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 with-and 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.

Inhalt

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.