24 August 2015, Birkbeck College London
Pragmatist and embodied approaches to aesthetics consider aesthetics to be the study of everything that goes into the human capacity to make and experience the bodily pre-linguistic cognitive, emotional and sensory-perceptual conditions of meaning constitution having its origins in the organic activities of living creatures and in their organism-environment transactions.
The 2nd conference on “Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind” aims at highlighting the role of the interdependent relation between emotion and cognition in the bodily mediated pre-linguistic meaning constitution in aesthetic experience and perception. It aims at doing this from an anti-dualistic point of view.
The rejection of the mind-body dualism and of the representationalist approaches to human cognition has led to recast the theoretical tenets of the relation between cognition and emotion in the process of meaning generation. It has contributed to the development of a truly enactive approach to emotions.
In the enactive approach emotions such as fear, joy, happiness are bodily mediated cognitive-emotional evaluations of the bodily sense-making of an adaptation to environmental factors the organism interacts with in the environment and of their viability. They allow to subjectively feel the cognitive-emotional qualitative dimension of the degree of value of our interaction with different environmental factors through the aroused lived body.
The submission of contributions that highlight the interdependent relation between emotion and cognition in bodily sense-making in aesthetic experience and in the aesthetic perception of the environment is encouraged.
The conference welcomes contributions from the following disciplines: philosophy of mind, philosophy of emotion, literary studies, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, developmental psychology, aesthetics, psychology of aesthetics, HCI.
Please send your abstract (max. 300 words) not later than 25 March 2015 to enactiveaestheticsatbirkbeck@gmail.com
You can send your abstract in English or in German.
Website of the conference: https://www.sites.google.com/site/enactiveaesthetics/