Literature as Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 81-100
Author(s):  
Robert Stecker
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Cognitive Value ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter has three main aims. The first is to argue for a modest view of the cognitive value of fiction in the context of the arts. This view asserts that we acquire from such works new conceptions or hypotheses that we then can test in the actual world. The second aim concerns the interaction of values. The claim we will make is that the kind of cognitive value typically possessed by representational art arises through the aesthetic experience of the work. The third aim is to argue against both more ambitious and more skeptical views about the cognitive value of fiction in art.

The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics

2009 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Third ◽  
Extensive Survey ◽  
General Overview ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theory Application ◽  
Music Film

The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics looks at a fascinating theme in philosophy and the arts. Leading figures in the field contribute forty-eight articles which detail the theory, application, history, and future of philosophy and all branches of the arts. The first article of the book gives a general overview of the field of philosophical aesthetics in two parts: the first is a quick sketch of the lay of the land, and the second an account of five central problems over the past fifty years. The second article gives an extensive survey of recent work in the history of modern aesthetics, or aesthetic thought from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. There are three main parts to the book. The first part comprises sections dealing with problems in aesthetics, such as expression, fiction or aesthetic experience, considered apart from any particular artform. The second part contains articles on problems in aesthetics as they arise in connection with particular artforms, such as music, film, or dance. The third part addresses relations between aesthetics and other fields of enquiry, and explores viewpoints or concerns complimentary to those prominent in mainstream analytical aesthetics.

The Impact of the Social Context on Aesthetic Experience

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Mastandrea
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
Affective Processes ◽  
The Family ◽  
Socio Demographic Factors ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Impact

Not only cognitive and affective processes determine an aesthetic experience; another important issue to consider has to do with the social context while experiencing the arts. Several studies have shown that the aesthetic impact of a work of art depends on, to an important extent, the different socio-demographic factors including age, class, social status, health, wealth, and so on. The concepts of cultural and social capital by Pierre Bourdieu and the production and consumption of artworks by Howard Becker are discussed. Another important aspect of the impact of the social context on aesthetic experience deals with early art experience in childhood within the family—considered as the first social group to which a person belongs.

Aesthetics of Nature

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Budd
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Long Period ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Natural Beauty ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetics Of Nature

The long period of stagnation into which the aesthetics of nature fell after Hegel's relegation of natural beauty to a status inferior to the beauty of art was ended by Ronald Hepburn's ground-breaking paper (1966). In this essay, which offers a diagnosis of the causes of philosophy's neglect of the aesthetics of nature, Hepburn describes a number of kinds of aesthetic experience of nature that exhibit a variety of features distinguishing the aesthetic experience of nature from that of art and endowing it with values different from those characteristic of the arts, thus making plain the harmful consequences of the neglect of natural beauty. The subtlety of Hepburn's thought precludes simple summary, and this article does no more than enumerate a few of his themes that have been taken up and developed in the now flourishing literature on the aesthetics of nature (although not always with the nuanced treatment accorded them by Hepburn).

Nature, aesthetic appreciation of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Western World ◽  
Aesthetic Appreciation ◽  
Ideal Object ◽  
The Third ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Aesthetic

In the Western world, aesthetic appreciation of nature and its philosophical investigation came to fruition in the eighteenth century. During that time, aestheticians made nature the ideal object of aesthetic experience and analysed that experience in terms of disinterestedness, thereby laying the groundwork for understanding the appreciation of nature in terms of the sublime and the picturesque. This philosophical tradition reached its zenith with Kant, while popular aesthetic appreciation of nature continued primarily in terms of the picturesque. In the late twentieth century, renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature has produced various positions designed to avoid assimilating appreciation of nature with traditional models for aesthetic appreciation of art. Three are especially noteworthy. The first holds that the appreciation of nature is not in fact aesthetic; the second rejects the traditional analysis of aesthetic experience as disinterested, arguing instead that the aesthetic appreciation of nature involves engagement with nature; the third attempts to maintain the traditional analysis, while distinguishing aesthetic appreciation of nature by dependence on scientific knowledge. These positions have a number of ramifications. In freeing aesthetic appreciation of nature from artistic models, they pave the way for a general environmental aesthetics comparable to other areas of philosophy, such as environmental ethics. Moreover, the significance given to scientific knowledge in the third position both explains the aesthetic appreciation associated with environmentalism and provides aesthetic appreciation of nature with a degree of objectivity that may make aesthetic considerations more effectual in environmental assessment.

scholarly journals Dewey After the End of Art

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 146-169
Author(s):  
Roberta Dreon
Keyword(s):  
Summer School ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Theoretical Level ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Common ◽  
End Of Art ◽  
Art As Experience ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article explores the significance of Hegel’s aesthetic lectures for Dewey’s approach to the arts. Although over the last two decades some brilliant studies have been published on the “permanent deposit” of Hegel in Dewey’s mature thought, the aesthetic dimension of Dewey’s engagement with Hegel’s heritage has not yet been investigated. This inquiry will be developed on a theoretical level as well as on the basis of a recent discovery: in Dewey’s Correspondence traces have been found of a lecture on Hegel’s Aesthetics delivered in 1891 within a summer school run by a scholar close to the so-called St. Louis Hegelians. Dewey’s deep and long-standing acquaintance with Hegel’s Aesthetics supports the claim that in his mature book, Art as Experience, he originally appropriated some Hegelian insights. First, Dewey shared Hegel’s strong anti-dualistic and anti-autonomistic conception of the arts, resisting post-Kantian sirens that favored instead an interpretation of art as a separate realm from ordinary reality. Second, they basically converged on an idea of the arts as inherently social activities as well as crucial contributions to the shaping of cultures and civilizations, based on the proximity of the arts to the sensitive nature of man. Third, this article argues that an original re-consideration of Hegel’s thesis of the so-called “end of art” played a crucial role in the formulation of Dewey’s criticism of the arts and of the role of aesthetic experience in contemporary society. The author suggests that we read Dewey’s criticism of the removal of fine art “from the scope of the common or community life” (lw 10, 12) in light of Hegel’s insight that the experience of the arts as something with which believers or citizens can immediately identify belongs to an irretrievable past.

scholarly journals L.S. Vygotsky’s Critique: Between Aesthetics, Publitsistika and Psychology

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-34
Author(s):  
P.N. Marques
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Educational Engagement ◽  
Critical Activity ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Formal School ◽  
Extensive List ◽  
Early Activity

This paper discusses L.S. Vygotsky’s early activity as a critic through an analysis of texts in which the author himself reflects on the task of the critic. Fragments from the essay on Hamlet, Psychology of art and theatrical reviews of the Gomel period (1922—23) are analyzed to provide an overview of how his understanding of the role of the critic has evolved and changed in time. By moving from the reader’s critique to the objective analytic method, Vygotsky has placed the critic in a position of social and educational engagement, a public figure committed to raise the level of the arts and the audience’s capacity optimize the aesthetic experience. His stance to the critical work is also analyzed within the context of Russian critical traditions, particularly some ideas of Boris Eikhenbaum and the Formal School of literary studies. Finally, the critical activity is seen alongside an extensive list of attributes that has been linked to Vygotsky (scientist, methodologist, philosopher etc.) as an equally important and complementary facet of a person fully committed to social transformation.

scholarly journals The Art of Feeling Different: Measuring and Exploring the Diversity of Emotions Experienced During a Museum Visit

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekah Rodriguez ◽  
Anna Fekete ◽  
Paul Silvia ◽  
Katherine N. Cotter
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Openness To Experience ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Individual ◽  
First Time ◽  
Emotional Balance

The aesthetic experience of a collection of works—such as a sculpture garden, a neighborhood filled with street art, or an afternoon spent wandering in a museum—is not simply the sum of experiences of the individual works. In the present research, we explored visit-level aesthetic experiences in a field study of 298 visitors to a museum of modern and contemporary art. In particular, we focused on emotional diversity: the richness, complexity, and heterogeneity of the emotions that people experienced during their visit. After their visit, participants reported the degree to which they experienced, if at all, 10 emotions, for which we calculated diversity metrics reflecting their emotional variety (the number of emotions experienced) and emotional balance (the relative evenness between emotions or dominance of a single emotion) during the visit. Overall, the sample reported a rich aesthetic experience, but there was wide and predictable variability. Among other findings, emotional variety was higher for people with greater openness to experience and among first-time visitors to the museum; emotional balance was higher among people high in openness to experience and people with greater interest in art. The concept of diversity—the richness and complexity of someone’s emotional experience of the arts—appears promising for understanding holistic aesthetic experiences, such as entire museum visits rather than single works, as well as for many other questions in empirical aesthetics.

scholarly journals Art, experience and alterity: reflections in the horizon of ethical and aesthetic education

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (33) ◽  
pp. e15315
Author(s):  
Maria Regina Johann
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Philosophical Hermeneutics ◽  
Artistic Experience ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic

Oriented by the theoretical perspective of philosophical hermeneutics, this text addresses the ethical and aesthetic dimension of education, and it has the arts teaching as a reflexive field, emphasizing the artistic experience as a possibility for knowledge and self-awareness beyond the instrumental rationality frameworks. I emphasize, therefore, the artistic experience as an opportunity of (re) approximation among the student, the work and the artist as a way of self-investigation in the field of authorship, with reference to the experimentation of the artistic game and the tensions of the creative process. This creative process triggers a dialogue, which would be in the basis of ethics, since the moral action would be based in the process of co-creation of the aesthetic experience in relation to the work of art.

The Role of Attention, Executive Processes, and Memory in Aesthetic Experience

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Mullennix
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Memory Load ◽  
Cognitive Effort ◽  
Attention And Memory ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Imaging Research ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
And Control

When considering the cognitive processes involved in aesthetic experiences, one approach is to focus on the different components in the cognitive system. In this chapter, research on the roles of dual-mode processing, cognitive effort and control, and memory in the aesthetic experience are reviewed. Automatic and controlled processes, respectively, appear to be engaged at different times when viewing art, with one’s goal (e.g., forming a quick impression of art or closely evaluating an artwork) determining how those processes are utilized. Shifts in cognitive control affect how art is processed, as well as attention and memory load demands at the time art is being viewed. Memory comes into play when considering how knowledge about art and expertise is used. Overall, the growing literature on cognitive processing of art and related brain imaging research is producing numerous exciting findings of interest both to the researcher and to persons working in the arts.

First Aid for Writers

2020 ◽  
pp. 58-84
Author(s):  
Asha Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
First Aid ◽  
State Funding ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Welfare State ◽  
Collective Enterprise

This chapter reflects on the aesthetic commitments of the welfare state through the lens of the Arts Council Literature Department, which emerged belatedly in the mid-1960s. Focusing on the influential scheme of literary ‘first aid’ grants introduced by the poet Cecil Day-Lewis in 1966, it discusses the relatively idealist terms in which the Arts Council envisioned the obligations of writers to a wider public. The third section centres on three emblematic beneficiaries of state funding between 1966 and 1981, the avant-gardists B.S. Johnson and Dambudzo Marechera, who both tended to strain against the ideals of invested institutions, and the Caribbean Artists Movement, which encompassed a more socially inclusive, though no less contested, idea of literature as a collective enterprise.

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