Evolutionary and Neurocognitive Approaches to Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts (Foundations and Frontiers in Aesthetics Series)

In this book, well-known scholars describe new and exciting approaches to aesthetics, creativity and psychology of the arts, approaching these topics from a point of view that is biological or related to biology and answering new questions with new methods and theories. All known societies produce and enjoy arts such as literature, music and visual decoration or depiction. Judging from prehistoric archaeological evidence, this arose very early in human development. Furthermore, Darwin was explicit in attributing aesthetic sensitivity to lower animals. These considerations lead us to wonder whether the arts might not be evolutionarily based. Although such an evolutionary basis is not obvious on the face of it, the idea has recently elicited considerable attention. The book begins with a consideration of ten theories on the evolutionary function of specific arts such as music and literature. The theory of evolution was first drawn up in biology, but evolution is not confined to biology: genuinely evolutionary theories of sociocultural change can be formulated. That they need to be formulated is shown in several chapters that discuss regular trends in literature and scientific writings. Psychologists have recently rediscovered the obvious fact that thought and perception occur in the brain, so cognitive science moves ever closer to neuroscience. Several chapters give overviews of neurocognitive and neural network approaches to creativity and aesthetic appreciation. The book concludes with two exciting describing brain-scan research on what happens in the brain during creativity and presenting a close examination of the relationship between genetically transmitted mental disorder and creativity.

Arts & Photography

Berleant, Arnold

Martindale, Colin

Petrov, Vladimir

Locher, Paul

History & Criticism

Routledge

Neuroaesthetics (Foundations and Frontiers in Aesthetics Series)

The beginning of psychological aesthetics is normally traced back to the publication of Gustav Theodor Fechner's seminal book "Vorschule der Aesthetik" in 1876. Following in the footsteps of this rich tradition, editors Martin Skov and Oshin Vartanian view neuroaesthetics - the emerging field of inquiry concerned with uncovering the ways in which aesthetic behavior is caused by brain processes - as a natural extension of Fechner's 'empirical spirit' to understand the link between the objective and subjective worlds inherent in aesthetic experience. The editors had two specific aims for this book. The first was to highlight the diversity of approaches that are underway under the banner of neuroaesthetics.Currently, this topic is being investigated from experimental, evolutionary, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging perspectives to tackle problems in the visual arts, literature, music, and film. Its quintessentially interdisciplinary nature has functioned as a breeding ground for generating and testing hypotheses in multiple domains. The second goal was more integrative and involved distilling some of the key features common to these diverse strands of work. The book presents a possible framework for neuroaesthetics by highlighting what the contributors consider to be its defining features and offering a working definition of neuroaesthetics that captures these features. "Neuroaesthetics" will provide an empirical and theoretical framework to motivate further work in this area. Ultimately, the hope is that puzzles in aesthetics can be solved through insights from biology, but that the contribution can be truly bidirectional.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Vartanian, Oshin

Skov, Martin

Mental Health

In Living in the Landscape Arnold Berleant explores new ways of thinking about how we live—and might live—in the landscapes that enfold us. Through the concepts of "aesthetic engagement" and "environmental continuity," he proposes a new paradigm that offers a holistic approach to the meaning of place and places of meaning in our lives. Although environmental aesthetics is linked in the popular mind to dramatic vistas and monumental landscapes—the Grand Canyon, for example—Berleant is much more concerned with the commonplace settings of everyday life. He argues that our active appreciation of (or "aesthetic engagement" with) the prosaic landscapes of home, work, local travel, and recreation plays a vital role in our discovery of hidden continuities, as well as pleasure and meaning, in the places we inhabit. Berleant begins with a general introduction to environmental aesthetics, identifying the kinds of experience, meanings, and values it involves, and describing its historical sources and the issues with which it is concerned. In the rest of the book, he spotlights new directions in the field—as they relate to education, community, creativity, and the sacred—and provides an insightful analysis of "negative environmental aesthetics." Throughout, he is both thoughtful and entertaining, as evidenced in his extended critique of the pop post-modern environment of Disney World. Berleant addresses issues commonly associated with the environmental movement—e.g., preservation, pollution control, and quality of life. But his study draws from a wide range of disciplines and for that reason should also appeal to scholars and students interested in art and aesthetics, landscape architecture and planning, urban and environmental design, and cultural geography, as well as environmental studies.

Living in the Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of Environment (Theories of Contemporary Culture; 18)

Business & Money

Economics

University Press of Kansas

Re-thinking Aesthetics: Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts

The essays, collected by Berleant in this volume all express the impulse to reject the received wisdom of modern aesthetics: that art demands a mode of experience sharply different from others and unique to the aesthetic situation, and that the identity of the aesthetic lies in keeping it distinct from other kinds of human experience, such as the moral, the practical, and the social. Berleant shows, on the contrary, that the value, the insight, the force of art and the aesthetic are all enhanced and enlarged by recognizing their social and human role, and that this recognition contributes both to the significance of art and to its humanizing influence on what we like to call civilization.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

These essays comprise a set of variations on art and culture guided by the theme of the environment. The essays deal with the physical reality of the environment such as the city, the shore, the water but also with the virtual environment and the social one.

Aesthetics And Environment: Variations on a Theme

Ashgate Pub. Co

Environmental aesthetics is an emerging discipline that explores the meaning and influence of environmental perception and experience on human life. Arguing for the idea that environment is not merely a setting for people but fully integrated and continuous with us, Arnold Berleant explores the aesthetic dimensions of the human-environment continuum in both theoretical terms and concrete situations. Insisting on the need to reconceptualize environment and recognize its aesthetic implications, he pursues a variety of topics and approaches to environmental aesthetics. Aesthetic experience, maintains Berleant, is always contextual. There is no inside and outside, person and environment, human being and external world. Recognizing that humans, along with all other things, inhabit a single intraconnected realm, he speaks of environment as "a seamless unity of organism, perception, and place" that is suffused with values. The foremost characteristic of environmental perception, then, is the quality of engagement. Berleant moves from natural to non-natural environments, suggesting that the aesthetic aspect of any human habitat is an essential part of its desirability. After explaining the concept of environment and the possibilities of describing our aesthetic responses to various sorts of environments, Berleant applies his phenomenologically descriptive aesthetics to a broad range of issues and situations. From outer space to the museum, from architecture to landscape, from city to countryside to wilderness, this book discovers in the aesthetic perception of environment the reciprocity that constitutes both person and place.

The Aesthetics of Environment

Temple Univ Pr

Humor & Entertainment

Aesthetics beyond the Arts: New and Recent Essays

Taking the view that aesthetics is a study grounded in perception, the essays in this volume exhibit many sides of the perceptual complex that is the aesthetic field and develop them in different ways. They reinvigorate our understanding of such arts as music and architecture; they range across the natural landscape to the urban one; they reassess the place of beauty in the modern environment and reassess the significance of the contributions to aesthetic theory of Kant and Dewey; and they broach the kinds of meanings and larger understanding that aesthetic engagement with the human environment can offer. Written over the past decade, these original and innovative essays lead to a fresh encounter with the possibilities of aesthetic experience, one which has constantly evolved, moving in recent years in the direction of what Berleant terms 'social aesthetics', which enhances human-environmental integration and sociality.

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