: the theory of rigid embodiments. The debate between monists and pluralists reduplicates in the domain of ordinary occurrences, like walks and conferences. Specifically, they disagree whether an occurrence in progress (also called “process”) like John’s walk that is happening at tn is identical to some completed occurrence (also called “event”) like John’s walk that happened between, e.g., t1 and tn. Under the adoption of the pluralist’s position, the article aims to provide a novel theory of ordinary occurrences that develops the ontological reading of “under a description” to account for occurrences in progress and completed occurrences. As a first result, we formulate a theory according to which both occurrences in progress and completed occurrences are rigid embodiments. As a second result, we argue that the suggested theory is explanatorily powerful to the extent it solves two puzzles that we call “the Puzzle from the Completion of a Process” and “the Metaphysical-cum-Semantical Puzzle”. (shrink)

This paper proposes a radical re-examination of the foundations of modern aesthetics. It urges that we replace the tradition of eighteenth century aesthetics, with its insistence on disinterestedness and the separateness of the aesthetic, and its problematic oppositions, such as the separation of sense from cognition. In their place it appeals to a more process-oriented, pluralistic account, one that takes note of varying cultural traditions in aesthetics, that recognizes the aesthetic as a complex of many forces (...) and factors, and that considers the aesthetic as part of a complexity of values, including moral, practical, social, and political ones. It urges, further, an aesthetic-based criticism, not only of the arts, but of culture and knowledge. Central to this account is the idea of aesthetic engagement, which not only recognizes and extends the many connections of and in aesthetic experience, but invites our total involvement as active participants. (shrink)

Accounts of aesthetic valuing emphasize two constraints on the formation of aesthetic belief. We must form our own aesthetic beliefs by engaging with aesthetic value first-hand (the acquaintance principle) and by using our own capacities (the autonomy principle). But why? C. Thi Nguyen’s proposal is that aesthetic valuing has an inverted structure. We often care about inquiry and engagement for the sake of having true beliefs, but in aesthetic engagement this is flipped: we care about arriving at good aesthetic beliefs (...) for the sake of the values that arise in the process of doing so. The engagement is the point, so we must use our own capacities in first-hand encounters. Here I challenge Nguyen’s account. I argue that it misconstrues the value of aesthetic belief; it conflicts with restrictions on aesthetic testimony; and it has trouble harnessing engagement-value for a theory of aesthetic value. A better approach emphasizes the social character of aesthetic valuing. On this view, aesthetic valuing is a social practice structured around the collaborative exercise and improvement of certain special capacities. The autonomy and acquaintance principles tell us to engage these capacities in forming our aesthetic beliefs. Understood aright, and contrary to consensus, these rules are identical. (shrink)

This book is founded on a close reading of Kant’s Opus Postumum in order both to explore the essential motivation that drove Kant to write a last comprehensive magnum opus and, by doing so, to show the essential link between his aesthetics and the idea of Übergang, the title of this last work. For this work contains not only his dynamical theory of matter defining motion as preliminary to the notions of space and time, and the advanced version of (...) his philosophy of natural science, but also his arguments for the phenomenal validity of the metaphysical foundations, his teachings on the aesthetic human faculties of judgment and Anschauung, and the discernment of the transcendental philosophy from Platonic idealism carrying it to a cosmological level, i.e. Kant’s insertion of the concept of cosmotheoros. Since the process of transition is an aesthetic process based on human senses, intuitions and judgments, the argument will follow that in order to explicate Übergang, we need to reconcile cosmology, as the oldest branch of philosophy dealing with the interactions between the cosmic forces and the ways they affect human life, with aesthetics, as the youngest branch of philosophy dealing with how we sense, intuit and judge the form and motion of matter. Therefore, in the last analysis, Übergang becomes rather a cosmologic-aesthetic principle similar to the Heraclitean logos. Another building block of the book is the fruitful comparison between the Kantian sublime and Nietzschean Dionysian, which are going to be construed as the aesthetic theories on human understanding representing the transition from nature to art. For they are not only conceptual – aesthetic but also dynamic – cosmological theories due to their reference both to nature and to human nature. Finally, Cosmological Aesthetics employs the principles of transition and motion to analyze Van Gogh’s Starry Night in an excursus. (shrink)

Can experiments be appreciated for their aesthetic value and what would this appreciation be focused on? This chapter identifies a number of categories that are the focus on our aesthetic appreciation of experiments and shows how these categories are rather stable across different experimental traditions. It is argued that we can find aesthetic value in the phenomena unveiled in the experimental set up, the instruments and tolls used, the results that are obtained, the process of conceptualisation of the experimental (...) set up, the experimental design and the very performance of the experiment. The chapter draws a distinction between immediately accessible to the senses beauty and intellectual beauty and argues that the ultimate source of aesthetic value is to be found in the relationship between design and significance. (shrink)

This contribution proposes how beholders may internally process unfinished works of art. It does so by considering five of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s interrupted sculptures and pointing out their empathic and imaginative potential. The beholder focused on the surface, I propose, is inclined to mentally simulate the artist’s gesture that drafted the sculptures through the visible graphic signs of the chisels. This inner simulation takes place within the activation of various brain networks, located in the brain’s motor system. Renaissance authors associated (...) the observation of the unfinished to learning and, as this article shows, this assumption seems to find confirmation in recent neuroscientific studies on mirror neurons and imitation learning. In this way, the empathic engagement established between the beholder and the work of art observed – as well as the role played by embodied simulation and imagination in this kind of visual perception – clarifies how the incompleteness can also have that pedagogical function recognised by Giorgio Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini. (shrink)

It has always been a matter of curiosity what kind of information art, which is far from ordinary and untouchable, provides people. Confronting a person with an art object means looking at the window of a world different from the world of daily routines, with his head stuck out. We can describe this world as magical in a romantic way. This magic arises from the difference in the functioning of perception, interpretation and judgment processes, which the person confronted with an (...) art object has difficulty in explaining to himself from time to time. Because the acquisition of perception in the world of routines and the acquisition of perception from the art object are different in terms of the functioning of mental processes... (shrink)

I propose an account of aesthetic value, where aesthetic value lies in the process of aesthetic engagement: in our activity of perceiving, guiding our attention, interpreting, and otherwise wrestling with aesthetic objects. It also includes our social activities of engagement: arguing with each other, writing criticism, making top-ten lists. (This is a short summary of a view developed in greater detail elsewhere.).

The complexity, subtlety, interlinking, and scale of many problems faced individually and collectively in today's rapidly changing world requires an epistemology--a way of thinking about our knowing--capable of facilitating new kinds of responses that avoid recapitulation of old ways of thinking and living. Epistemology, which implicitly provides the basis for engagement with the world via the fundamental act of distinction, must therefore be included as a central facet of any practical attempts at self/world transformation. We need to change how we (...) think, not just what we think. The new epistemology needs to be of a higher order than the source of the problems we face. -/- This theoretical, transdisciplinary dissertation argues that such a new epistemology needs to be recursive and process-oriented. This means that the thoughts about thinking that it produces must explicitly follow the patterns of thinking by which those thoughts are generated. The new epistemology is therefore also phenomenological, requiring the development of a reflexivity in thinking that recursively links across two levels of order--between content and process. The result is an epistemology that is of (and for) the whole human being. It is an enacted (will-imbued) and aesthetic (feeling-permeated) epistemology (thinking-penetrated) that is sensitive to and integrative of material, soul, and spiritual aspects of ourselves and our world. I call this kind of epistemology aesthetic, because its primary characteristic is found in the phenomenological, mutually fructifying and transformative marriage between the capacity for thinking and the capacity for feeling. -/- Its foundations are brought forward through the confluence of multiple domains: cybernetic epistemology, the esoteric epistemology of anthroposophy (the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner), and the philosophy of the implicit as developed by Eugene Gendlin. -/- The practice of aesthetic epistemology opens new phenomenal domains of experience, shedding light on relations between ontology and epistemology, mind and body, logic and thinking, as well as on the formation (and transformation) of identity, the immanence of thinking in world-processes, the existence of different types of logic, and the nature of beings, of objects, and most importantly of thinking itself and its relationship to spirit. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore the different strategies the Bard uses in order to evoke sympathy in the reader for Macbeth who is so persistent in the path of evil. What strategy does Shakespeare use in order to provoke such a deep emotional response from his readers? By using paradoxes in the play, the Bard creates a world of illusion, fear and wild imagination. The paradoxical world in Macbeth startles us into marvel and fear, challenges our commonly held opinions, and (...) reshapes our thought in the process (Platt 8). As the text involves the reader in the formation of illusion and the simultaneous formation of the means whereby the illusion is punctured, “reading reflects the process by which we gain experience. Once the reader is entangled, his own preconceptions are continually overtaken so that the text becomes his present while his own ideas fade into the past. As soon as it happens, he is open to the immediate experience of the text” (Iser, The Implied Reader 290). Mesmerised by Macbeth’s powerful imagination and poetic language, the reader engages in a dialogical interaction with the play and eventually finds light in the murky world of the text. Regardless of Macbeth’s diabolical world, the reader ventures into it, shares it with him and ultimately wakes up from its dizzying stupor. In reading Macbeth, the reader leaves behind the familiar world of his experience in order to participate in the adventure the text offers him. The edifying effect of the tragedy in the end is the reward the reader reaps after eventually waking up from the nightmarish dream of the text. (shrink)

A recent version of the view that aesthetic experience is based in empathy as inner imitation explains aesthetic experience as the automatic simulation of actions, emotions, and bodily sensations depicted in an artwork by motor neurons in the brain. Criticizing the simulation theory for committing to an erroneous concept of empathy and failing to distinguish regular from aesthetic experiences of art, I advance an alternative, dynamic approach and claim that aesthetic experience is enacted and skillful, based in the recognition of (...) others’ experiences as distinct from one’s own. In combining insights from mainly psychology, phenomenology, and cognitive science, the dynamic approach aims to explain the emergence of aesthetic experience in terms of the reciprocal interaction between viewer and artwork. I argue that aesthetic experience emerges by participatory sense-making and revolves around movement as a means for creating meaning. While entrainment merely plays a preparatory part in this, aesthetic engagement constitutes the phenomenological side of coupling to an artwork and provides the context for exploration, and eventually for moving, seeing, and feeling with art. I submit that aesthetic experience emerges from bodily and emotional engagement with works of art via the complementary processes of the perception–action and motion–emotion loops. The former involves the embodied visual exploration of an artwork in physical space, and progressively structures and organizes visual experience by way of perceptual feedback from body movements made in response to the artwork. The latter concerns the movement qualities and shapes of implicit and explicit bodily responses to an artwork that cue emotion and thereby modulate over-all affect and attitude. The two processes cause the viewer to bodily and emotionally move with and be moved by individual works of art, and consequently to recognize another psychological orientation than her own, which explains how art can cause feelings of insight or awe and disclose aspects of life that are unfamiliar or novel to the viewer. (shrink)

One challenge faced by aesthetics is the development of an account able to trace out the continuities and discontinuities between general experience and aesthetic experiences. Regarding this issue, in this paper, I present an enactive model of some raw cognitive dynamics that might drive the progressive emergence of aesthetic experiences from the stream of general experience. The framework is based on specific aspects of John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and embodied aesthetic theories, while also taking into account research in ecological (...) psychology, cognitive sciences, and dynamic systems theory. The model focuses on dynamically relevant nodes at the pre-reflective and the reflective side of experience that would work as nested rhythmic constraints at different cognitive timescales with the potential to shunt experiences toward the aesthetic in everyday situations. My proposal constitutes a way to explore aesthetic experiences from an enactive perspective that regards them as transformative events in which cognitive processes entrain and are entrained by changes taking place in the environment, the brain, and the body. (shrink)

According to the scientific image, aesthetic experience is constituted by private reverie or mindless gratification of some kind. This image fails to fully acknowledge the theoretical and hence cultural aspect of perception, which includes aesthetic experience. This chapter reframes aesthetic reflective judgment in terms of perceptual processes (section 2); intentional pleasure (section 3); non-perceptually represented perceptual properties (section 4); and intersubjectivity (section 5). By clarifying the relevant terms, the liberal naturalist account of the sublime provides the link between the sublime (...) and moral motivation (section 6). (shrink)

The overall aim of this paper is to defend the value of the arts as uniquely instructive regarding philosophical questions. Specifically, I aim to achieve two things: firstly, to show that through the phenomenological challenge to dualist and monist ontologies the key debate in aesthetics regarding subjective response and objective judgment is reconfigured and resolved. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s analyses complement and complete Kant’s project. Secondly, I propose that through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological interrogations of the creative process the broader (...) issue of the viability of his relational nondualist ontology is defended against accusations that it has not gone beyond dualism or that it has collapsed into a monism. (shrink)

The protracted history of consuming carbon-based energy sources in Iran culminated in 1908 with the momentous discovery of the inaugural oil field in Masjed Soleyman. This newfound carbon-based source not only brought a lot of revenues to Iran but also, brought forth a multitude of materialities like pipelines, roads, bridges, refinery factories, tankers, and rigs into Iran. This new materiality exerted a profound influence on the perception and imagination of Iranians, particularly Iranian artists. Consequently, carbon permeated diverse manifestations within Iranian (...) artworks assuming various artistic approaches; in other words, carbon was inevitably introduced into aesthetics. Serendipitously, the ascension of Reza Shah Pahlavi to power in Iran almost coincided with the discovery of oil. Reza Shah and his successor, Mohammadreza Shah, sought to position themselves as a novel international force governing a "developed" nation for which they needed to lubricate the production-consumption cycle in Iran. To achieve this objective, they championed extensive governmental propagandas that celebrated carbon-based consumerism, and with that, they introduced aesthetics into carbon. Drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin's notions “politicizing aesthetic” and “aestheticizing politics” and insisting that in Iran, oil/carbon is politics, this paper aims to historicize the process of carbonization of aesthetics in Iranian art realm on the one hand, and aestheticization of carbon in governmental propaganda on the other hand. This paper focuses on visual ideologies in visual artworks, including architecture, painting, and sculpture in the artwork realm and postal stamps, postcards, and paper moneys, on the other hand. (shrink)

This paper is founded on a close reading of Kant’s Opus Postumum in order both to explore the essential motivation that drove Kant to write a last comprehensive magnum opus and, by doing so, to show the essential link between his aesthetics and the idea of Übergang, the title of this last work. For this work contains not only his dynamical theory of matter defining motion as preliminary to the notions of space and time, and the advanced version of (...) his philosophy of natural science, but also his arguments for the phenomenal validity of the metaphysical foundations, his teachings on the aesthetic human faculties of judgment and Anschauung, and the discernment of the transcendental philosophy from Platonic idealism carrying it to a cosmological level, i.e. Kant’s insertion of the concept of cosmotheoros. Since the process of transition is an aesthetic process based on human senses, intuitions and judgments, the argument will follow that in order to explicate Übergang, we need to reconcile cosmology, as the oldest branch of philosophy dealing with the interactions between the cosmic forces and the ways they affect human life, with aesthetics, as the youngest branch of philosophy dealing with how we sense, intuit and judge the form and motion of matter. Therefore, in the last analysis, Übergang becomes rather a cosmologic-aesthetic principle similar to the Heraclitean logos. Another building block of the paper is the fruitful comparison between the Kantian sublime and Nietzschean Dionysian, which are going to be construed as the aesthetic theories on human understanding representing the transition from nature to art. For they are not only conceptual – aesthetic but also dynamic – cosmological theories due to their reference both to nature and to human nature. (shrink)

The concept of ‘the image’ can be given historical, conceptual, aesthetic and moral specifications. This essay sets out some of the scholarly issues in the dense semantic field of ‘the image’. In particular, the essay considers how the meaning of the image is often determined in relation to the opposition between sensible form and intelligible idea. Specific attention is given to Kantian aesthetics, which inaugurates a specific way of understanding the sensible form as a mode of processing moral ideas.

Much has been written about Schopenhauer’s use of Kant’s aesthetics as well as Schopenhauer’s adherence to and departures from Kant’s theoretical philosophy, not least by Schopenhauer himself. The hypothesis I propose in this paper combines these two research trajectories in a novel way: I wish to argue that Schopenhauer’s main theoretical innovation, the doctrine of the will, can be regarded as the development of an aspect of Kant’s aesthetic theory, specifically that the intransitive, goalless striving of the will in (...) Schopenhauer is the intellectual air to Kant's understanding of the mental processes required for the appreciation of beauty as 'conforming to law without a law'. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper explores the role of aesthetic judgements in mathematics by focussing on the relationship between the epistemic and aesthetic criteria employed in such judgements, and on the nature of the psychological experiences underpinning them. I claim that aesthetic judgements in mathematics are plausibly understood as expressions of what I will call ‘aesthetic-epistemic feelings’ that serve a genuine cognitive and epistemic function. I will then propose a naturalistic account of these feelings in terms of sub-personal processes of representing and (...) assessing the relation between cognitive processes and certain properties of the stimuli at which they are directed. (shrink)

In this paper I will discuss some issues related to a recent trend in experimental philosophy (or x-phi), and try to show the reasons of its late (and scarce) involvement with aesthetics, compared to other areas of philosophical investigation. In order to do this, it is first necessary to ask how an autonomous experimental philosophy of aesthetics could be related to the long-standing tradition of psychological experimental aesthetics. After distinguishing between a “narrow” and a “broad” approach of (...) experimental philosophy, I will then make a distinction between topics in aesthetics pertaining to perceptual and cognitive processes, and traditional issues involved in the analysis of general and culturally-laden concepts. The narrow program of experimental philosophy, focused on the investigation of folk intuitions, is particularly effective only when two general conditions are met: the use of hypothetical scenarios (testing of thought experiments) and the heuristic role of folk intuitions in drawing philosophically relevant conclusions. I will argue that, when aesthetics is concerned, these requirements are not easily met. These difficulties notwithstanding, I will support a pluralistic view where aesthetics is revealed as an instructive example of how experimental approaches and traditional “armchair” philosophy integrate, and enrich each other. (shrink)

Taking Heidegger's prominent critique of Nietzsche's treatment of Kant's notion of 'aesthetic disinterestedness' as a foil this paper argues that, contrary to the dominant interpretation, Nietzsche's text contain a positive and radical notion of 'aesthetic disinterestedness'. It is argued that Nietzsche's naturalistic notion of aesthetic disinterestedness is a key feature of his conception of art as natural life process that contests the boundaries, values and libidinal constitution of the 'human'. The ramifications of this for Heidegger's reading of Nietzche's (...) class='Hi'>aesthetics are considered. The paper reviews Nietzsche's critical treatment of the notion of 'aesthetic disinterestedness' in both "The Birth of Tragedy" and the "Genealogy of Morality" and relates these to his overall vision of the relationship between art and life. (shrink)

This work investigates one of the most widespread yet elusive ideas about our experience of art: the idea that there is something cognitively valuable in engaging with great artworks, or, in other words, that we learn from them. This claim and the age-old controversy that surrounds it are reconsidered in light of the psychological and neuroscientific literature on learning, in one of the first systematic efforts to bridge the gap between philosophical and scientific inquiries on the topic. The work has (...) five chapters. Chapter 1 lays down its conceptual bases: it explains what learning is taken to be in the current philosophical debate and it points out how Bayesian cognitive science (particularly in its predictive processing formulations) might be well-suited to capture the kind of learning involved in our engagement with the arts. The following chapters test this latter hypothesis with respect to particular art forms, namely literature and literary language (Chapter 2), narrative (Chapter 3), and visual art, music and motor activities (Chapter 4). The fine-grained discussions conducted in each of these areas will enable us to see that the relationship between art and learning is indeed fundamental and pervasive. The final chapter (Chapter 5) examines the consequences of this fact for our understanding of the role of art in our epistemic practices, its ultimate usefulness and value, and its place in the interdisciplinary study of the human mind. The upshot is a novel and wide-ranging picture, both philosophically informed and empirically sound, that bypasses many of the problems and dead ends of the current philosophical debate on the topic and captures the deep sense in which art and learning are interrelated. (shrink)

Poetry is the most complex and intricate of human language used across all languages and cultures. Its relation to the worlds of human experience has perplexed writers and readers for centuries, as has the question of evaluation and judgment: what makes a poem "work" and endure. The Poem as Icon focuses on the art of poetry to explore its nature and function: not interpretation but experience; not what poetry means but what it does. Using both historic and contemporary approaches of (...) embodied cognition from various disciplines, Margaret Freeman argues that a poem's success lies in its ability to become an icon of the felt "being" of reality. Freeman explains how the features of semblance, metaphor, schema, and affect work to make a poem an icon, with detailed examples from various poets. By analyzing the ways poetry provides insights into the workings of human cognition, Freeman claims that taste, beauty, and pleasure in the arts are simply products of the aesthetic faculty, and not the aesthetic faculty itself. The aesthetic faculty, she argues, should be understood as the science of human perception, and therefore constitutive of the cognitive processes of attention, imagination, memory, discrimination, expertise, and judgment. (shrink)

Although artistic activity has been a major social phenomenon in the western world, aesthetics has not always reflected the changes in techniques, processes, themes and uses through which the arts have developed and had their effect. Theory most often comes after the fact, and properly so. Yet aesthetics in its history has not only displayed an unfitting hubris, with thinkers attempting to legislate about style, suitability and materials to the artist; aesthetics has also lagged far behind the (...) living edge of artistic activity and discussed it in anachronistic terms. (shrink)

If complexity is a necessary but not sufficient premise for the existence and expression of the living, anticipation is the distinguishing characteristic of what is alive. Anticipation is at work even at levels of existence where we cannot refer to intelligence. The prospect of artificially generating aesthetic artifacts and ethical constructs of relevance to a world in which the natural and the artificial are coexistent cannot be subsumed as yet another product of scientific and technological advancement. Beyond the artificial, the (...) synthetic conjures the understanding of aesthetics and ethics no longer from the perspective of the How? type of question, but rather the Why? Given the current infatuation with synthetic biology (i.e., making life from non-life), there is a practical consequence to such considerations. Synthetic life, as any other form of life, implies the possibility of evolution. Anticipation, which is the underlying factor of evolution, is thus expected. At the level of human existence, anticipation is expressed, for instance (but not exclusively), in aesthetic forms and ethical values. This translates, in turn, into an argument for the role aesthetics and ethics play in the process. Consequently, to qualify as life, the synthesis of the physical and the living will have to efficiently handle ambiguity. Current computational facilities, regardless of their nature or performance, operate exclusively in the semiotic domain of the well defined non-ambiguous. (shrink)

I analyze Deleuze’s concept of temporality in terms of its ontology and axiological (political and aesthetic) aspects. For Deleuze, the concept of temporality is non-monolithic, in the senses that it is modified throughout his works — the monographs, lectures, and those works that were co-authored with Félix Guattari — and that it is developed through reference to a dizzying array of concepts, thinkers, artistic works, and social phenomena. -/- I observe that Deleuze’s concept of temporality involves a complex ontology of (...) difference, which I elaborate through reference to Deleuze’s analyses of Ancient Greek and Stoic conceptualizations of time. From Plato through to Chrysippus, temporality gradually comes to be identified as a form that comprehends the variation of particulars. Deleuze modifies the ancients’ concept of time to suggest that time obtains as a form of ceaseless ontological variation. Through reference to Deleuze’s reading of Gilbert Simondon, I further suggest that Deleuze tends to conceive of temporality as an ontogenetic force which participates in the complex process of individuation. -/- A standout feature of this dissertation involves an analysis of how Deleuze’s concept of temporality is modified in his works on cinema. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, temporality comes to be characterized as something other than the measure of the movement of existents. In his detailed analyses of Bergson — in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, and Bergsonism — Deleuze suggests that time involves an actualization of aspects of a virtual past as contemporaneous with the lived present. While not an outright denial of the relation of temporal succession, Deleuze’s claim implies a diminishment of this relation’s significance in an adequate elaboration of the nature of temporality. -/- Further, I observe —through reference to Deleuze’s readings of Marx, Kierkegaard, and Spinoza — that (the explicitly temporal) change of societal forms of economic organization is non-reducible to that suggested by linear evolution. The claim is that putatively discrete modes of economic organization do not enjoy temporal displacement with respect to one another. This suggests that linear evolutionary models of societal development are inadequate. This further implies that temporality is non-reducible to the relation of temporal succession. In concrete terms, societal change is characterized as immanent temporal variation. -/- Taken together, these analyses yield the conclusion that Deleuze tends to conceive of the nature of temporality as involving the ongoing realization of multiple — non-identical, sometimes contrary — aspects of a stochastic process of creation that is expressed in ontogenetic circumstances, social evolution, literary works, and filmic works. (shrink)

WHAT is art? Classificatory disputes.. Classificatory disputes about what is art Art historians and philosophers of art have long had classificatory disputes about art regarding whether a particular cultural form or piece of work should be classified as art. Disputes about what does and does not count as art continue to occur today -/- Defining art is difficult if not impossible. Aestheticians and art philosophers often engage in disputes about how to define art. By its original and broadest definition, art (...) (from the Latin ars, meaning “skill” or “craft”) is the product or process of the effective application of a body of knowledge, most often using a set of skills; this meaning is preserved in such phrases as “liberal arts” and “martial arts”. However, in the modern use of the word, which rose to prominence after 1750, “art” is commonly understood to be skill used to produce an aesthetic result (Hatcher, 1999). (shrink)

In order to grasp the true ethical meaning of Foucault's aesthetics of existence, I begin by explaining in what sense he was an anti-normativist, arguing that the most important thing about the "final" Foucault is his strong emphasis on the idea of human freedom. I go on with a brief discussion about Foucault's sources of inspiration and a criticism of Rorty's kindred plea for "aesthetic life". I strongly reject the interpretation of Foucault's aesthetics of existence in terms of (...) narcissistic individualism, arguing, on the contrary, that it has a definite communitarian dimension. I also claim that it is rooted in the Socratic and Stoic understanding of "care of the self," at the same time allowing new challenging developments fitted for our "post-duty" historical age, by way of analogy with the process of artistic making. I conclude with some short answers to a few questions regarding the status of this aesthetics of living. (shrink)

This paper discusses the empirical findings concerning the visual aesthetic experience in a neurological context. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to shed light on the common ground across neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy to pave new roads for empirical research. Cognitive models posit that the brain employs neural networks mediating bottom-up and top- down processes, and in effect, engenders emotion and reward throughout the visual aesthetic experience. Likewise, empathy and its corresponding recruitment of bodily processes may facilitate the understanding (...) of a visual artwork’s depicted emotion, which may allow the viewer to engage with the visual artwork from a psychological distance and, consequently, to experience pleasure regardless of the visual artwork’s emotional content. In conclusion, empathetic processes may be central to the visual aesthetic experience and should be considered by future empirical research investigating the visual aesthetic experience. (shrink)

This study explores the interface between conscious and nonconscious mental processes using phenomenological analysis, information processing cognitive psychology, connectionism and traditional aesthetic theories. It attempts to explain how global, evaluative information--especially the primitive feeling of 'rightness' or 'making sense'--is represented in consciousness. ;Many lines of evidence confirm and extend William James' nucleus/fringe model of consciousness: surrounding clear experience in focal attention is a fringe of vague experience. Context information in general, and the feeling of rightness in particular, occupy the fringe. (...) The fringe is vague because it works to finesse consciousness' limited capacity to articulate experience, and the fringe is elusive or 'ungraspable' because it helps to call new information into consciousness. The phenomenology of the fringe is thus a consequence of its cognitive functions. ;Meaningfulness is proposed to be a summary index of cognitive integration, signalling consciousness about the degree of global compatibility or 'fit' between a given content in the focus of attention and its nonconscious context. Though very similar to goodness-of-fit in a connectionist network, Meaningfulness is proposed to play an active feedback role in cognition, while goodness-of-fit, as currently used, is a passive measure of network integration. ;This analysis predicts that an intense feeling of Meaningfulness will have a characteristic 'profile,' and this profile is evident in many accounts of aesthetic experience: a feeling of unity and coherence that cannot be captured adequately in words, but which nevertheless seems to be a source of profound, and often "spiritual," knowledge. ;Many philosophical theories try to explain the unistic, ineffable, noetic, and transcendent aspects of the aesthetic. Platonic and Aristotelian traditions are considered, but the primary focus is on Kant. The Critique of Judgment created modern aesthetics, and in many ways it is remarkably compatible with current cognitive analysis. ;Beyond clarifying the cognitive foundation of aesthetic experience, this study offers new arguments against epiphenomenalism, provides further reason to doubt rule-based accounts of nonconscious processing, explains the isomorphism in aesthetic and mystical phenomenology, and develops a method to investigate consciousness called convergent phenomenology. (shrink)

For Hölderlin and Adorno, the power to transcend one’s being-in-nature in order to capture nature in an image, is both the most dangerous and the most beautiful aspect of the human being. Hölderlin develops a model of reconciliation of man with nature where the transcendental power, as soon as it achieves a vision of nature, violates true nature by virtue of its finitude and so must pay for this “hybris” through self-sacrifice. Adorno appropriates this model for the work of art. (...) Nature can never be captured directly, but only indirectly, by the attempt and failure to capture it directly. This is the role of the work of art. A good work of art is one which criticizes its own appearing quality. It recognizes its own hybris and “explodes” its appearance. In the afterglow of this explosion, true nature “expresses itself.” Hölderlin limits this sacrificial model to Greek humanity. Modern humanity does not follow this negative dialectical model of reconciliation with nature. It conditions nature through its movement away from its source. The Modern poem also becomes a type of movement, a pathway involving an alternation of representations or tones. Each poetic “path” creates truth in the process of its own movement. There is no longer any true nature to reconcile with, but nature is transformed by the particular path chosen and followed. In this way, each work of art creates its own destiny. Adorno misses this aspect of Hölderlin. Whereas Adorno needed the sacrificial dynamic to provide a place for philosophical reflection at a safe distance from the work of art, Hölderlin’s Modern dynamic places any philosophical reflection within the material destiny of any individual work. It is Walter Benjamin who recognizes this Modern dynamic and his disagreements with Adorno are reflected in the difference between their interpretations of Hölderlin. What I hope to show most strikingly in this dissertation is the manner in which the work of art is a material thing, a direction, a process and a destiny, and how any engagement with the work operates along its destiny. (shrink)

Can we conceive of disorder in a positive sense? We organize our desks, we discipline our children, we govern our polities--all with the aim of reducing disorder, of temporarily reversing the entropy that inevitably asserts itself in our lives. Going all the way back to Hesiod, we see chaos as a cosmogonic state of utter confusion inevitably reigned in by laws of regularity, in a transition from fearful unpredictability to calm stability. In contrast to a similar early Chinese notion of (...) chaotic disorder (luan), early Daoists posit a type of chaos that is to be cultivated rather than feared. This chaos is a primal disorder, akin to Hesiod's, but rather than threatening disruption, it is replete with creative potential and through spontaneous action yields orderly processes that proceed from the concretion of things to their dissolution and back, in a complex web of relations. This processional activity, although taken in one sense as cosmogonic, in a more important sense is immanent at every moment of activity. This article identifies terms of chaos, such as dun dun 沌 沌, hundun 渾 沌, and xingming 涬 溟 in Laozi and Zhuangzi and examines the passages in which they occur. Analyzing these passages brings us to a better understanding of "chaos" in a Chinese sense and to a familiarity with related terms in its semantic field, such as xuan 玄 (dark, mysterious), miao 妙 (subtle/profound), wei 微 (minute/inchoate), xiao 小 (small/minute), and pu 樸 (uncarved block). We see that the Daoist ideal is to return to a chaotic inchoateness by melding with the cosmos and there finding a repository of creative potential. This notion of chaos as the inchoate is used a springboard into understanding the origins of Daoist spontaneity. (shrink)

Despite recent breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) – or more specifically machine learning (ML) algorithms for object recognition and natural language processing – it seems to be the majority view that current AI approaches are still no real match for natural intelligence (NI). More importantly, philosophers have collected a long catalogue of features which imply that NI works differently from current AI not only in a gradual sense, but in a more substantial way: NI is closely related (...) to consciousness, intentionality and experiential features like qualia (the subjective contents of mental states)1 and allows for understanding (e.g., taking insight into causal relationships instead of ‘blindly’ relying on correlations), as well as aesthetical and ethical judgement beyond what we can put into (explicit or data-induced implicit) rules to program machines with. Additionally, Psychologists find NI to range from unconscious psychological processes to focused information processing, and from embodied and implicit cognition to ‘true’ agency and creativity. NI thus seems to transcend any neurobiological functionalism by operating on ‘bits of meaning’ instead of information in the sense of data, quite unlike both the ‘good old fashioned’, symbolic AI of the past, as well as the current wave of deep neural network based, ‘sub-symbolic’ AI, which both share the idea of thinking as (only) information processing: In symbolic AI, the name explicitly references to its formal system based, i.e. essentially rule-based, nature, but also sub-symbolic AI is (implicitly) rule-based, only now via globally parametrized, nested functions. In the following I propose an alternative view of NI as information processing plus ‘bundle pushing’, discuss an example which illustrates how bundle pushing can cut information processing short,and suggest first ideas for scientific experiments in neuro-biology and information theory as further investigations. (shrink)

Philosophers investigating the experiences of the dancing subject (Sheets-Johnstone 1980, 2009, 2011, 2012; Parviainen 1998; Legrand 2007, 2013; Legrand & Ravn 2009; Montero 2013; Foultier & Roos 2013) unearth vast variations of embodied consciousness and cognition in performing body experts. The traditional phenomenological literature provides us with descriptions and definitions of reflective self-consciousness as well as of pre-reflective bodily absorption, but when it comes to the states of self-consciousness dance philosophers refer to as thinking in movement and a form of (...) reflective consciousness at a bodily level – as well as to dancers’ re- ported experiences of being in a trance and yet hyper-aware – we are challenged in terms of terminology and precise descriptions. After empirical research on dancers’ experiences and studies of the above-mentioned philosophies of dance, aligning this material with Husserl, Zahavi and other phenomenologists’ descriptions of reflection and embodied self-consciousness, I find it plausible to acknowledge the existence of a third form of self- consciousness: embodied reflection, a reflective process experienced through and with the embodied and/or emotional self. In this article I aspire to capture the characteristics of this transcendence of the bodily self. (shrink)

The theory and culture of the arts has largely focused on the arts of objects, and neglected the arts of action – the “process arts”. In the process arts, artists create artifacts to engender activity in their audience, for the sake of the audience’s aesthetic appreciation of their own activity. This includes appreciating their own deliberations, choices, reactions, and movements. The process arts include games, urban planning, improvised social dance, cooking, and social food rituals. In the traditional (...) object arts, the central aesthetic properties occur in the artistic artifact itself. It is the painting that is beautiful; the novel that is dramatic. In the process arts, the aesthetic properties occur in the activity of the appreciator. It is the game player’s own decisions that are elegant, the rock climber’s own movement that is graceful, and the tango dancers’ rapport that is beautiful. The artifact’s role is to call forth and shape that activity, guiding it along aesthetic lines. I offer a theory of the process arts. Crucially, we must distinguish between the designed artifact and the prescribed focus of aesthetic appreciation. In the object arts, these are one and the same. The designed artifact is the painting, which is also the prescribed focus of appreciation. In the process arts, they are different. The designed artifact is the game, but the appreciator is prescribed to appreciate their own activity in playing the game. Next, I address the complex question of who the artist really is in a piece of process art — the designer or the active appreciator? Finally, I diagnose the lowly status of the process arts. (shrink)

Artworks have at least some necessary content properties, as do abstract entities such as propositions. But no concrete item, whether an object, event, process etc., could have any necessary content property. So no artwork could be identical with a concrete item. Hence artworks must be abstract. I also argue that artworks are only contingently connected with concrete items, just as propositions are only contingently linked to their linguistic tokens.