CALL FOR PARTICIPATION Deadline for submission: 12th June 2019 3rd Conference on Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind 29th - 30th August 2019 Georg-August-Universität Göttingen - Germany Confirmed Speakers: - Didier Bottineau (CNRS UMR 5191 ICAR, ENS Lyon, France) - Jessica Lindblom (School of Informatics - University of Skövde, Sweden) - Pentti Määttänen (University of Helsinki, Finland) - Andrea Schiavio (University of Graz, Austria) - Christian Tewes (University of Heidelberg, Germany) - Mariselda Tessarolo (University of Padova, Italy) "Feeling Sense-Making, Enacting Meaning: The Lived Unity of an Experience and the Mind-Body-Language Continuity" The aim of this conference is to put into focus the role of embodied cognitive-emotional and linguistic sense-making in our being sensitive to multiple domains of meanings in the sensorimotor and social interaction with the environment. In enactive cognitive science, bodily sense-making is the feel of the cognitive-emotional qualitative dimension of an adaptation to environmental factors the organism interacts with and has a participatory character in social interaction. Recent studies in neuroscience and philosophy of mind (Fuchs 2018; Di Paolo et al. 2018) highlight the role of the subjective and intersubjective embodied evaluation of sense-making in experiencing the bodily conditions of meaning constitution in social interaction and in the constitution of a shared reality in our sensorimotor engagement with the world. Moreover, they support the view that human experience relies on the mind-body-language continuity. Human embodiment involves a special kind of autonomy acquired via incorporation of linguistic habits of sense-making we become sensitive to. We are sensitive to multiple registers and domains of meaning at once when we co-determine and make sense of the environment and of the interaction with the others. This conference highlights the enactive relation between subjectivity, intersubjectivity and sensorimotor coupling with the environment in the constitution of an experience. According to John Dewey, an experience has a unity. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts. The capacity of experience to mean and to become an experience is realized through a consummatory process of bodily sense-making and completes itself. Such an experience is aesthetic for it conveys a feeling of wholeness. The submission of contributions that highlight enactive sense-making in the lived process of meaning generation in experiencing interactions and the embodied quality of an experience is encouraged. The conference welcomes contributions from the following disciplines: Artificial Intelligence and human cognition HCI Linguistics Literary studies Music and the Cognitive Sciences Neurophenomenology Neuroscience Philosophy of emotion Philosophy of mind Psychology of aesthetics Please send your abstract (max. 300 words) not later than 12th June 2019 to alfonsinascarinzi[at]googlemail.com Contact Dr. Alfonsina Scarinzi alfonsinascarinzi[at]googlemail.com SOME REFERENCES Bottineau, D. (2012). Remembering Voice Past: Languaging as an embodied interactive cognitive technique. E.I. Pivovar. Conference on Interdisciplinarity in Cognitive Science Research, Apr. 2012, Moscou, Russia. Moscow: RGGU [Russian State University for the Humanities], 194-219 Di Paolo, E.A., Cuffari, E. C., De Jaegher, H. (2018). Linguistic Bodies. The Continuity between Life and Language. MIT Press Thomas Fuchs (2018). Ecology of the Brain (International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry), OUP Alfonsina Scarinzi (ed.) (2015), Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy, Contributions to Phenomenology, Vol. 73, Springer Science+Business Media, Dordrecht Schiavio, A., van der Schyff, D., Cespedes-Guevara, J. & Reybrouck, M. (2017). Enacting musical emotions. Sense-making, dynamic systems, and the embodied mind. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 16(5), 785-809 Steiner, P. (2014). Enacting anti-representationalism. The scope and the limits of enactive critiques of representationalism, AVANT, 2, 2014, 43 – 86
John T. Haworth - New Beginning Principal Investigator: Alfonsina Scarinzi, Dr. phil. Art and aesthetic meaning mark the fulfillment of nature in experience and of experience in meaning. It is there that the capacities of the world to achieve the interpenetration of sense and value in human life are realized. Thomas M. Alexander on John Dewey's Theory of Art
The research project Wiss. Leitung/Scientific Direction: Alfonsina Scarinzi, Dr. phil. In his work The Meaning of the Body philosopher Mark Johnson argues that aesthetics is not just art theory. Rather, it should be considered to be the study of everything that goes into the human capacity to make and experience the bodily pre-linguistic cognitive, emotional and sensory-perceptual conditions of meaning constitution having its origins in the organic activities of living creatures and in their organism-environment transactions. In this way he rejects both the Kantian view of aesthetics, according to which aesthetics is nonconceptual and incapable of giving rise to knowledge, and the mind/body dichotomy that underlies it. Johnson introduces the embodied mind thesis into aesthetics. The embodied mind thesis is usually traced back to the work The Embodied Mind by Varela & Thompson & Rosch. It denies a separation of mind and body, sees meaning, reason and imagination as embodied and ties reason to emotion. In other words, experience and cognition are bodily mediated and depend on the sensorimotor capacities of individuals embedded in a biological, psychological and cultural context that interact with the environment in a relation of co-determination. The cross-disciplinary research project "Reevaluating Aesthetics. Towards Enactive Aesthetics" aims at bringing aesthetics closer to the enactive framework in the postcognitivist cognitive sciences by considering aesthetic experience as a cognitive-emotional process of meaning-making beyond traditional art theories. The project covers psychology of aesthetics, neuroaesthetics, empirical aesthetics, computational aesthetics, literary aesthetics, pragmatist aesthetics, neuroscience, HCI. Edited Volume Alfonsina Scarinzi (ed.) (2015), Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy, Contributions to Phenomenology, Vol. 73, Springer Science+Business Media, Dordrecht  "The first scholarly volume in the field of aesthetics to present an embodied approach to human experience" (Leading researchers like Mark Johnson, Jim Garrison, David Miall, Daniel Hutto, Luca Ticini, Beatriz Calvo-Merino, John Haworth) |
