Beauty is in the heart of the beholder : the affective experience of aesthetic properties

Diplôme Master Beauty is in the heart of the beholder : the affective experience of aesthetic properties eng 2022-09-07 2022-08-31 author Borra Romolo 858354 Services communs du CISA (EMCO) director Teroni Fabrice 0000-0001-6532-4258 89389 Département de philosophie (PHIL1) director Deonna Julien 0000-0003-2237-4444 83202 Département de philosophie (PHIL1) 87 How do we apprehend aesthetic properties? This work aims to understand the specific way in which we experience aesthetic properties. Traditionally, philosophers have tended to consider the relevant experience as perceptual. Despite its initial attractiveness, I argue that we should reject this approach in favour of one that conceives this experience as affective in nature. In a slogan: “We do not <i>see</i> beauty, we <i>feel</i> it”. In a first step, I consider the most plausible candidates for the mental state behind our apprehension of aesthetic properties—non-experiential states and processes, perceptual experience, and non-perceptual experience. The dominant Perceptual View is examined by interrogating whether aesthetic properties can be listed among the possible contents of perceptual experience. Following a recent trend in the philosophy of perception, I raise the question of whether we can explain the phenomenal contrast between one’s experience before and after acquiring a recognitional capacity for a given aesthetic property in perceptual terms. I argue that this explanation misrepresents the specificity of the aesthetic domain: aesthetic properties are not among the possible content of perceptual experience because they are essentially evaluative. In a second step, I defend the latter claim by arguing that we should treat aesthetic properties as thick values, i.e., properties that indissolubly combine evaluative and descriptive features. If this is right, we would perceptually apprehend aesthetic properties only if values are among the possible contents of perceptual experience. However, several reasons are advanced for considering perception’s representational capacities as exclusively descriptive, the most important being that the possibility of representing values in perceptual experience would imply the impossibility of genuine aesthetic divergences based on differences in taste. In response, I propose the Affective View. This view understands the apprehension of aesthetic properties as an emotional experience by grounding our access to the aesthetic onto the intimate relation between emotions and values. After setting the foundations of the latter view, this work concludes by briefly discussing its implications for the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and aesthetics. Aesthetic Properties Affective Experience Perceptual Experience Perception Emotions Phenomenal Contrast High-Level Properties Thick Values Metaphysics of Aesthetics Beauty Evaluative Attitudes Aesthetic Appreciation Dewey 100/501 Maîtrise universitaire en philosophie avec spécialisation en philosophie contemporaine Prix Amiel, Prix Adolphe Neuman 89 Département de philosophie 3G false 48e116e2-8c9e-4ade-97e0-9bd8750be27d Master thesis Public Romolo_BORRA_MA_Thesis.pdf 2277904 application/pdf CC BY-NC-ND-4.0 cf9d4b19d340cca9889f9a37f3d3b85bfa97c858b94efd7c618cb7bb71b23b50 openAccess Faculté des lettres / Département de philosophie

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Beauty is in the heart of the beholder : the affective experience of aesthetic properties				2022	83	39

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Borra, Romolo

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