The Aesthetic Mind

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 is Samuel Hall Professor in Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Philosophy and Conceptual Art (OUP, 2007), On Personality (Routledge, 2004), and The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Clarendon Press, 2000).

• Introduction ; PART 1: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE AESTHETIC ; 1. The Master of the Masek Beds: Handaxes, Art and the Minds of Early Humans ; 2. The Fragility of Aesthetic Knowledge: Aesthetic Psychology and Appreciative Virtues ; 3. Neuroscience, Biology, and Brain Evolution in Visual Art ; 4. Fact and Fiction in the Neuropsychology of Art ; PART 2: EMOTION IN AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE ; 5. Emotion and Aesthetic Value ; 6. Beauty is Felt, not Calculated; and it Does Not fit in Boxes ; 7. The Ethics of Aesthetic Bootstrapping ; 8. The Origins of Aesthetics: A Neurobiological Basis for Affective Feelings and Aesthetics ; PART 3: BEAUTY AND UNIVERSALITY ; 9. Beauty is Instinctive Feeling: Experimenting on Aesthetics and Art ; 10. Beauty Is Not One: The Irreducible Variety of Visual Beauty ; 11. Aesthetics: The Approach from Social Anthropology ; 12. Experiencing the Aesthetic: Kantian Autonomy or Evolutionary Biology? ; PART 4: IMAGINATION AND MAKE-BELIEVE ; 13. Imagination Unblocked ; 14. An Attitude Towards the Possible: The Contributions of Pretend Play to Later Adult Consciousness ; 15. Unpacking the Boxes: The Cognitive Theory of Imagination and Aesthetics ; PART 5: FICTION AND EMPATHY ; 16. Enacting the Other: Towards an Aesthetics of Feeling in Literary Reading ; 17. On Keeping Psychology Out of Literary Criticism ; 18. Mirroring Fictional Others ; PART 6: MUSIC, DANCE, AND EXPRESSIVITY ; 19. Moving in Concert: Dance and Music ; 20. 'I'll Be Your Mirror'?: Embodied Agency, Dance, and Neuroscience ; 21. Music and Emotion: Psychological Considerations ; 22. Cross-cultural Musical Expressiveness: Theory and the Empirical Programme ; PART 7: PICTORIAL REPRESENTATION AND APPRECIATION ; 23. Neurology and the New Riddle of Pictorial Style ; 24. Varieties of Pictorial Judgement: A Functional Account ; 25. Pictorial Representation and Psychology ; Index

The question of what we philosophers of art ought to make of empirical research results and methods is one whose answer we are still very much feeling our way towards. The great value of this collection is that, with it, the terrain we must traverse to do so is now all the clearer.