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The Aesthetic Mind breaks new ground in bringing together empirical sciences and philosophy to enhance our understanding of art and the aesthetic. An eminent international team of experts explores the roles of emotion, imagination, empathy, and beauty in this realm of human experience, discussing visual and literary art, music, and dance.
List of contents
- Introduction
- PART 1: The PSYCHOLOGY OF THE AESTHETIC
- 1: Gregory Currie: The Master of the Masek Beds: Handaxes, Art and the Minds of Early Humans
- 2: Matthew Kieran: The Fragility of Aesthetic Knowledge: Aesthetic Psychology and Appreciative Virtues
- 3: Dahlia W. Zaidel: Neuroscience, Biology, and Brain Evolution in Visual Art
- 4: Roman Frigg and Catherine Howard: Fact and Fiction in the Neuropsychology of Art
- PART 2: EMOTION IN AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE
- 5: Jesse Prinz: Emotion and Aesthetic Value
- 6: Roddy Cowie: Beauty is Felt, not Calculated; and it Does Not fit in Boxes
- 7: Peter Goldie: The Ethics of Aesthetic Bootstrapping
- 8: Edmund Rolls: The Origins of Aesthetics: A Neurobiological Basis for Affective Feelings and Aesthetics
- PART 3: BEAUTY AND UNIVERSALITY
- 9: I. C. McManus: Beauty is Instinctive Feeling: Experimenting on Aesthetics and Art
- 10: Jerrold Levinson: Beauty Is Not One: The Irreducible Variety of Visual Beauty
- 11: Robert Layton: Aesthetics: The Approach from Social Anthropology
- 12: Elisabeth Schellekens: Experiencing the Aesthetic: Kantian Autonomy or Evolutionary Biology?
- PART 4: IMAGINATION AND MAKE-BELIEVE
- 13: Aaron Meskin and Jonathan Weinberg: Imagination Unblocked
- 14: Dorothy and Jerome Singer: An Attitude Towards the Possible: The Contributions of Pretend Play to Later Adult Consciousness
- 15: Kathleen Stock: Unpacking the Boxes: The Cognitive Theory of Imagination and Aesthetics
- PART 5: FICTION AND EMPATHY
- 16: David Miall: Enacting the Other: Towards an Aesthetics of Feeling in Literary Reading
- 17: Peter Lamarque: On Keeping Psychology Out of Literary Criticism
- 18: Zanna Clay and Marco Iacoboni: Mirroring Fictional Others
- PART 6: MUSIC, DANCE, AND EXPRESSIVITY
- 19: Noël Carroll and Margaret Moore: Moving in Concert: Dance and Music
- 20: David Davies: 'I'll Be Your Mirror'?: Embodied Agency, Dance, and Neuroscience
- 21: William Forde Thompson and Lena Quinto: Music and Emotion: Psychological Considerations
- 22: Stephen Davies: Cross-cultural Musical Expressiveness: Theory and the Empirical Programme
- PART 7: PICTORIAL REPRESENTATION AND APPRECIATION
- 23: Mark Rollins: Neurology and the New Riddle of Pictorial Style
- 24: Norman H. Freeman: Varieties of Pictorial Judgement: A Functional Account
- 25: Derek Matravers: Pictorial Representation and Psychology
- Index
About the author
Elisabeth Schellekens is Senior Lecturer at the University of Durham, and Associate Editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics. She is the author of Aesthetics & Morality (Continuum, 2007), co-author of Who's Afraid of Conceptual Art (Routledge, 2009), and is currently working on a book on Aesthetic Objectivism. She was post-doctoral research fellow on the AHRC-funded project 'Towards an aesthetic psychology:
the philosophy of aesthetic perception and cognition' between 2004 and 2006. Her main research
interests include questions at the intersection of the philosophy of mind and aesthetics, meta-ethics, and Kant.
Peter Goldie was formerly Samuel Hall Professor in Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He authored a number of books, including The Mess Inside (OUP, 2012), Philosophy and Conceptual Art (OUP, 2007), On Personality (Routledge, 2004), and The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Clarendon Press, 2000).
Summary
The Aesthetic Mind breaks new ground in bringing together empirical sciences and philosophy to enhance our understanding of aesthetics and the experience of art. An eminent international team of experts presents new research in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and social anthropology: they explore the roles of emotion, imagination, empathy, and beauty in this realm of human experience, ranging over visual and literary art, music, and dance. Among the questions discussed are: Why do we engage with things aesthetically and why do we create art? Does art or aesthetic experience have a function or functions? Which characteristics distinguish aesthetic mental states? Which skills or abilities do we put to use when we engage aesthetically with an object and how does that compare with non-aesthetic experiences? What does our ability to create art and engage aesthetically with things tell us about what it is to be a human being? This ambitious and far-reaching volume is essential reading for anyone investigating the aesthetic and the artistic.
Additional text
The question of what we philosophers of art ought to make of empirical research results and methods is one whose answer we are still very much feeling our way towards. The great value of this collection is that, with it, the terrain we must traverse to do so is now all the clearer.
