Beauty and Sublimity
A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts

Integrating science and art, this accessible, but nuanced work explains how we experience beauty and why we enjoy it.

Patrick Colm Hogan (Author)

9781107115118, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 March 2016

298 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.2 cm, 0.58 kg

'In Beauty and Sublimity, Patrick C. Hogan makes yet another invaluable contribution to philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of art in the naturalistic tradition.' Ryan P. Doran, British Journal of Aesthetics

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion in neuroscientific and related research treating aesthetic response. This book integrates this research with insights from philosophical aesthetics to propose new answers to longstanding questions about beauty and sublimity. Hogan begins by distinguishing what we respond to as beautiful from what we count socially as beautiful. He goes on to examine the former in terms of information processing (specifically, prototype approximation and non-habitual pattern recognition) and emotional involvement (especially of the endogenous reward and attachment systems). In the course of the book, Hogan examines such issues as how universal principles of aesthetic response may be reconciled with individual idiosyncrasy, how it is possible to argue rationally over aesthetic response, and what role personal beauty and sublimity might play in the definition of art. To treat these issues, the book considers works by Woolf, Wharton, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Beethoven, Matisse, and Kiran Rao, among others.

Introduction. Why beauty?
1. Literary aesthetics: beauty, the brain, and Mrs Dalloway
2. The idiosyncrasy of beauty: aesthetic universals and the diversity of taste
3. Unspoken beauty: problems and possibilities of absence
4. Aesthetic response revisited: quandaries about beauty and sublimity
5. My Othello problem: prestige status, evaluation, and aesthetic response
6. What is aesthetic argument?
7. Art and beauty
Afterword. A brief recapitulation, with a coda on anti-aesthetic art.

Subject Areas: Neurosciences [PSAN], Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Philosophy: aesthetics [HPN], Philosophy of mind [HPM], Literary studies: general [DSB], The arts: general issues [AB]