Taken in the larger sense "neuroaesthetics" is the study of the neurological basis of perception, and of course, useful for medical and other reasons. In the sense you mean - studying art and beauty - it has been a going discipline for a long time (at least since the late 1980's), with its own journals, conferences, etc. Definitely publishable - anything that begins with "neuro'" has been publishable in philosophy for a long time (cf. "neuroethics"). For me, I can't even imagine, much less have I seen, a theory or established claim in this field that strikes me as philosophically interesting. It doesn't mean there is nothing to discover - I'm sure that if the "rule of thirds" in photography is a good general principle for creating attractive images, there is some neurological background that helps explain this. But I am interested in the phenomenon itself, how it relates to other aspects of photographic art, why it is a general but not universal guide, etc. The answer to these questions is never, for me, going to lie in neurological facts. Add to that the fact that the alleged neurological basis of any mental phenomenon is almost always defeasible (cf "mirror neurons"). There may be a neurological basis for both Kantian and utilitarian ethics too, but Thompson's study of the trolley problem gives us insights into our ethical intuitions in a way that I can't see any neurological study coming up with. I've read half a dozen books on consciousness by cognitive scientists and neuroscientists and they don't even have anything enlightening to say about that allegedly biological phenomenon. Emotion is a more borderline subject - I'm not sure it belongs in philosophy at all, so I wouldn't be surprised if neurological studies were more useful than philosophical ones.
Perhaps your friend who said "Don't" simply wanted you to focus on something that might be considered philosophically important rather than seeing your work get buried in a million other neuro-this and neuro-that studies. Reading Lessing or Hegel or Mary Mothersill on beauty is always going to be more helpful than reading neuroaesthetic studies.
Like I was telling that friend, I expect neuroscience and philosophy of the mind to eventually converge: at some point we'll just understand how the mind works (for aesthetics among other things), and it won't matter whether we got there through fMRIs or philosophical essays.
I sympathize and broadly agree with skepticism of neuro-anything, but the danger of making up fake theories if we don't at least try to ground them in reality seems at least as bad. If a philosopher (or blogger!) says that "the sublime" is a subset of beauty, and later neuroscience studies show conclusively that these two concepts, as commonly understood, trigger totally different responses in the brain, then that's important! It doesn't necessarily tell us in detail what "the sublime" is, but it at least shows how we should revise the original view.
I understand that some people believe in Quine's naturalization program - in fact Paul Churchland has put it even more radically than what you say in the first paragraph. For me, I can agree that scientific research will make certain philosophical solutions unavailable, but not that it will provide solutions. Nor will philosophy provide solutions in a final and definitive sense - that is just to take philosophy on the model of science, which is is what I don't want to do. Philosophy provides intellectual tools which give us insights into our assumptions and concepts. That is always subject to variation as the conceptual structure of our interactions change over time. Neurological facts can't track those changes.
The other part of what you say presupposes that we already know what the neural correlates of "beauty" and "the sublime" are - which in turn presupposes that you have a phenomenology that clearly distinguishes between those experiences. This was Francisco Varela's point - without an accurate phenomenology you can't have any neurological explanations. Ten different philosophers mean 10 different things by "consciousness", and 10 different neurologists believe in 10 different neural signatures of consciousness, and the latter are not tracking the former, so we are not even on a path to a neurological explanation of consciousness. Have we got a phenomenology of aesthetic experience such that you know what you are investigating? Otherwise I think you will be headed down a rabbit hole, looking for neural facts that have no direct relationship to mental concepts.
excited to see what comes out of this! and agree re: "Putting a patient in an fMRI machine, showing them images of the Mona Lisa or putting on a Mozart symphony, and detecting some kind of increased neural activity in this or that part of the brain, isn’t super enlightening." feel this way about a lot of the fMRI studies I see
Interesting post! I've had the pocket theory that beauty is secretly an emotion for a little while now. After all, people often treat it the same way as love, preferring to experience beauty, rather than break it down into component parts. If I'm spitballing, I'd say that beauty functions as a de-stressor of sorts, encouraging you to slow down, concentrate on less immediately productive behaviors, like staring at the sunset. Probably counteracts anxiety, since beauty is a very present tense emotion, not so preoccupied with the future or past. I feel like beauty is closely tied to novelty, for some reason. Unusual, unsurvivable environments seem to be the most beautiful, in my experience, so maybe it is a subtle encouragement to mix up your lifestyle, seek out new (beautiful) things.
Taken in the larger sense "neuroaesthetics" is the study of the neurological basis of perception, and of course, useful for medical and other reasons. In the sense you mean - studying art and beauty - it has been a going discipline for a long time (at least since the late 1980's), with its own journals, conferences, etc. Definitely publishable - anything that begins with "neuro'" has been publishable in philosophy for a long time (cf. "neuroethics"). For me, I can't even imagine, much less have I seen, a theory or established claim in this field that strikes me as philosophically interesting. It doesn't mean there is nothing to discover - I'm sure that if the "rule of thirds" in photography is a good general principle for creating attractive images, there is some neurological background that helps explain this. But I am interested in the phenomenon itself, how it relates to other aspects of photographic art, why it is a general but not universal guide, etc. The answer to these questions is never, for me, going to lie in neurological facts. Add to that the fact that the alleged neurological basis of any mental phenomenon is almost always defeasible (cf "mirror neurons"). There may be a neurological basis for both Kantian and utilitarian ethics too, but Thompson's study of the trolley problem gives us insights into our ethical intuitions in a way that I can't see any neurological study coming up with. I've read half a dozen books on consciousness by cognitive scientists and neuroscientists and they don't even have anything enlightening to say about that allegedly biological phenomenon. Emotion is a more borderline subject - I'm not sure it belongs in philosophy at all, so I wouldn't be surprised if neurological studies were more useful than philosophical ones.
Perhaps your friend who said "Don't" simply wanted you to focus on something that might be considered philosophically important rather than seeing your work get buried in a million other neuro-this and neuro-that studies. Reading Lessing or Hegel or Mary Mothersill on beauty is always going to be more helpful than reading neuroaesthetic studies.
Like I was telling that friend, I expect neuroscience and philosophy of the mind to eventually converge: at some point we'll just understand how the mind works (for aesthetics among other things), and it won't matter whether we got there through fMRIs or philosophical essays.
I sympathize and broadly agree with skepticism of neuro-anything, but the danger of making up fake theories if we don't at least try to ground them in reality seems at least as bad. If a philosopher (or blogger!) says that "the sublime" is a subset of beauty, and later neuroscience studies show conclusively that these two concepts, as commonly understood, trigger totally different responses in the brain, then that's important! It doesn't necessarily tell us in detail what "the sublime" is, but it at least shows how we should revise the original view.
I understand that some people believe in Quine's naturalization program - in fact Paul Churchland has put it even more radically than what you say in the first paragraph. For me, I can agree that scientific research will make certain philosophical solutions unavailable, but not that it will provide solutions. Nor will philosophy provide solutions in a final and definitive sense - that is just to take philosophy on the model of science, which is is what I don't want to do. Philosophy provides intellectual tools which give us insights into our assumptions and concepts. That is always subject to variation as the conceptual structure of our interactions change over time. Neurological facts can't track those changes.
The other part of what you say presupposes that we already know what the neural correlates of "beauty" and "the sublime" are - which in turn presupposes that you have a phenomenology that clearly distinguishes between those experiences. This was Francisco Varela's point - without an accurate phenomenology you can't have any neurological explanations. Ten different philosophers mean 10 different things by "consciousness", and 10 different neurologists believe in 10 different neural signatures of consciousness, and the latter are not tracking the former, so we are not even on a path to a neurological explanation of consciousness. Have we got a phenomenology of aesthetic experience such that you know what you are investigating? Otherwise I think you will be headed down a rabbit hole, looking for neural facts that have no direct relationship to mental concepts.
Remember what Marvin Minsky is said to have observed: "If the mind was simple enough for us to understand, we would be too stupid to!"
Consider reading over the propositions in the neuroscience section of this paper on Harmony: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240587262200003X
And this paper on resonance, written with several neuroaestheticians ;)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9097027/
Love your posts, always excellent.
Excellent, thanks for these sources!
Wonderful presentation Étienne! What are your thoughts on Russellian monism? A fascinating topic, all of this!
I don't think I have thoughts about Russellian monism! Should I?
Probably not! You are forging your own unique approach which I think is very novel and interesting!
excited to see what comes out of this! and agree re: "Putting a patient in an fMRI machine, showing them images of the Mona Lisa or putting on a Mozart symphony, and detecting some kind of increased neural activity in this or that part of the brain, isn’t super enlightening." feel this way about a lot of the fMRI studies I see
Yeah, I don't know that much about neuroscience but it sure feels like we're extremely blind and able to get only the coarsest kind of evidence!
Interesting post! I've had the pocket theory that beauty is secretly an emotion for a little while now. After all, people often treat it the same way as love, preferring to experience beauty, rather than break it down into component parts. If I'm spitballing, I'd say that beauty functions as a de-stressor of sorts, encouraging you to slow down, concentrate on less immediately productive behaviors, like staring at the sunset. Probably counteracts anxiety, since beauty is a very present tense emotion, not so preoccupied with the future or past. I feel like beauty is closely tied to novelty, for some reason. Unusual, unsurvivable environments seem to be the most beautiful, in my experience, so maybe it is a subtle encouragement to mix up your lifestyle, seek out new (beautiful) things.