The Aesthetic Mind Philosophy and Psychology

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.

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).

Introduction, Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie
PART 1: The PSYCHOLOGY OF THE AESTHETIC
1. The Master of the Masek Beds: Handaxes, Art and the Minds of Early Humans, Gregory Currie
2. The Fragility of Aesthetic Knowledge: Aesthetic Psychology and Appreciative Virtues, Matthew Kieran
3. Neuroscience, Biology, and Brain Evolution in Visual Art, Dahlia W. Zaidel
4. Fact and Fiction in the Neuropsychology of Art, Roman Frigg & Catherine Howard
PART 2: EMOTION IN AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE
5. Emotion and Aesthetic Value, Jesse Prinz
6. Beauty is Felt, not Calculated; and it Does Not fit in Boxes, Roddy Cowie
7. The Ethics of Aesthetic Bootstrapping, Peter Goldie
8. The Origins of Aesthetics: A Neurobiological Basis for Affective Feelings and Aesthetics, Edmund Rolls
PART 3: BEAUTY AND UNIVERSALITY
9. Beauty is Instinctive Feeling: Experimenting on Aesthetics and Art, I. C. McManus
10. Beauty Is Not One: The Irreducible Variety of Visual Beauty, Jerrold Levinson
11. Aesthetics: The Approach from Social Anthropology, Robert Layton
12. Experiencing the Aesthetic: Kantian Autonomy or Evolutionary Biology?, Elisabeth Schellekens
PART 4: IMAGINATION AND MAKE-BELIEVE
13. Imagination Unblocked, Aaron Meskin and Jonathan Weinberg
14. An Attitude Towards the Possible: The Contributions of Pretend Play to Later Adult Consciousness, Dorothy & Jerome Singer
15. Unpacking the Boxes: The Cognitive Theory of Imagination and Aesthetics, Kathleen Stock
PART 5: FICTION AND EMPATHY
16. Enacting the Other: Towards an Aesthetics of Feeling in Literary Reading, David Miall
17. On Keeping Psychology Out of Literary Criticism, Peter Lamarque
18. Mirroring Fictional Others, Zanna Clay & Marco Iacoboni
PART 6: MUSIC, DANCE, AND EXPRESSIVITY
19. Moving in Concert: Dance and Music, Noel Carroll & Margaret Moore
20. 'I'll Be Your Mirror'?: Embodied Agency, Dance, and Neuroscience, David Davies
21. Music and Emotion: Psychological Considerations, William Forde Thompson & Lena Quinto
22. Cross-cultural Musical Expressiveness: Theory and the Empirical Programme, Stephen Davies
PART 7: PICTORIAL REPRESENTATION AND APPRECIATION
23. Neurology and the New Riddle of Pictorial Style, Mark Rollins
24. Varieties of Pictorial Judgement: A Functional Account, Norman H. Freeman
25. Pictorial Representation and Psychology, Derek Matravers
Index