CFP: /Philosophies/ Special Issue: The Role of Theory and the Relevance of Epistemic Models in Contemporary Aesthetics

Dear Colleagues,

The thinner the threshold between virtuality and reality in contemporary aesthetics, the more crucial and influential the theoretic paradigms regulating the modes of accessing and understanding its experience become. As this is manifest in the scene of contemporary arts, the implications of what aesthetic means and is, far exceeds the arts’ spectrum, including the very distinction between artefacts and nature. This consolidates the need to put aesthetics back at the centre of the philosophical debate, focusing on the relevance of its theoretical implications. What are the challenges that aesthetic attitude asks contemporary epistemology to face?

This has been particularly evident in recent years, when the contributions from the neurosciences to the aesthetic field have given birth to the discipline of neuroaesthetics, which has become hard to account for without an appropriate epistemic model explaining its functioning and guiding its empirical research.

Naïve approaches often turn into misconceptions and this is precisely where theory comes into play, dispelling confusion and setting rigorous basis. As the matter of aesthetics is, perhaps, the most transversal in contemporary philosophy, its claim for theory is urgent but, as is the case with any properly efficient system, the resolutive means do not lay outside the very same field. It is to this extent that the aesthetic field needs a theoretical grounding.

In the intimate confrontation between aesthetics and the meta-aesthetic premises building its background, we are bound to find the space for the emergence and description of epistemic models such as Emotivism, Cognitivism, and the likes. In other words, putting aesthetics in confrontation with other theories might challenge its definition or points of view that could complement might allow us to access its core, question its basis and references, and explore its history and implications.

Encouraging such multi-faceted analyses is the goal of this Special Issue, aimed at detaching aesthetics from the naïvete of an indistinct ground for justification by consolidating its theoretical models as orientations bound to epistemic verification. Within the same context, additional paths of investigation should concern the relationship between new epistemic model of aesthetics and new paradigms of philosophy of mind and the relationship between the current models of aesthetic attitude (as a cognitively and emotionally informed perceptual exchange between subject and object) and ecological thinking.

Prof. Fabrizio Desideri
Guest Editor

Keywords

• meta-aesthetics
• aesthetic models
• aesthetic theory
• epistemology
• emotivism
• expressivism
• aesthetic mind
• symbolic mind
• aesthetic attitude
• neuroaesthetics
• aesthetic perception
• ecological aesthetics

Please contact Guest Editor Prof. Fabrizio Desideri or Special Issue Editor Viktor Ćirković at [email protected] for further information.

Philosophies (ISSN 2409-9287, https://www.mdpi.com/journal/philosophies) is an international peer-reviewed open access journal. The journal has recently been indexed into Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) in Web of Science.

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