Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-siècle field of “physiological aesthetics,” which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to appreciate beauty and art, changed the way poets, artists, and musicians worked and brought a dramatic transformation to the idea of art itself.

Inspired by the ecosophical writings of Felix Guattari, this book explores the many ways that aesthetics - in the forms of visual art, film, sculpture, painting, literature, and the screenplay - can act as catalysts, allowing us to see the world differently, beyond traditional modes of representation. This is in direct parallel to Guattari's own attempt to break down the 19th century Kantian dialectic between man, art, and world, in favour of a non-hierarchical, transversal approach, to produce a more (...) ethical and ecologically sensitive world view."-- Back cover. (shrink)

This essay collection explores the crucial connections between aesthetic experience and the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. After examining philosophical accounts of embodiment and aesthetic experience, the essays apply somaesthetic theory to the diverse fine arts and the art of living.

Introduction: a peculiar experiment -- Kinaesthetic knowing: the nineteenth-century biography of another kind of knowledge -- Looking: Wölfflin's comparative vision -- Affecting: Endell's mathematics of living feeling -- Drawing: the Debschitz school and formalism's subject -- Designing: discipline and introspection at the Bauhaus -- Epilogue.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001) 265-279 [Access article in PDF] The Physiological Sublime: Burke's Critique of Reason Vanessa L. Ryan The eighteenth-century discussion of the sublime is primarily concerned not with works of art but with how a particular experience of being moved impacts the self. The discussion of the sublime most fully explores the question of how we make sense of our experience: "Why (...) and how does this object move me?" Focusing on the perceiving subject, most critics cast the British discussion of the sublime as reflecting a gradual shift towards a Kantian focus not on the object judged, but on the judging mind. Certainly, eighteenth-century thinkers move away from understanding the sublime as a set of qualities that are presumed to be internal to a given object, and shift their attention to the mental effects of those objects. Yet the increasing interest in the perceiving subject in eighteenth-century British thought should not be understood as necessarily anticipating a Kantian perspective. In his classic work on the sublime Samuel H. Monk claims that this aspect of the British debate provides a preliminary discussion of the Kantian "autonomy of the subject" and that it constitutes a movement towards the "subjectivism of Kant." 1 This reading of British aesthetics exclusively in [End Page 265] terms of a preparation for the Kantian description of the subject obscures the differences between the British and the German traditions. It thereby fails to accommodate the reluctance of British thinkers to give up the social and ethical when faced with the sublime: instead of explaining the commonality of the aesthetic experience by positing a "disinterested" and "autonomous" subject, thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Dennis, and Edmund Burke subordinate the freedom of the individual subject in an attempt to reconcile the aesthetic affect with moral conduct.The teleological and Kantian understanding of British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory is largely the result of the central position that has been given to its most famous theorist, Edmund Burke. Although Burke's conception of the sublime differs in some points markedly from that of his British contemporaries, his treatment of the sublime in the Philosophical Enquiry (1757) has come to represent eighteenth-century British thought, and as such it is routinely compared to Kant's analytic of the sublime. Yet at the point where the British tradition seems to come closest to the Kantian, namely, in the writings of Burke, it also most clearly marks its distance from it. Burke is in some ways the least Kantian of eighteenth-century British thinkers. Whereas Kant holds that the sublime allows us to intuit our rational capacity, Burke's physiological version of the sublime involves a critique of reason. The sublime for Burke is a question not of the subject's increasing self-awareness but of the subject's sense of limitation and of the ultimate value of that experience within a social and ethical context.One of the most intransigent problems in distinguishing the strains of thought on the sublime is that the relationship between the object and its sublime effect--between the object taken to arouse heightened response and the affective quality of such a response--is so variously conceived. The sublime experience is seen as leading, on the one hand, to an overpowering of the self and, on the other hand, to an intense self-presence and exaltation, sometimes even to self-transcendence. The central question is thus not to what extent the sublime is located in the subject, but in what way the experience of the sublime affects the perceiving subject: Does the sublime enlarge us, or diminish us? 2 Does the sublime annihilate our sense of self, or does it affirm and heighten our sense of identity? These two opposing views of the effect of the sublime on the self can be seen in the contrast between Kant and Longinus, whose theories exerted an enormous influence in Britain, especially on Burke. Whereas Longinus emphasizes that the sublime overpowers and dominates the self, Kant holds that the feeling of... (shrink)

The Western history of aesthetics is characterised by tension between theory and practice. Musicians listen, play, and then listen more profoundly in order to play differently, adapt the body, and sense the environment. They become deeply involved in the sensorial qualities of music practice. Artistic practice refers to the original meaning of aesthetics - the senses. Whereas Baumgarten and Goethe explored the relationship between sensibility and reason, sensation and thinking, later philosophers of aesthetics deemed the sensorial to (...) be confused and unreliable and instead prioritised a cognitive or objective approach. Written by authors from the fields of philosophy, composition, performance, and artistic practice, 'Sensorial Aesthetics in Music Practices' repositions aesthetics as a domain of the sensible and explores the interaction between artists, life, and environment. Aesthetics becomes a field of sensorial and embodied experience involving temporal and spatial influences, implicit knowledge, and human characteristics. (shrink)

_Shusterman’s Somaesthetics_ is a wide-ranging collection of penetrating essays by twelve scholars examining in rich detail the many dimensions of philosopher Richard Shusterman’s pragmatism and somaesthetics, complemented by his own chapter of responses to these scholars.

Sport aesthetics is an important but often marginalized field in the philosophy of sport. Kinetic Beauty offers a comprehensive, principled, pluralist introduction to the philosophical aesthetics of sport. The book tackles a wide variety of issues in the philosophical aesthetics of sport, proposing a five-level analysis that coordinates extant scholarship on the same conceptual map, reveals gaps in the literature, and motivates a fresh perspective on stubborn debates and novel topics in the field. This is an excellent (...) resource for professors and students in the philosophy of sport, sport aesthetics, general aesthetics, and the philosophy of art. It is also a fascinating read for those working in kinesiology, sport studies, philosophy, art, and aesthetics. (shrink)

This book builds a new understanding of the body and its relationship to images and technology, using a framework where novel writings of pragmatist somaesthetics and phenomenology meet new research on bodily reactions. Max Ryynänen gives an overview of the topic by collecting the existing information of our bodies gazing at visual culture and the philosophies supporting these phenomena, and examines the way the gaze and the body come together in our relationship to culture. Themes covered include somatic film; the (...) body in artistic documentation of activist art; body parts (and their mutilation or surgeries) in contemporary art and film; robot cars and our visual relationship to them; the usefulness of Indian rass philosophy in explaining digital culture; and an examination of Mario Perniola's work about the idea that we, human beings, are increasingly experiencing ourselves to be simply 'things.' The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, aesthetics, cultural philosophy, film studies, technology studies, media studies, cultural studies, and visual studies. (shrink)

In _African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminisms, Politics_, Catherine F. Botha brings together original research on the body in African cultures, interrogating the possible contribution of a somaesthetic approach in the context of colonization, decolonization, and globalization in Africa.

This book explores our corporeal connections to the past by considering what three theoretical approaches-somaesthetics, posthumanism, and the uncanny-may reveal about both premodern and postmodern terms of embodiment. It takes as its point of departure a selection of fifteenth-century northern European Books of Hours-evocative objects designed at once to to inscribe social status, to strengthen religious commitment, to entertain, to stimulate emotions, and to encourage discomfiting self-scrutiny. Studying their kaleidoscopically strange, moving, humorous, disturbing, imaginative pages not only enables a window (...) into relationships among bodies, images, and things in the past, but also in our own internet era, where surprisingly popular memes drawn from such manuscripts constitute a part of our own visual culture. In negotiating theoretical, post-theoretical, and historical concerns, this book aims to contribute to an emerging and much-needed intersectional social history of art. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, Renaissance/early modern studies, gender studies, the history of the book, posthumanism, aesthetics, and the body. (shrink)

Il testo si apre con una breve descrizione divulgativa della biologia della visione, dalla percezione delle linee complesse ai colori, e di come questa si sia evoluta nel corso dei millenni, da meccanismo pro-sopravvivenza legato all'analisi dell’ambiente naturale e dei propri simili, a strumento di valutazione e apprezzamento della composizione artistica. Indaga le analogie tra lo sviluppo del cervello nei bambini affetti da disturbi dello spettro affettivo e relazionale (autismo) e le rappresentazioni iconografiche degli uomini primitivi, dal paleolitico al neolitico. (...) Un’ampia sezione descrive dinamiche cerebrali dovute ai cosiddetti neuroni specchio e di come questi influiscono sull’espressione e la fruizione dell’opera d’arte, analizzando le produzioni di due degli artisti contemporanei più famosi: Damien Hirst e Jeff Koons, collegati da una complementarità culturale ancestrale, quella tra eros e thanatos, che affonda le radici nell’arte funeraria etrusca. Il testo continua con l’analisi neuroestetica della visione e i suoi effetti sull’organismo umano, seguendo l’evoluzione che ha subito il punto di visuale. Dal basso verso l’alto nel barocco, dal basso a “volo d’uccello” nell’arte futurista e dall’alto verso il basso nella produzione pittorica dell’archistar anglo-irachena Zaha Hadid. Lo stesso punto di vista che fugge i confini della rappresentazione pittorica, fino ad abbandonare totalmente i confini del corpo e le dinamiche cerebrali nell’arte riferita al metaumanesimo e transumanesimo. (shrink)

In the last decade, we have observed a continuous increase of interest in eye movement research. According to a recent investigation, eye movements are discussed in over one million publications. The number of publications with eye movement in the title or abstract has been steadily increasing over the years, with over 1,200 papers published alone in 2013. The last decade has also witnessed the emergence of many new sub-disciplines in the field of neuroscience and cognition - one of them is (...) neuroaesthetics, which refers to the [neuro-]science of aesthetic perception of art.The title and contents of our book have been inspired by a very influential research article. It is one of the most cited scientific papers of all time, published in 1959 by a team of neurophysiologists and engineers, Lettvin, McCulloch and Pitts who are considered to be the founders of modern cybernetics. Their article, "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain," refers to the role of internal cortical models in the communication or interfacing of the information in the outside world with the practical contextual task of the viewer. It shows how eye movements are the modality of this communication. The same duality between eye movements and internal models plays a fundamental role in humans. When we look, for example, at art, it explains those neurological processes involved in neuroaesthetics. Our book undertakes this innovative approach to neuroaesthetics. It explains this duality and discusses the communication between the artist and the viewer's aesthetic perception. It is structured into five chapters.Chapter One discusses the neurology of aesthetics, the idea of art as a form of communication, and explains perception as an active matching between a "top" (the viewer's mind) and a "down" (the viewer's sensorial machinery). It goes deep into the philosophical quandary of what beauty is in terms of art. Chapter Two is about eye movements and the scanpath theory of vision perception. It discusses the role of visual attention for controlling active vision, the meaning of mental binding and the analysis of eye movements as the key to understanding aesthetic processes. Chapter Three introduces Claude Shannon's information theory using it as a matrix into which to embed the top down active vision scanpath theory. The authors explain the main concept of neuroaesthetics as a form of communication mediated by the sequence of eye fixations. Chapter Four discusses art critique: The role of the viewer's training and expectation, the dilemma of the aesthetics of art versus non-art and how all of this affects the viewing mode. Finally, Chapter Five treats the intimacy of the artistic process, showing the unique implementation of the communicative experience between the artist and the viewer - the relation between a pictorial representation defined by the artist and modes of AWE generated in the viewer during active looking. (shrink)

Cette collection d'essais analyse des objets (image miraculeuse, tableau ou scène de théâtre), décortique des anecdotes et soulève des questions théoriques, comme le statut du plaisir dans la théorie de la peinture et la théologie des images. Qu;elles portent sur la peinture--et sa théorie profane ou sacrée--sur le théâtre ou sur l'exégèse, ces études ont en commun de s'intéresser à des œuvres qu'on ne peut saisir que d'un regard oblique : si elles désignent un objet c'est le plus souvent pour (...) en cacher un autre. En allant au-delà de ce qu'elles donnent à voir pour atteindre ce qu'elles donnent à ne pas voir, on peut dégager la théorie latente dont elles sont porteuses, et spéculer ainsi sur l'articulation entre visible et invisible, sur la relation perpétuellement réversible entre occultation et monstration, pulsion scopique et cécité. Ce qui revient à explorer la face cachée de la première modernité tout en interrogeant les voies tortueuses et les ressorts secrets de notre pulsion interprétative. (shrink)

This thought-provoking book examines the science behind human attractiveness—the ratios, proportions, and other factors that to a large extent dictate what we find "beautiful." It's said that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," but recent scientific research suggests that human attractiveness is much more objective than we once thought, deeply rooted in our biology and evolutionary history. For instance, facial symmetry is considered extremely attractive because it indicates good health and nutrition during the formative developmental years. This book (...) explores these insights. Part I of The Biology of Beauty: The Science behind Human Attractiveness takes a closer look at what traits we find the most alluring and why. It discusses why attractiveness is important from an evolutionary standpoint and the advantages (and disadvantages) of being attractive. In addition to exploring these beauty "universals," it examines how beauty ideals can be shaped by factors such as culture, religion, and the media. Part II provides an in-depth analysis of individual features that contribute to attractiveness, offering scientific explanations for our preferences. The book also includes a collection of insightful sidebars that highlight beauty ideals in different parts of the world and at other times in history. (shrink)

Scholars such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have shown how the body can become a site of oppression. But after all, the body can become a vehicle for resistance or emancipation. The contributors to this volume, referring to Richard Shusterman's concept of somaesthetics, show through various examples how this is possible. Moving away from Foucault’s and Bourdieu’s construal of the body as a site of oppression, the contributors to this volume draw on Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics to argue that the (...) body can also be a vehicle for resistance and emancipation. (shrink)

This paper analyses the cluster of aesthetic features involved in the common experience of the weather. Perceptual features (framelessness, chromatics, texture, synaesthesia, ephemerality, proteism) are accompanied by ‘atmospheric’ moods that are irreducible to physiological well-being. Representation and imagination reach their limits due to the more-than-human spatiotemporal scale of the atmosphere. Finally, some ‘transaesthetic’ aspects include the agency of an active matter and the longing for an elemental alterity. The aesthetics of the weather has to account for the (...) interdependence between aesthetic and ethical values, between bodily engagement and appropriate knowledge, individual contemplation and social commitment, in order to develop ecological responsibility. (shrink)

Was wir sehen, bestimmt sich durch das, was wir im Kopf haben. Dies ist aber nicht einfach Resultat unserer Gene, sondern immer auch Ausfluss unserer Kultur: Die 'Neuronale Ästhetik' erschliesst die hier nötige Abstimmung von Natur- und Kulturgeschichte. Olaf Breidbach geht es um eine neue Phänomenologie, die Natur und Kultur nicht in zwei Bereiche teilt, denkt oder die eine auf die andere Seite zurück bricht. Unsere Art und Weise die Dinge zu sehen, wird durch die Kultivierung bestimmt, die eben auch (...) unseren Kopf ausrichtet. Das Neuronale ist nicht einfach nur Effekt einer Evolution, es ist Reflex einer Kultur und in diesem Doppelsinne als Einheit zu deuten. Es geht hier um eine neue integrative Phänomenologie, die unser Erfahren auf unsere Körperlichkeit zurück bindet, diesen Körper aber immer auch in seiner Kultur und damit seine über die blosse Natur hinausweisende Geschichte begreift. (shrink)

Is there a substantial difference between a portrait depicting the sitter’s face made by an artist and an image captured by a machine able to simulate the neuro-physiology of facial perception? Drawing on the later Wittgenstein, this paper answers this question by reference to the relation between seeing a visual pattern as (i) a series of shapes and colours, and (ii) a face with expressions. In the case of the artist, and not of the machine, the portrait’s creative process involves (...) the ability to see both aspects. From the perspective of the image’s viewer, the distinction is more difficult to draw. I address this difficulty by further distinguishing between two attributes of portraits: their representational accuracy, and their ability to convey the artist’s reflection on her experience of seeing the sitter face-to-face. While artificial intelligence can mimic this latter reflective ability, it cannot exactly reproduce it. (shrink)

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one's knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticised as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such (...) charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness. Rather than rehashing intractable ontological debates on the mind-body relation, Shusterman reorients study of this crucial nexus towards a more fruitful, pragmatic direction that reinforces important but neglected connections between philosophy of mind, ethics, politics, and the pervasive aesthetic dimensions of everyday life. (shrink)

It has recently been suggested that research in neuroscience of art has failed to bring art into focus in the laboratory. Two general arguments are brought to bear in the regard. The common perceptual mechanisms argument observes that neuroscientists working within this field develop models to explain art relative to the ways that artworks are fine-tuned to the operations of perceptual systems. However, these perceptual explanations apply equally to how viewers come to recognize and understand art and nonart objects and (...) events. Therefore these explanations fail to disambiguate artworks from other things. They fail to locate art. This observation points to a deeper problem. What interests us in art is how what we perceive has been used to show us what the work represents. Our understanding of art is governed by a range of productive and evaluative normative conventions that govern how we ought to look at a work and evaluate how it was made. The normative dimension of appreciation argument suggests that these aspects of our engagement with artworks lie outside the scope of neuroscientific explanations of art. This chapter provides a sketch of a diagnostic recognition framework for engaging art that resolves both problems and helps explains how artworks function within the social institution of the artworld to facilitate a communicative exchange between artists and consumers. (shrink)

This Companion addresses fundamental questions about the nature of music from a psychological perspective. Music cognition is presented as the field that investigates the psychological, physiological, and physical processes that allow music to take place, seeking to explain how and why music has such powerful and mysterious effects on us. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of research in music cognition, balancing accessibility with depth and sophistication. A diverse range of global scholars-music theorists, musicologists, pedagogues, neuroscientists, and psychologists-address the (...) implications of music in everyday life while broadening the range of topics in music cognition research, deliberately seeking connections with the kinds of music and musical experiences that are meaningful to the population at large but are often overlooked in the study of music cognition. Consisting of over forty essays, the volume is organized by five primary themes. The first section, "Music from the Air to the Brain," provides a neuroscientific and theoretical basis for the book. The next three sections are based on musical actions: "Hearing and Listening to Music," "Making and Using Music," and "Developing Musicality." The closing section, "Musical Meanings," returns to fundamental questions related to music's meaning and significance, seen from historical and contemporary perspectives. (shrink)

_Coming to Our Senses_ positions affect, or feeling, as our new cultural compass, ordering the parameters and possibilities of what can be known. From Facebook "likes" to Coca-Cola "loves," from "emotional intelligence" in business to "emotional contagion" in social media, affect has become the primary catalyst of global culture, displacing reason as the dominant force guiding global culture. Through examples of feeling in the books, film, music, advertising, cultural criticism, and political discourse of the United States and Latin America, Reber (...) shows how affect encourages the public to "reason" on the strength of sentiment alone. Well-being, represented by happiness and health, and ill-being, embodied by unhappiness and disease, form the two poles of our social judgment, whether in affirmation or critique. We must then re-envision contemporary politics as operating at the level of the feeling body, so we can better understand the physiological and epistemological conditions affirming our cultural status quo and contestatory strategies for emancipation. (shrink)

Have you ever gotten chills while listening to a particularly gorgeous piece of music? Or felt a sense of calm while gazing at a painting of a serene landscape? We have experiences like those every day, but rarely stop to consider what's happening internally to cause them. In Your Brain on Art, founder of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Susan Magsamen and Google designer Ivy Ross explain how, by understanding how we biologically (...) react to aesthetic experiences, we can not only heal as individuals but thrive as communities. Using the new science of neuroaesthetics, which explores our physiological reactions to art, Magsamen and Ross show us how, for instance, gardening can help a person heal from trauma or listening to a major fifth interval can snap the body out of a fight-or-flight response. Beyond enjoyment and abstraction, art can change the way we operate on a daily, practical level. And, in addition to helping each of us heal from stress, anxiety, burnout, and other malaises of modern life, neuroaesthetics can effect major change in society writ large, whether through public art murals in high-crime areas or music and dance therapy for patients experiencing neurodegenerative disorders. (shrink)

At first glance, freedom and coercion, or constraint, appear to be clearcut oppositions. However, in many contexts we find that the two are closely interwoven. Freedom and coercion then rather resemble a continuum: Without notice, elements of freedom resurface as forces of - or preconditions for - constraint and vice versa. Thus, sometimes the two mutually reinforce each other, while at other times they tend to undermine the other. This volume comprehensively explores the complex relationship between the elements and powers (...) of freedom and coercion in various contexts and from various perspectives. It is structured in four systematic sections: I Politics and economy, II. Institutions and personal life, III. Physiological aspects, IV. Aesthetic contexts. Der Band durchleuchtet das keineswegs einfach oppositive Verhältnis von Freiheit und Zwang, wie es sich seit der Formierung der Moderne in der Aufklärung entwickelt hat - politisch, philosophisch, anthropologisch, ästhetisch. Freiheit und Zwang stellen nur auf den ersten Blick binäre Gegensätze dar. Das eine kann graduell und oft unmerklich in das andere übergehen, und beide sind ohne das jeweils andere nicht denkbar. Häufig stehen Freiheit und Zwang in einem - negativen oder positiven - dialektischen Verhältnis zueinander, in dem sie sich gegenseitig bedingen und steigern oder aber unterminieren. Oder sind Freiheit und Zwang in der Moderne sogar zunehmend ununterscheidbar geworden? Der Band verleiht diesem schillernden Vexierbild in vier Abteilungen Ordnung und Struktur: I. Politik und Ökonomie, II. Institutionen und Lebensführung, III. Physiologische Dimensionen, IV. Ästhetische Verhandlungen. (shrink)

How do our embodied experiences of music shape our analysis, theorizing, and interpretation of musical texts, and our engagement with practices including composing, improvising, listening, and performing? 'Music, Analysis, and the Body: Experiments, Explorations, and Embodiments' is a pioneering essay collection uniting major and emerging scholars to consider how theory and analysis address music's literal and figurative bodies. The essayists offer critical overviews of different theoretical approaches to music analysis and embodiment, then test and demonstrate their ideas in specific repertoires. (...) The range of musics analysed is diverse: Western art music sits alongside non-Western repertoires, folk songs, jazz, sound art, audio-visual improvisations, soundtracks, sing-alongs, live events, popular songs, and the musical analysis of non-musical experiences. Topics examined include affect, agency, energetics, feel, gesture, metaphor, mimesis, rehearsal, subjectivity, and the objects of music analysis--as well as acoustic ecology, alterity, class, distraction, excess, political authority, sensoriality, technology, and transcendence. (shrink)

Comment l'enregistrement a-t-il modifié les manières d'être de la musique?Quelles incidences a-t-il eu sur nos façons d'interpréter et d'écouter les oeuvres ou les improvisations? Comment est-il devenu un outil dans la construction d'un répertoire, d'une tradition, voire d'un genre musical? Quel est son rôle dans la recherche musicologique? Voilà les questions, tant philosophiques que musicologiques, que cet ouvrage se propose d'aborder, en prenant en compte aussi bien la musique savante que les musiques populaires.

Ab der Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts vollzog sich in der Medizin ein Paradigmenwechsel von hoher ästhetischer Relevanz. Hatten die Nerven bis dahin als Transportkanäle für die „Lebensgeister“ gegolten, so trat nunmehr eine konkurrierende Theorie auf den Plan, nach der es sich um elastische Fasern handle, die in Analogie zur Saitenvibration, also über das Prinzip der Schwingung zu erklären seien. Der menschliche Leib avancierte buchstäblich zu einem Musikinstrument, das emotionale Erleben (nicht nur) von Musik zu einem Resonanzeffekt. Die Folgen dieser Sichtweise (...) waren einschneidend: Das vorliegende Buch zeigt anhand zahlreicher Quellen aus den Bereichen Musik, Medizin, Literatur und Ästhetik, wie eine „musikalische Anthropologie“ entstand, die wiederum auf die Kompositionspraxis zurückwirkte, etwa bei Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Georg Anton Benda und Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (shrink)

A compelling approach among works on temporality, phenomenology, and the ecologies of the new sound worlds, Enacting Musical Time argues that musical time is itself the site of the interaction between musical sounds and a situated, embodied listener, created by the moving bodies of participants engaged in musical activities.

This study is part of a larger exploration of ‘talk and cure’ that combines the examination of talk-in-interaction, with nonverbal displays, and measurements of the client’s and therapist’s autonomic arousal during therapy sessions. A key assumption of the study is that psychotherapy entails processes of intersubjective meaning-making that occur across different modalities and take place in both verbal/explicit and nonverbal/implicit domains. A single session of a psychodynamic psychotherapy is analysed with a focus on the expression and management of affect, with (...) an aim to describe key interactive events that promote change in both semantic and procedural domains. The clinical dialogue is analysed discursively, with a focus on the conversational processes through which new meanings are jointly constructed and affective states shared; detailed attention is paid to nonverbal displays of affiliation and affect. Furthermore, we explore whether the interactional patterns implicated in joint meaning-making, as revealed by analysing the therapeutic conversation, have correlates in the autonomic arousal of the two protagonists, as reflected in their heart rates. Conversation analysis has still untapped potential to illuminate interactional patterns that underlie the practice of psychotherapy. In this exploratory study we suggest that discursive analyses of talk-in-interaction can be enriched through detailed focus on nonverbal displays as well as measures of physiological arousal. Drawing upon the analysis, we suggest that bringing the methodological strengths of language-based analysis into fertile dialogue with embodied quantitative data can help our explorations of what’s really going on in psychotherapy. (shrink)

Intended to introduce readers to the use of artificial neural networks in the study of music, this volume contains numerous case studies and research findings that address problems related to identifying scales, keys, classifying musical chords, and learning jazz chord progressions. A detailed analysis of networks is provided for each case study which together demonstrate that focusing on the internal structure of trained networks could yield important contributions to the field of music cognition.

Der Begriff «Harmonie» wird unter musikalischen, philosophischen, psychologischen und neurologischen Gesichtspunkten behandelt. Sein Bezug zur Verschmelzungslehre von Carl Stumpf wird erörtert. Die Beiträge des Bandes reichen von der antiken Musiktheorie über die Phänomenologie bis zu neuen neuroakustichen Modellen.

In the past few decades, neuroscience research has greatly expanded our understanding of how the human brain functions. In particular, we have begun to explore the basis of emotions, intelligence, and creativity. These brain functions also have been applied to various aspects of behavior, thought, and experience. We have also begun to develop an understanding of how the brain and mind work during aesthetic and religious experiences. Studies on these topics have included neuropsychological tests, physiological measures, and brain (...) imaging. These different techniques have enabled us to open up a window into the brain. It is by understanding the functioning of the creative brain that we begin to understand the concept of the creative mind. It is through the use of emotions and other higher cognitive functions that the brain and mind can create ideas, music, literature, and ultimately our entire repertoire of behaviors. How these different creative abilities are derived can also be traced to various parts of the brain and how they function. Modern neuroscience allows us to begin to understand the creative aspect of the brain and mind and perhaps can take us one step further toward understanding the most profound types of aesthetic and religious experiences. (shrink)

It was not long ago when the consciousness was not considered a problem for science. However, this has now changed and the problem of consciousness is considered the greatest challenge to science. In the last decade, a great number of books and articles have been published in the field, but very few have focused on the how consciousness evolves and develops, and what characterizes the transitions between different conscious states, in animals and humans. This book addresses these questions. Renowned researchers (...) from different fields of science (including neurobiology, evolutionary biology, ethology, cognitive science, computational neuroscience and philosophy) contribute with their results and theories in this book, making it a unique collection of the state-of-the-art of this young field of consciousness studies. - First book on the topic - Focus on different levels of consciousness, including: Evolutionary, developmental, and functional - Highly interdisciplinary. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Erotic Art and Pornographic PicturesJerrold LevinsonOnly in primitive art, with its urgent need to evoke the sources of fertility, are the phallus and the vulva emphasized, as it were innocently. By ancient Greek and Roman times there already existed the special category of the pornographic—graphic art or writing supposed, like a harlot, or porne, to sexually stimulate.1IAS REGARDS PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS of the opposition between the erotic and the pornographic, (...) there are a number of reasonable goals one might have: to preserve as many considered intuitions about the opposition as possible; to present the opposition in a clearer light than it enjoys when casually invoked; to modestly "sharpen" the standard opposition that either accounts for our experience in this domain more fully, or allows us to organize our thinking about the domain more perspicuously. I hope in this paper to make progress toward some of those goals. Though the scope of the erotic/pornographic opposition goes beyond the visual, my focus here will be the opposition as it exists in the visual sphere, and even more narrowly, in the sphere of images. In addition to preserving and clarifying a distinction between erotic art and pornography, I hope also to make an intelligible place for erotica, as something intermediate between the other two.Here, then, are some intuitions on the erotic and the pornographic: [End Page 228]1. the erotic and the pornographic are both concerned with sexual stimulation or arousal.2. while the term "erotic" is neutral or even approving, the term "pornographic" is pejorative or disapproving.3. while "erotic art" is a familiar, if somewhat problematic, notion, "pornographic art" seems an almost oxymoronic one.4. whereas pornography has a paramount aim, namely, the sexual satisfaction of the viewer, erotic art, even if it also aims at sexual satisfaction on some level, includes other aims of significance.5. whereas we appreciate (or relish) erotic art, we consume (or use) pornography. In other words, our interactions with erotic art and pornography are fundamentally different in character, as reflected in the verbs most appropriate to the respective engagements.In what follows I try to accommodate all of those intuitions. As I will need a distinction invoked in the first of them (between sexual stimulation and sexual arousal) let me spell that out before proceeding. By sexual stimulation I will mean the inducing of sexual thoughts, feelings, imaginings, or desires that would generally be regarded as pleasant in themselves. By sexual arousal I mean the physiological state that is prelude and prerequisite to sexual release, involving in the male, at least, some degree of erection. And by sexual release I mean something that I take it needs no spelling out.How to differentiate erotic art from pornography, and from erotica as well, is of course not the only important philosophical question about erotic art. Here are two others: 1) How is the erotic aspect of erotic art compatible with the disinterested or distanced frame of mind that seems required for aesthetic engagement with or appreciation of a work of visual art? 2) How is the degree of eroticness of a work of erotic art related to its artistic value? I will briefly address those two questions toward the end of the paper, but most of my effort will be devoted to the prior question, that of the differentiation of erotic art, erotica, and pornography.IIHow, then, to effect that differentiation in the domain of visual images to which I have restricted my inquiry? One possibility would [End Page 229] concern the specific kind of response aimed at. Thus, erotic art might be said to involve images intended to sexually stimulate, but also to reward artistic interest; erotica to involve images intended to sexually stimulate but not to reward artistic interest; pornography to involve images intended to sexually arouse in the interests of sexual release. Another possibility would be by the character of the sexual representation involved, so that pornography would involve sexually explicit images, erotic art would involve sexually inexplicit images, and erotica images would be intermediate in their explicitness, irrespective of the ends for which the images were fashioned. A third possibility would be by... (shrink)

The paper focuses on the complex relations between aesthetics and phenomenology as they show themselves within the core locus of their interplay—the realm of the visible and the invisible. To do so, the paper examines a specific case study, a Rembrandt painting—A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654)—through which the discussion illuminates the interconnected and inseparable relationship between aesthetics and phenomenology in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the visible and the invisible. The reading addresses both dimensions of the (...) visible: the essential intersubjective aspect of life and its complex visual representation in art. To achieve this, the paper first explores Merleau-Ponty’s late aesthetic ontology—a phenomenology that perceives the aesthetic realm, particularly the visible domain, as originating from human corporeal existence, thereby redefining the act of seeing and the concepts of the visible and the invisible; I show the manner in which invisible elements permeate our visual experience in the Rembrandt painting and in seeing as such. The paper also reveals the unique ontological role of painting and the painter in unveiling the aesthetic world, and in guiding the philosopher toward a vision that true philosophy—phenomenology—must embrace. The paper concludes by rethinking the significance of aesthetics, and especially, the arts, to phenomenological thought, and the necessity of phenomenology to aesthetic thought. (shrink)

I demonstrate that analogies, both explicit and implicit, between Wittgenstein’s discussions of rituals, aesthetics, and aspect-perception, have important payoffs in terms of understanding his notion of a “surveyable representation” (übersichtliche Darstellung) as it applies to phenomena that are not exclusively grammatical in nature. In particular, I argue that a surveyable representation of certain anthropological and aesthetic facts allows us to see, qua form of aspect-perception, internal relations and formal connections, so that the inner nature of a ritual or the (...) solution of an aesthetic puzzle is exhibited. This particular form of seeing both explains why Wittgenstein thought that hypothetical explanations about the origins of a ritual are irrelevant to appreciating its meaning and elucidates his understanding of rituals, which involves seeing “internal relations” and “formal connections.” The upshots of the account for work in anthropology are discussed. (shrink)

It is difficult to find agreement on what constitutes perceiving.at Rovereto, Italy. The term is used in a wide array of domains ranging from psychology to physiology to aesthetics, and over time it has also acquired diverse connotations within various disciplines. Current perceptual science, however, even when it deals with qualitative aspects of experience, for example phenomena of lightness and colour, almost exclusively explains them in terms of primary qualities or stimuli quantitatively understood. The fact that science treats (...) qualitative experiences in terms of stimuli is important, because almost nothing of phenomenal perception as such is quantitative in nature. The paper argues for a qualitative science of perceiving, its methodology, its laws, and its possible developments. (shrink)

: The thought of the Qurʾān consists of certain concepts. The concept of “fiṭrah” that expresses the physical and spiritual side of the people, is one of crucial concepts which stands for the conseption of the Qurʾān. Therefore this concept has become the one drawing attention of scholars from the earlies. Usually, the concept of “fiṭrah” is interpreted as the religion of Islam and the initial creation or the human potentiality of acception a religion and whether they can change or (...) not. In this context, it has been established a connection between the “word of khalqullah” in the Surah of Rūm and the same word in the Surah of Nisā. In this study, the essence of “fiṭrah” will be examined and the basic elements of “fiṭrah” will be focused on. Also, whether wisdom, affection, love, and ugliness are among the basic components of fiṭrah or not, will be discussed. In addition, whether there is any connection between the verse of “fiṭrah” and the words of “tabdīl” and “taġyīr” will be investigated. Summary: The Qur’ānic view of human has been set forth with certain concepts. According to our understanding, there is a strong relation between the Qurʾānic definition of human and the terms of tafsīr and ta’wīl. If the Qur’ānic view of human is put forth correctly, then the explanation and interpretation of the Qurʾān will also be more accurate. Therefore, we think that there is an important link between the characteristic of Qurʾānic view of human and the ta’wīl of naṣṣ. For this reason, we have based our study on the term, fiṭrah which explains the nature of human beings and the context of this term in the Qur’ān. In this regard we have tried to take into account in our comments the consistency through the mention of the term of fiṭrah that comes in the 30th verse of the surah al-Rūm with the relation to other verses. Main focus of the study is to see whether the essential aspects of human nature is in correlation with compassion, mental potentiality, power to produce, seeking for truth, wanting to do good and avoiding bad deeds. In the etymological dictionaries of Arabic language and in tafsir books the term of fiṭrah has been explained in various meanings such as “religion of Islam”, “unity of God”, “the first creation of human beings”, “mental capability”, “ability to accept the truth”, “initial agreement”, “pre-eternity of human destiny”, “inborn creed”, “tattoing”, “plucking females hairs” and “to geld animals”. The verse of “la tabdīla li khalqillāh” is explained that there should not be changed things and qualities which are parts of the nature of human being. The verse of "I am going to command humans and they are going to change God's creation" is associated with above mentioned fiṭrah verses. In this context neglecting to worship to Allah and taking means through other idols that are worshiped, sacrificing in the name of idols, replacing religious motives with other motives, denial of creed, making permissible acts impermissible or impermissible acts permissible, females plucking their hair, etc., have been interpreted as changing Allah’s creation. However, we do not think that the interpretation of nature that is mentioned in the verse regarding the replacement of Allah’s creation has no relation with the replacement of Allah’s creation which occurs in Surah al-Nisā. Because changing khalqullāh in al-Nisā is not to change fiṭrah which is accepted same as religion and there is no relation between two issues. The mention of nature along with the concept of religion comes to show the value of Islam is in accordance with human nature. Yet when the Qurʾān is interpreted in the correct manner, a better understanding of the human nature will be seen. The samples and types of i’rāb regarding the link between the terms of fiṭrah and dīn show that there is also a strong relation between religion and human nature. This shows that religion entails all the values and qualities that human nature contains. In the context of the Qurʾān, the term of fiṭrah consists of spiritual qualities, such as reflection, love, desire to find the truth, inclination to good deeds, avoiding bad deeds, creativity and worship rather than physiological qualities such as the desire to eat and drink, need of shelter and sexuality. These are core foundations of human nature which cannot be changed. However, these natural qualities can be lead the opposite direction. This is the reason why there is frequent mention of natures spiritual qualities in the Qurʾān. However, if the Qurʾān and the Sunnah are falsely interpreted, the core qualities of nature will be understood incorrectly which may not be a prototypical that the Qurʾān aims. The Qurʾān frequently makes mention and condemns those that do not use their logic, which comes to show the importance of nature. In order for the other nature qualities to be functional, first the logic must be functional. Likewise, since early ages people try to understand the objects in their environment and start to question them is again natures manifestation. The past and today's philosophical movements, scientific research and as a result the information and findings derived from them is a result of human nature. One of the main components of nature is the belief of the unity of God and acknowledging that the creator is Allah therefore comprehending that He is only worthy of worship. Thus, this belief provides the mental and emotional integrity of person. In times of difficulty, through the natural instinct people show towards the Creator is an act of the reaction shown which is coursed by natural creed properties. It should be said that another important natural human quality is love and affection. As the Qurʾān has expressed that human being is created from "alaq" also comes to the meaning of compassion. It is the human’s natural instinct to incline to those that he has compassion for. Once this inclination is made stronger the compassion turns into love. Desiring good or evil is also part of human nature as these two opponents are in men’s structure. Men being virtuous comes from choosing the good. Another important feature of human nature is desiring those that are aesthetically beautiful and disliking those that are aesthetically ugly. Men does not only desire those that are aesthetically beautiful but rather those that are spiritually attractive such as knowledge, modesty and bravery. It dislikes ignorance, lies and other bad qualities. Qurʾān’s phonetic structure can be counted as a proof to this. One of human’s natural instinct is to create and constantly update information. The word "khalq” is used commonly to bring anything to existence when it was absent totally, therefore this is used for mankind as a metaphor. As a result, it is possible to say that the most important human instinct qualities are reason, the ability of accepting of the unity of God, compassion, human and divine love, creativity, evoking good deeds, avoiding evil, valuing those that are ecstatically nice and avoiding those that are ugly. The different meanings and definitions of fiṭrah in tafsīr books and dictionaries such as dīn, pre-eternity of human destiny, initial agreement, and to geld animals are not the essential aspects of fiṭrah but the manifestations of the basic elements. (shrink)

Purpose of the study is to shed light on the role of psychophysiology in the creative process, namely, the style corrections connected with pathological changes in the artist’s organism, deviating from empirical-descriptive methods. Theoretical basis of the study implies the interpretation of the notions style and disease not in their narrow professional limitation but from the standpoint of expanding the parameters of these concepts to philosophical dimensions. Based on the principle of analogy, the research findings prove that non-mimetic creative process (...) manifests itself exclusively in connection with a human from a bodily viewpoint through anthropological mimesis, which can program the propensity to certain capabilities of the individual organism. C. G. Jung was the first who pointed to the productivity of this method in his work "Theoretical Reflections on the Nature of the Psyche". The creativity phenomenon reflects not only "pure" psychology and the intellectual and spiritual component but also its relation to the artist as a physical being. It, outside its belonging to and being conditioned by transcendent factors, includes a quantitative aspect related to the moment of intensity. The disease acts to some extent as a stimulator of the production/change of aesthetic enzyme. In this context, the dialectic method is also effective because the subject of study cannot be comprehensively argued using naturalistic approaches only and requires a semantic explanation too. The essence of it is the logic of contradictions. In this case, the antinomy of matter-spirit plays a conceptual role in the projection on the plane of word-formation. Originality of the research findings is in the expansion of the causal relationship range of the creative process, namely the inclusion of the factor of psycho-physiological pathology into the system artist-work. This factor performs important stylistic functions. Conclusions. In contrast to scientific studies, where 1) style is analyzed separately and 2) the figure of the artist, this study argues the need to correlate these issues, taking them beyond descriptiveness to avoid schematics and one-dimensionality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal Mind in its Early Years, 1876–1920:An IntroductionThomas W. StaleyAt its inception, and in the succeeding decades, the journal Mind was a publication of singular significance. Founded in 1876 by Alexander Bain, it was the first of its kind: the pioneering "philosophical journal" in the Anglophone world, to use Bain's own description.1 Close on the heels of Nature, the hugely successful periodical established seven years earlier to address (...) progress in the natural sciences, Mind would devote itself to another important domain of intellectual work in Britain and worldwide. At the time, science and philosophy were as yet poorly demarcated areas, and the primary ground on which this distinction was negotiated was the study of the human mind and its role in social phenomena.2 Especially under its first two editors, George Croom Robertson (serving from the foundation to 1891) and G. F. Stout (from 1892 until 1920), the journal bore witness to a wholesale transformation of scholarly activity regarding these subjects.The purview of Mind was advertised on its opening page by Croom Robertson.3 This introductory offering bears close scrutiny as an indication of how the journal would develop. Foremost, in his mission statement, Robertson elaborated his position in terms of a series of dichotomies that [End Page 259] Mind would bridge. As both an "organ for... original researches" and a "critical record," the journal would be an announcer for and a judge of new work on the phenomena of "subjective consciousness" as well as "objective" physiological operations. On the side of psychology, it would deal with such "natural" mental productions as language as well as the "abnormal mental phases" of insanity. It would treat the mental character of animals in addition to that of humans, employing a relative methodology encompassing "much of... Anthropology and all that is meant by Comparative Psychology." In its philosophical aspect, Mind would range from the theoretical ground of "ultimate questions" to applications in educational practice and "Logic, Aesthetics, and Ethics." It would deal with the historical background of philosophy and with "what is being done or left undone in the present day." While an obvious focus was expected on the intellectual community in Britain itself, attention would be granted to work "on the Continent and in America" and the reader was assured that "Mind will not be the organ of any philosophical school."Mind's masthead, formally unchanged until 1972, denominated it as a "Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Psychology" but Robertson's comments indicate that it would encompass far more than this phrase might immediately suggest. Explicitly at issue was a wide range of controversies then current in Britain. Late Victorian culture was characterized by a self-conscious examination of its own status and prospects. Especially vital concerns included the secularization of knowledge-making institutions4; shifts in the role of public social movements5; the reshaping of scholarship to accommodate new modes of inquiry, fostering in the process new relationships between literature and science6; and the morality of scientific practice7—all items of substantive interest for Mind and its founding editor. [End Page 260]As detailed in a pair of articles written for the journal's centennial in 1976, Mind under its first two editors gradually transformed into an exclusive forum for academic philosophy, shedding its aspirations to chronicle scientific psychology as well as its other broader goals for social reform.8 However, for a significant period, it continued to pursue the ambitious program of inquiry indicated on its very first page. In Robertson's introduction, Mind's territory was effectively defined to cover all of what was then known alternately as "moral philosophy" or "moral science." At the moment of the journal's foundation, this was a field undergoing wholesale transformation. An examination of the project of the new periodical provides a window into many important changes underway in intellectual activity at the time. That this project would be centered on problems of "mind" was hardly a surprise. The dominant orientation of British philosophy since the Enlightenment work of Locke and Hume had been directed toward issues of human society by way of an inquiry into individual mental operations. However, with... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 122-123 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Spirits and Clocks: Machine & Organism in Descartes Dennis Des Chene. Spirits and Clocks: Machine & Organism in Descartes. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii + 181. Cloth, $39.95. Confronted with the thousandth "entirely new" interpretation of the Cartesian mind-body union, one sometimes wonders whether anything new can in fact (...) be said about the great Descartes. Once again, after his invaluable and prize-winning Physiologia (Cornell University Press, 1996), Des Chene proves that a serious historian, with a keen awareness of historical context, actually can. Unlike the usual accounts of Descartes's animal-machine, Des Chene does not concentrate on the all too familiar set of questions whether or not machines can think, sense, etc. Instead, Des Chene interprets the machine-metaphor the way Descartes meant it to be, viz. as a model for explaining animal and human physiology instead of (cognitive) psychology. Des Chene's central claim is that the Traité de l'Homme and Descartes's later (unpublished) physiological tracts are an attempt to replace scholastic commentaries on Aristotle's De Anima, itself discussed in this book's companion volume Life's Forms (Cornell University Press, 2000). Spirits and Clocks investigates how Descartes's general mechanistic program (outlined in Physiologia) is applied to the field of animal and human life. This project in itself had a far more lasting influence than Descartes's specific and often bizarre physiological explanations. Therefore, Des Chene rightly concentrates on the philosophical aspects of Descartes's general project of "mechanizing" physiology. His short but illuminating book studies a wide range of ontological, epistemological, and even aesthetic aspects of the machine metaphor and, although this is not the express goal [End Page 122] of the book, it also sheds new light on the epistemology and metaphysics of the Meditations. In this sense Spirits and Clocks is not only a significant contribution to the history of biology but first and foremost a must for historians of philosophy.Des Chene explains that the use of a machine model in physiology was neither new nor entirely unacceptable to the Aristotelians. What is new is Descartes's use of it. His mechanistic understanding of the body as a machine is incompatible with accepting the soul as the source of life and the principle of all our physiological and psychological capacities, while Aristotelians had no problem in accepting both the soul and certain machine models of the body. (Aristotle himself uses the lever to explain animal motion.) Des Chene sketches Descartes's attempt to explain all physiological processes by means of the physical properties of material parts that obey the general laws of motion, excluding all talk of ends. In this context, the use of illustrations is of considerable importance: though they cannot per se convey a denial of a "soul-model" of physiology, they strongly suggest that the (mechanistically understood) machine is all there is to say about the functions of human and animal bodies. Des Chene offers an interesting, albeit sometimes somewhat speculative and ahistoric, discussion of the aesthetic aspects of the machine model.As Des Chene showed in his Physiologia, the rejection of teleology is one of the main goals of Descartes's physics. However, although Descartes may be successful in rejecting the view that stones fall down from some kind of desire to reach their final destiny, he is less successful in denying that the eye is meant for seeing (and hence for our self-preservation). Des Chene gives a truly fascinating account of the limits of Descartes's denial of teleology in physiology. This includes questions about the physical unity of the human body: how can I explain why I have this body and how can I even identify this body as a unit without invoking ends? Similarly, Descartes takes the healthy, "normally" functioning body as the norm of his investigations. But, again, can he do so without acknowledging some form of teleology? Descartes's answer in most of these cases is that the final goals... (shrink)