A Study on the Interface Between Arts and Sciences

Author(s):  
Alexandre Siqueira de Freitas

This chapter discusses issues related to two fields of knowledge: neuroesthetics and cognitive neuroscience of art. These two fields represent areas that link historically dichotomic instances: nature and culture. In the first section, the author introduces a brief discussion on this dichotomy, reified here as science and art/aesthetics. Based on a preliminary analysis of these fields, as well as potential interfaces and articulations, the author then situates neuroesthetics and cognitive science of art. In both cases, the main definitions, usual criticisms, and comments on potential expectations regarding the future of these two areas will be presented.

Author(s):  
Alexandre Siqueira de Freitas

This chapter discusses issues related to two fields of knowledge: neuroesthetics and cognitive neuroscience of art. These two fields represent areas that link historically dichotomic instances: nature and culture. In the first section, the author introduces a brief discussion on this dichotomy, reified here as science and art/aesthetics. Based on a preliminary analysis of these fields, as well as potential interfaces and articulations, the author then situates neuroesthetics and cognitive science of art. In both cases, the main definitions, usual criticisms, and comments on potential expectations regarding the future of these two areas will be presented.


Human Affairs ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tibor Solymosi

AbstractCognitive science and its philosophy have been far too long consumed with representation. This concern is indicative of a creeping Cartesianism that many scientists and philosophers wish to evade. However, their naturalism is often insufficiently evolutionary to fully appreciate the lessons of pragmatism. If cognitive neuroscience and pragmatism are to be mutually beneficial, the representational-friendly scientists and the anti-representational pragmatists need an alternative to representation that still accounts for what many find so attractive about representation, namely intentionality. I propose that instead of representations we philosophers and scientists begin thinking in terms of cultural affordances. Like Gibsonian affordances, cultural affordances are opportunities for action. However, unlike Gibsonian affordances, which are merely biological and available for immediate action in the immediately present environment, cultural affordances also present opportunities for thinking about the past and acting into the future—tasks typically attributed to representations.


1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 839-839
Author(s):  
Valerie Gray Hardcastle

Gold & Stoljar's “trivial” neuron doctrine is neither a truism in cognitive science nor trivial; it has serious consequences for the future direction of the mind/brain sciences. Not everyone would agree that these consequences are desirable. The authors' “radical” doctrine is not so radical; their division between cognitive neuroscience and neurobiology is largely artificial. Indeed, there is no sharp distinction between cognitive neuroscience and other areas of the brain sciences.


2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Fein ◽  
Paul Lehner ◽  
Bryan Vossekuil
Keyword(s):  

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 847-849 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antti Revonsuo

Explanatory problems in the philosophy of neuroscience are not well captured by the division between the radical and the trivial neuron doctrines. The actual problem is, instead, whether mechanistic biological explanations across different levels of description can be extended to account for psychological phenomena. According to cognitive neuroscience, some neural levels of description at least are essential for the explanation of psychological phenomena, whereas, in traditional cognitive science, psychological explanations are completely independent of the neural levels of description. The challenge for cognitive neuroscience is to discover the levels of description appropriate for the neural explanation of psychological phenomena.


2003 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 250-251
Author(s):  
Margaret C. Jacob

The Marxists had it right all along, they just got tripped up by their materialism. Early modern capitalism opened vast new worlds, particularly in the arts and sciences, only the traffic went both ways. Creative agents invented new markets and pushed commerce in directions that favored enterprises immensely cosmopolitan and innovative, often solely for the sake of beauty and display. Commerce offered a context but the nobility, and not an imagined bourgeoisie, had the edge when it came to exploiting the market for objets. Paintings could be traded for property, land, and houses. Princes could sponsor natural philosophers, and the fluidity in values meant that good investors, like good practitioners of the arts and sciences, took an interest in all aspects of learning. The interrelatedness of the representational arts and natural philosophy stands as one of the central themes in this tightly integrated collection of essays. We now have a vast historiography telling us that we should no longer teach early modern science without reference to the art of the time, and vice-versa. The point is beautifully illustrated by an exhibition recently held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (spring 2002) on the art of Pieter Saenredam. Working in Utrecht in the 1630s, he used geometry to regularize and make precise the angles and corners found in the exquisite paintings he made of the city's churches. He knew as much about geometry as he did about chiaroscuro. At precisely the same moment, an hour or two away by barge, Descartes in Leiden put the final touches on his Discourse on Method (1637). In effect he explained to the world why precision and clarity of thought made possible the kind of beauty that Saenredam's paintings would come to embody.


Author(s):  
Michael S. McPherson ◽  
Francesca B. Purcell

For all of the doubts raised about the benefits of a college education, it delivers on its promises of greater individual and social prosperity. This article provides an overview of work by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education Progress, which offers a national strategy to improve the college student experience. It argues that teaching and learning need to be prioritized so that all students have high-quality postsecondary educational experiences that incorporate a blend of liberal arts and vocational skills. Efforts around improving completion rates and making college more affordable need additional action and there are promising practices to lead the way.


Author(s):  
Nathan Brown

Twenty-first century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. In this important intervention, Nathan Brown argues that the key to overcoming this antinomy is rethinking the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing claims of those competing schools, any speculative critique of Kant will have to reopen and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to both extend and delimit one another has always been at the core of philosophy and science, and that coordinating their discrepant powers is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique. Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux, while showing how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism is a book that reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.


Author(s):  
Luisa Dall'Acqua

Intelligence analysts are a task force of experts in the field of politics, economics, technology, military, and terrorism analysis. They possess the knowledge, sufficient capacity for imagination, and creativity to relate data predict events. The intelligence approach (basically) tries to reduce the uncertainty of this analysis to forecast the future without being privy to alternatives in the minds of policy decision makers. This chapter intends to describe a new interpretative socio-cognitive paradigm, Orientism, to understand and manage the fluid nature of knowledge, but at the same time to seize and manage the unpredictability and risks of dynamics of risk decision management in relationships complex environment. The new elements are five key factors and criteria to direct and motivate people in the choosing process and following 10 different and key relationships between them.


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