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“Aesthetics and the Limits of the Extended Mind”

27Nov

Speaker

Dr. Ted Nannicelli

Dr. Ted Nannicelli

Lecturer
School of Communication and Arts
The University of Queensland


Time

1130-1240, 27 Nov 2018

Venue

AST916, Sing Tao Building, Ho Sin Hang Campus, HKBU


Speaker bio:
Ted Nannicelli teaches in the School of Communication and Arts at The University of Queensland. Before arriving at UQ, he received a M.F.A. in Film and Media Arts from Temple University and a P.h.D. in Film Studies from the University of Kent, and he taught at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He is editor of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, co-editor of Cognitive Media Theory (2014), and author of A Philosophy of the Screenplay (2013) and Appreciating the Art of Television (2017). His current book project, Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism, is under contract with Oxford University Press.

 

Abstracts:

This paper seeks to establish closer connections and spur dialogue between philosophers working on 4E (embedded, embodied, enacted, extended) cognition and scholars of the arts, broadly construed. In part, the aim is to offer a critical overview of the ways 4E research might inform our understandings of the arts. Yet it is also partly to flag some potential art-specific challenges to some of the theses found within the 4E literature. I start by examining the strongest extant claims regarding art (specifically music) and active externalism, and argue that it is hard to see either how active externalism could square with our actual appreciative practices or that its explanatory value could be sufficient to pressure us to radically revise those practices. Furthermore, I argue, rejecting active externalism seems necessary to adequately acknowledge the important ways in which artistic creation often involves the application of embodied know-how or the execution of embodied skills. For this reason, I argue, embodied approaches to cognition are better positioned to complement and inform the humanistic methods traditionally employed in philosophical aesthetics, art theory, and disciplines devoted to individual arts. (So, too, I argue, are embedded approaches to cognition, which emphasize the use of artefacts and elements of our surrounding environment as scaffolds for cognition.) However, I conclude on a moderately sceptical note: The challenge still outstanding for these approaches is to yield new understandings of our artistic practices that have not been (and could not be) gleaned through traditional humanistic inquiry.