scholarly journals Modern Western Ecological Aesthetics from the Perspective of Aesthetics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaofeng Wang
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Reference Value ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Environmental Aesthetics ◽  
Ecological Aesthetics ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Ecological Art ◽  
Environmental Practice ◽  
People’S Perception

Aesthetics is the study of people's perception and experience of heaven, earth and man and all things. Environment and landscape are the most important perceptual manifestation of ecosystem. How this perceptual manifestation affects human mind needs to be answered by aesthetics. It is not only possible but also necessary to study ecosystem from the perspective of aesthetics. Taking the ecological aesthetics of the English world as the main research object, this paper studies the three main approaches to the construction of western ecological aesthetics, which are philosophical speculation, ecological art theory and environmental practice. This study shows that: the interaction between ecological aesthetics and ecological art makes ecological aesthetics become the universal aesthetics of all aesthetic objects (including environment and Art), so as to distinguish it from environmental aesthetics more clearly. Strengthening the interaction between aesthetics and ecological aesthetic experience can make the connotation of ecological aesthetics more profound and clear. The results of this study have a certain reference value for the study of modern western ecological aesthetics from the perspective of aesthetics.

scholarly journals Environmental Aesthetics in the Age of Climate Change

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (18) ◽  
pp. 5001
Author(s):  
R. Auer
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Environmental Aesthetics ◽  
Environment Change ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Human Wellbeing ◽  
Aesthetic Enjoyment

As climate change alters the environment, people’s associations with and appreciations of the environment change too. Environmental aesthetics, an area of knowledge informed by philosophy and ethics, offers an important vantage point on human wellbeing in the age of climate change. Contributors to the literature have attempted to imagine how changing environmental conditions might change aesthetic encounters with nature. Some have contemplated the prospect of aesthetic enjoyment becoming tainted by knowledge of the societal forces and human folly that have damaged nature. One strain of argument rests on the view that aesthetic value in nature is an inherent property of the natural entity itself, and thus independent of moral considerations and other interests, which are viewed as external. The irrelevance of moral consideration to estimations of aesthetic value is the crux of the “autonomist” understanding of environmental aesthetics. From this perspective, condemnation of peoples’ enjoyment of climate-altered nature is beside the point, since moral concerns have no bearing on the intrinsic, aesthetic qualities of the observed entity. This paper argues that the autonomist perspective is challenged in a world of increasingly pervasive and negative encounters with climate-altered nature. Expectations for more frequent, widespread, and severe impacts from climate change suggest a rethinking of salient questions bearing on aesthetic experience. This article raises the prospect of pleasurable aesthetic experiences becoming increasingly rare in a climate-changed world and the prospect of moral pressures becoming more immediate and personal. Also challenged is the thesis that people will ably adjust to climate change and thereby secure aesthetic comfort.

Aesthetic Value, Nature, and Environment

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Brady
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Appreciation ◽  
Ethical Values ◽  
Environmental Aesthetics ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Natural Objects ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Cognitive Approaches ◽  
Aesthetic Engagement ◽  
Critical Pluralism

This chapter discusses key issues and questions about aesthetic experience and valuing of natural objects, processes, and phenomena. It begins by exploring the character of environmental, multisensory aesthetic appreciation and then examines the central debate between “scientific cognitivism” and “noncognitivism” in contemporary environmental aesthetics. In assessing this debate and the place of knowledge, imagination, and emotion in aesthetic valuing, it is argued that non-cognitive approaches have the advantage of supporting a critical pluralism that recognizes the variety and breadth of aesthetic engagement with nature. Interactions between aesthetic and ethical values are also discussed, especially with respect to their role in philosophical positions such as “aesthetic preservationism” and the call for developing aesthetic theories that are consistent with environmentalism.

How the Mind Comes into Being

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin V. Butz ◽  
Esther F. Kutter
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Generative Models ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Brain Anatomy ◽  
Structural Development ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Abstract Thought ◽  
Computational Perspective ◽  
Embodied Cognitive Science

For more than 2000 years Greek philosophers have thought about the puzzling introspectively assessed dichotomy between our physical bodies and our seemingly non-physical minds. How is it that we can think highly abstract thoughts, seemingly fully detached from actual, physical reality? Despite the obvious interactions between mind and body (we get tired, we are hungry, we stay up late despite being tired, etc.), until today it remains puzzling how our mind controls our body, and vice versa, how our body shapes our mind. Despite a big movement towards embodied cognitive science over the last 20 years or so, introductory books with a functional and computational perspective on how human thought and language capabilities may actually have come about – and are coming about over and over again – are missing. This book fills that gap. Starting with a historical background on traditional cognitive science and resulting fundamental challenges that have not been resolved, embodied cognitive science is introduced and its implications for how human minds have come and continue to come into being are detailed. In particular, the book shows that evolution has produced biological bodies that provide “morphologically intelligent” structures, which foster the development of suitable behavioral and cognitive capabilities. While these capabilities can be modified and optimized given positive and negative reward as feedback, to reach abstract cognitive capabilities, evolution has furthermore produced particular anticipatory control-oriented mechanisms, which cause the development of particular types of predictive encodings, modularizations, and abstractions. Coupled with an embodied motivational system, versatile, goal-directed, self-motivated behavior, learning becomes possible. These lines of thought are introduced and detailed from interdisciplinary, evolutionary, ontogenetic, reinforcement learning, and anticipatory predictive encoding perspectives in the first part of the book. A short excursus then provides an introduction to neuroscience, including general knowledge about brain anatomy, and basic neural and brain functionality, as well as the main research methodologies. With reference to this knowledge, the subsequent chapters then focus on how the human brain manages to develop abstract thought and language. Sensory systems, motor systems, and their predictive, control-oriented interactions are detailed from a functional and computational perspective. Bayesian information processing is introduced along these lines as are generative models. Moreover, it is shown how particular modularizations can develop. When control and attention come into play, these structures develop also dependent on the available motor capabilities. Vice versa, the development of more versatile motor capabilities depends on structural development. Event-oriented abstractions enable conceptualizations and behavioral compositions, paving the path towards abstract thought and language. Also evolutionary drives towards social interactions play a crucial role. Based on the developing sensorimotor- and socially-grounded structures, the human mind becomes language ready. The development of language in each human child then further facilitates the self-motivated generation of abstract, compositional, highly flexible thought about the present, past, and future, as well as about others. In conclusion, the book gives an overview over how the human mind comes into being – sketching out a developmental pathway towards the mastery of abstract and reflective thought, while detailing the critical body and neural functionalities, and computational mechanisms, which enable this development.

scholarly journals AN EXPLORATORY RESEARCH ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INVESTORS IN FINANCIAL MARKETS

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 979-992
Author(s):  
Mustafa Hakan SALDI
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Financial Markets ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Endocrine System ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Exploratory Research ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Risky Assets ◽  
Main Research ◽  
The Relationship

The emotional mind which was granted to human beings in order to add the meaning of their perception through the data, information and knowledge that are being gathered from all around the outside environment with senses and the experiences of realities that have effects on the attitude of a person which can be observed as stereotypes, have effects on the decision making processes of investors, which was proven with general assumptions and theories with countless times in the background of the subject. Differently, this research is mainly designed for in-depth investigation of the relationship between parts of the human brain and endocrine system which have a role on emotional actions that can be observed of investors' behaviours in financial markets. From the viewpoint of experimentally tested studies, the discovery of the response of the subproblems will be explored in the main research question of why the risky assets are being selected by the investors relative to the sciences of neurology and endocrinology. Also, the amygdala, testosterone and cortisol relation which is the predictive factor of behaviours is going to be explained in terms of showing their effects on decision making in monetary management and will be analysed as a moderator with depth observations to understand the relationship between investment behaviour and emotions as well. As a result, the study will bring different perspectives to investors who are both experienced and inexperienced in trading with financial instruments by the addition of consideration of emotional side of the human mind to the logic and rational part.

scholarly journals Associating With Art: A Network Model of Aesthetic Effects

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Specker ◽  
Eiko I. Fried ◽  
Raphael Rosenberg ◽  
Helmut Leder
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Process ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Experimental Manipulation ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Psychological Constructs ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Active Interaction

In recent years, understanding psychological constructs as network processes has gained considerable traction in the social sciences. In this paper, we propose the aesthetic effects network (AEN) as a novel way to conceptualize aesthetic experience. The AEN represents an associative process where having one association leads to the next association, generating an overall aesthetic experience. In art theory, associations of this kind are referred to as aesthetic effects. The AEN provides an explicit account of a specific cognitive process involved in aesthetic experience. We first outline the AEN and discuss empirical results (Study 1, N=255) to explore what can be gained from this approach. Second, in Study 2 (N=133, pre-registered) we follow calls in the literature to substantiate network theories by using an experimental manipulation, and found evidence in favor of the AEN over other alternatives. The AEN provides a basis for future studies that can apply a network perspective to different aesthetic experiences and processes. This perspective takes a process-based approach to aesthetic experience, where aesthetic experience is represented as an active interaction between viewer and artwork. If we want to understand how people experience art, it is central to know why people have different experiences with the same artworks, and, also, why people have similar experiences when looking at different artworks. Our proposed network perspective offers a new way to approach and potentially answer these questions.

Environmental aesthetics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Appreciation ◽  
Environmental Aesthetics ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

Environmental aesthetics is one of the major new areas of aesthetics to have emerged in the last part of the twentieth century. It focuses on philosophical issues concerning appreciation of the world at large as it is constituted not simply by particular objects but also by environments themselves. In this way environmental aesthetics goes beyond the appreciation of art to the aesthetic appreciation of both natural and human environments. Its development has been influenced by eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics as well as by two recent factors: the exclusive focus of twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics on art, and the public concern for the aesthetic condition of environments that developed in the second half of that century. Both factors broadened the scope of environmental aesthetics beyond that of traditional aesthetics, and both helped to set the central philosophical issue of the field, which is due in large measure to the differences between the nature of the object of appreciation of environmental aesthetics, the world at large and the nature of art. These differences are so marked that environmental aesthetics must begin with basic questions, such as ‘what’ and ‘how’ to appreciate. These questions have generated a number of different philosophical positions, two of which are the engagement and the cognitive approaches. The first holds that appreciators must transcend traditional dichotomies, such as subject/object, and diminish the distance between themselves and objects of appreciation, aiming at multi-sensory immersion of the former within the latter. By contrast, the second contends that appreciation must be guided by the nature of objects of appreciation and that knowledge about their origins, types and properties is necessary for serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation. Each approach has certain strengths and weaknesses. However, although different in emphasis, they are not in direct conflict. When conjoined, they advocate bringing together feeling and knowing, which is the core of serious aesthetic experience and which, when achieved in aesthetic appreciation of different environments of the world at large, shows just how rewarding such appreciation can be.

scholarly journals The Role of Art in Society with Particular Reference to the Problem of Violence$

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-167
Author(s):  
Camilla Pagani
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Individual

Background: According to the Latin poet Virgil, art is capable of revealing to us what no science can ever reveal to a human mind. The main thesis of this paper is that art can play an extremely beneficial role in society as it can strongly foster humans’ efforts to attain a deeper and broader comprehension of reality. Objective: The experience of art can provide a powerful contribution to the efforts to avoid resorting to violence and to address conflicts constructively. Violence or, more exactly, unjustified violence, basically rests on an irrational and short-sighted analysis and interpretation of reality. Results: The psychological processes relating to the aesthetic experience and to its connections with violence are described. It is also pointed out that this theoretical perspective does not fully coincide with the theoretical theses underpinning art therapy. In fact, in this paper art is not considered as a mere therapeutic instrument. Instead, an attempt has been made to consider art and our relationship with art in their more complex and partly still unexplored aspects, where neither art or the individual is “at the service” of the other. Conclusion: Art can provide the possibility to experience a new dimension, where no power relations exist and where new ways of seeing and feeling are made possible. It can hence foster the development of less primitive and richer personalities. In this way violence should lose its raison d’être. So it appears that this theoretical approach might be particularly helpful in order to better understand and countervail violence.

Environmental aesthetics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Appreciation ◽  
Environmental Aesthetics ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

Environmental aesthetics is one of the major new areas of aesthetics to have emerged in the last part of the twentieth century. It focuses on philosophical issues concerning appreciation of the world at large as it is constituted not simply by particular objects but also by environments themselves. In this way environmental aesthetics goes beyond the appreciation of art to the aesthetic appreciation of both natural and human environments. The development of environmental aesthetics has been influenced by eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics as well as by two recent factors: the exclusive focus of twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics on art and the public concern for the aesthetic condition of environments that developed in the second half of that century. Both factors have broadened the scope of environmental aesthetics beyond that of traditional aesthetics, and both have helped to set the central philosophical issues of the field, which are due in large measure to the differences between the nature of the object of appreciation of environmental aesthetics, the world at large, and the nature of art. These differences are so marked that environmental aesthetics must begin with most basic questions, such as ‘what’ and ‘how’ to appreciate. These questions have generated a number of different philosophical positions, which are typically classified as either noncognitive or cognitive approaches. Positions of the first type stress various kinds of emotional and feeling-related states and responses, which are taken to be the more noncognitive dimensions of aesthetic experience. By contrast, positions of the second type contend that appreciation must be guided by the nature of objects of appreciation and thus that knowledge about their origins, types and properties is necessary for serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation. Each of these two kinds of approach has certain strengths and weaknesses. However, recent work in environmental aesthetics, especially in the aesthetics of human environments and everyday life, demonstrates that although different in emphasis, they are not in direct conflict. When conjoined, they advocate bringing together feeling and knowing, which is the core of serious aesthetic experience and which, when achieved in aesthetic appreciation of different environments of the world at large, demonstrates just how rewarding such appreciation can be.

Preface

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine M. Soussloff
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Self ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
The Aesthetic

This transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting? MICHEL FOUCAULT, “An Ethics of Pleasure,” in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984) In 1982 when Michel Foucault (1926–1984) spoke to an interviewer about the transformative effects of his writing on his being or existence, he compared himself to a painter. As Foucault well knew, the transformation of the self through one’s creation had a history in art theory that extended as far back as the late 1400s in Italy....

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