The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, by Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie (eds).

Abstract

The methodological approaches available to those who wish to study the nature of art and the aesthetic are dauntingly numerous. To further complicate matters, divining the boundaries of those methods is no easy task, with philosophy’s a priori approach becoming not only challenged by, but increasingly blurred with, the empirical methods of the experimental and social sciences. As such, this collection of original articles by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and neuroscientists is not only a timely and welcome addition to serious inquiry into art and the aesthetic, but to philosophical aesthetics in particular and to philosophy more generally. The papers it contains tackle a plethora of issues concerning art and the aesthetic, some of them entirely novel, while simultaneously broaching the thorny issue of when a priori and empirical methods can complement one another, and when it is better that they be kept apart. The twenty-five papers here, fifteen of which...