Abstract

The project of naturalizing human consciousness/experience has made great technical strides, but has been hampered in many cases by its uncritical reliance on a dualistic “Cartesian” paradigm. The present volume proposes a version of naturalism in aesthetics drawn from American pragmatism —one primed from the start to see human beings not only as embodied, but as inseparable from the environment they interact with—and provides a forum for authors from diverse disciplines to address specific scientific and philosophical issues within the anti-dualistic framework considering aesthetic experience as a process of embodied meaning-making. Cross-disciplinary contributions come from leading researchers including Mark Johnson, Jim Garrison, Daniel D. Hutto, John T. Haworth, Luca F. Ticini, Beatriz Calvo-Merino. The volume covers pragmatist aesthetics, neuroaesthetics, enactive cognitive science, literary studies, psychology of aesthetics, art and design, sociology.