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Body, Brain, and Beauty: The Place of Aesthetics in the World of the Mind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Zdravko Radman
Zdravko Radman*
Affiliation:
Institute of Philosophy, Zagreb
*
Zdravko Radman, Institute of Philosophy, Ulica grada Vukovara 54, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia. Email: radman@ifzg.hr
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Abstract

This article represents a programmatic attempt to relate the subject of aesthetics to the wider scope of issues concerning the nature of the human mind. In addition to a criticism of the aesthetics’ isolationism, it provides an outline of orthodox cognitivism and also of the more recent philosophy of embodiment, and sees the latter as a natural context for aesthetic concerns. The author argues that not only may the results of brain research be instructive for a more profound understanding of beauty but also that the subtlety and richness of aesthetic studies can be insightful for empirical studies of the neural system. That beauty is not reducible to brain processes does not mean that a possible lesson from neuroscience has no explanatory value for aesthetics; at the same time the article affirms the stand that the aesthetic, being one of the most profound traits of the human mind, cannot be fully captured in empiricist terms. What is needed is a multidisciplinary exchange that requires a shift from the comfort of the traditional views and an opening that might prove potent for the aesthetics of the present times which should not deprive itself of an ambition to participate in deciphering the ‘mysteries’ of the mind, cognition, and action.

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Articles
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Diogenes , Volume 59 , Issue 1-2: Why New Aesthetics? , May 2012 , pp. 41 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2012

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