RIP conference: Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art?

The AHRC funded project ‘Method in Philosophical Aesthetics: The Challenge from the Sciences’ http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/humanities/aesthetics/index.html are organizing an international conference, ‘Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art?’ in association with the University of Leeds, the University of Nottingham and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

The conference will involve speakers with a variety of perspectives, ranging from those with a good deal of enthusiasm for “empirical philosophy” to those more inclined to favour traditional, a priori approaches.

Confirmed Speakers Include:

• Whitney Davis (UC Berkeley)
• Stacie Friend (Heythrop)
• Berys Gaut (St Andrews)
• Jonathan Gilmore (Yale)
• Gordon Graham (Princeton Theological Seminary)
• Jenefer Robinson (Cincinnati)
• Roger Scruton (Oxford, St Andrews, and American Enterprise Institute)
• Deena Skolnick Weisberg (Temple)

Philosophers are now used to paying close attention to the results of theoretical and experimental work in the sciences. This has been long-standing practice in the philosophy of the sciences, and it is now common in the philosophy of mind. The practice is growing in the philosophy of language and in ethics, where there is controversy over the authority of linguistic and moral intuitions. The practice is less common in aesthetics, but it is beginning to develop, most notably in appeals to theories of vision in disputes about pictorial perception, and reference to empirical work on the emotions and imagination in the discussion of our engagement with fiction. Such interventions are controversial in some quarters; more controversial still are claims that work in the neurosciences and in evolutionary psychology can deepen, perhaps even revolutionise, our philosophical conceptions of the arts. Some argue that such studies will not make any positive contribution to understanding the nature and value of artistic experiences; the most we can hope for from them is that light be shed on empirical side-constraints.

Topics to be addressed include

• whether empirical and/or naturalistic approaches can shed light on the value(s) of art (a subject that may seem especially difficult to get empirical traction on);
• whether empirical/psychological accounts of creativity have any potential to shed light on the profound significance of artistic creativity;
• whether naturalistic approaches to the imagination fail to address the deep issues raised by the paradox of fiction;
• whether empirical approaches have, in fact, anything serious to say about beauty or, rather, confuse the beautiful with the merely agreeable.

Please address any enquiries to [email protected]