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. 

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

 

Zum "Enactive Literariness"

Enactive Literariness ist eine Bezeichnung aus dem 16. Kapitel dieses Bandes und wurde von mir vorgeschlagen, um zweierlei Ziele zu erreichen.

 

Einerseits soll die Bezeichnung die Aufmerksamkeit darauf lenken, dass das sprachliche Phänomen der Literarizität (Jakobson) und die Konstituierung deren Bedeutung im Prozess des Lesens aus antidualistischer Sicht in den subjektiven durch Interaktionen bestimmten Erfahrungen des Lesenden begründet liegt. Anderseits soll die Bezeichnung betonen, dass etablierte kognitivistische (cognitive/cognitivist/representationalist) Standpunkte und Erklärungen des Begriffes der Literarizität in Frage gestellt werden und auch mit der Begründung abgelehnt werden, dass sie keine unmittelbare Wechselbeziehung zwischen Geist und Körper anerkennen und sich stark an in den Kognitionswissenschaften abgeschwächtem Repräsentationalismus orientieren. Enactive Literariness bietet somit eine Brücke zur postkognitivistischen Wende .

 

Im Kapitel wird ausserdem ausreichend genug betont, dass ich Einiges im Kapitel absichtlich radikalisiere, um die Unterschiede zwischen "cognitive" und "enactive" sehr stark in den Vordergrund zu stellen.

Die Argumentation wird darauf aufgebaut:

1) mind-body continuity principle (J. Dewey)

2) Husserls Begriff von Leib/Körper

3) Direct Perception (Gibson/Varela)

Das Kapitel ist NICHT ALS BEITRAG ZUR LITERATURTHEORIE anzusehen, sondern im Allgemeinen als Beitrag zur Untersuchung von kognitiven Prozessen in Kontexten der Abweichung von Erwartungen gedacht.

 

 

 

"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)

Link:

http://www.springer.com/philosophy/philosophical+traditions/book/978-94-017-9378-0 

...and some additional points

Book review:   Ştefan-Sebastian Maftei: Alfonsina Scarinzi (ed.). Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015) in: Studia Phaenomenologica vol. 16 / 2016 - Film and Phenomenology

UniInform (April 2015, p.11), the official journal of the University of Göttingen (Germany), published this month (April 2015) a short review of the volume A. Scarinzi (ed.), Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind, Dordrecht Springer. In German language.

The volume contains original research works by leading researchers such as Mark Johnson, Daniel Hutto and Jim Garrison.

My Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Mark Johnson for accepting my invitation to contribute to this volume. I am indebted to the serious commitment and enthusiastic engagement of the invited contributors who took an interest in my invitation beyond the limits of mere politeness. Many thanks to those who spontaneously answered my call for contributions published in 2011 and who are now part of this volume. Last but not least, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, who reviewed this work, for their useful comments.