Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy

The project of naturalizing human consciousness/experience has made great technical strides (e.g., in mapping areas of brain activity), but has been hampered in many cases by its uncritical reliance on a dualistic Cartesian paradigm (though as some of the authors in the collection point out, assumptions drawn from Plato and from Kant also play a role). The present volume proposes a version of naturalism in aesthetics drawn from American pragmatism (above all from Dewey, but also from James and Peirce)one primed from the start to see human beings not only as embodied, but as inseparable from the environment they interact withand provides a forum for authors from diverse disciplines to address specific scientific and philosophical issues within the anti-dualistic framework considering aesthetic experience as a process of embodied meaning-making. Cross-disciplinary contributions come from leading researchers including Mark Johnson, Jim Garrison, Daniel D. Hutto, John T. Haworth, Luca F. Ticini, Beatriz Calvo-Merino.

The volume covers pragmatist aesthetics, neuroaesthetics, enactive cognitive science, literary studies, psychology of aesthetics, art and design, sociology.

The first scholarly volume in the field of aesthetics to present an embodied approach to human experience Presents a wide range sub-disciplines within aesthetics Highlights new research questions within the field of aesthetics, and they grapple with the embodied mind thesis

Contenu

Chapter 1 Introduction to a Non-classical View of Meaning-making and Human Cognition: Meaning-making as a Socially Distributed and Embodied Practice.- Part I Embodied Aesthetics: The Anti-Cartesian View and Aesthetics of Life.- Chapter 2 The Aesthetics of Embodied Life.- Chapter 3 Dewey's Aesthetics of Body-Mind Functioning.- Chapter 4 Corpo-real Cognition: Pragmatist Aesthetics in William James.- Chapter 5 Ecological Embodiment, Tragic Consciousness, and the Aesthetics of Possibility: Creating an Art of Living.- Chapter 6 Emotionally Charged Experience.- Part II Neuroscience, Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind.- Chapter 7 Embodied Aesthetics : Insight from Cognitive Neuroscience of Performing Arts.- Chapter 8 The Aesthetic Stance On the Conditions and Consequences of Becoming a Beholder.- Part III Art Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy.- Chapter 9 The Last 'Touch' Turns the Artist into a User: The Body, The Mind and The Social Aspect of Art.- Chapter 10 Art that Moves: Exploring the Embodied Basis of Art Representation, Production, and Evaluation.- Chapter 11 The Experience of Literariness: Affective and Narrative Aspects.- Chapter 12 A Qualitative Study of Aesthetic Reflection as Embodied Interpretation.- Part IV Radicalizing the Anti-Cartesian View: Enactivism in Aesthetics.- Chapter 13 Enactive Aesthetics: Philosophical Reflections on Artful Minds.- Chapter 14 Neuroaesthetics as an Enactive Enterprise.- Chapter 15 Aesthetics as an Emotional Activity That Facilitates Sense-making: Towards an Enactive Approach in Aesthetic Experience.- Chapter 16 Enactive Literariness and Aesthetic Experience: from Mental Schemata to Anti-representationalism.- Part V Creating with and for the Embodied Mind.- Chapter 17 Creativity in Digital Fine Art.- Chapter 18 Autopoietic Aesthetics as a Lens for Interactive Art.- Chapter 19 No Neuron Is an Island: a Neuroaesthetic Inquiry into Omer Fast's Mimetic Interactions.