For Freedberg as for others, the neural turn will renew the humanities and make them more meaningful; in aesthetics and art history, it will counter “intellectualizing views of art” (Freedberg 2009c) and make up for the “elimination of the emotional, the empathetic and the realm of non-cognitive corporeal response” said to characterize most of twentieth-century art history and criticism (Freedberg and Gallese 2007, 199). In those fields, Freedberg (2007, 23) explains, emotions “were felt to be too random, too embarrassing and too incidental to the transcendental value of art.”

While the anthropological and art historical “orthodoxy” allegedly refuses to analyze emotional responses independently of their cultural and historical contexts, neuroscientific research since the 1990s has corroborated insights about empathy as an embodied emotion that were first formulated by several late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophers, psychophysiologists, and art historians (Freedberg 2007, 27–29; 2009a, 87; 2009b, 70; Freedberg and Gallese 2007, 198).

Vidal, Fernando and Ortega, Francisco. Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (Forms of Living)....

Watch David Freedberg talk about his views on neuroaesthetics: