Davies considers the potential for, and scope of, appeals to the results of empirical research in the philosophy of art. He then examines, in light of these considerations, some attempts to illuminate specific issues in the philosophy of art by appeal to recent work in cognitive neuroscience on the nature and cognitive functions of ‘mirror neurons’. Such work is used to support sometimes surprising claims about how receivers respond to the manifest features of instances of artworks. Davies argues that, while the philosophy of art is richer for being informed by experimental work of this sort, the significant philosophical issues, which are often normatively inflected, are only rarely significantly illuminated by appeal to such work. Normatively inflected philosophical questions about art are not, however, to be addressed by simple appeal to armchair intuitions but require that we bring our practices and the goals of those practices into a rational equilibrium.
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David Davies has taught at McGill university since 1987. For the past 20 years his research has focu...
Inspired by the homonymous book by Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, this timespace presents the authors' genealogy of the cerebral subject and the influence of the neurological discourse in human sciences, mental health and culture.
