TeC-FiloLab con Iris Vidmar Jovanović: «Aesthetic experience and literary cognitivism: a compatibilist approach»

El martes, 21 de enero, tendrá lugar una nueva sesión del seminario TeC-FiloLab. En esta ocasión, nos acompañará Iris Vidmar Jovanović, de la Universidad de Rijeka, Croacia. A continuación tenéis el título y el resumen de la charla, así como una breve nota sobre el trabajo de Iris.

«Aesthetic experience and literary cognitivism: a compatibilist approach»

Abstract: Literary cognitivism is, roughly, the view that literature is a valuable source of knowledge and other epistemically significant values, such as understanding, and activities, such as perspective-taking. Reading literary works is therefore cognitively beneficial for us and it can also contribute to development of moral sensibility, for example, by showing us complexities of a moral problem we have been unaware of, or by challenging us to reconsider our moral beliefs. Critics of literary cognitivism (literary anti-cognitivists) oppose to this view by highlighting a set of problems with it: they challenge the reliability of literary depictions, sincerity and expertise of authors, or the epistemic position of the audience who lacks the skills to judge the truthfulness of fictional literary depictions. One particular challenge, the one I am concerned with in this talk, relates to the aesthetic aspects of literary works and their role in generating cognitive benefits. The claim is that our engagements with a work of art demand aesthetic rather than epistemic stance: in paying attention to the work’s aesthetic features we lose sight of its epistemic ones, and vice versa, if we attend to the work’s epistemic dimension, we are no longer treating it as a work of art.

My aim here is to argue against these claims and to explore the relevance of an artwork’s aesthetic qualities and the aesthetic experience that we undergo in the process of engagement with the work, for the work’s capacity to engage us cognitively and ethically. I start by analyzing the phenomenology of aesthetic experience to show how it relates to readers’ attention, belief processing, emotional response and pleasure, arguing ultimately for what I call the compatibilist approach: the view that aesthetic and cognitive dimensions are compatible and mutually reinforcing. I rely on the research in cognitive sciences to explain our literary engagements, bringing it in relation to philosophical work on aesthetic experience. In conclusion, I show that the problem of learning from art matters not only within philosophical debates, but, more importantly, within our cultural and educational context. Understanding the interaction between aesthetic and cognitive dimension of our literary experiences is therefore a crucial step in recognizing the important education benefits of literature, as well as those that may be in some way corruptive.

Bio: Iris Vidmar Jovanović is an associate professor and a chair in aesthetics and epistemology at the Department for Philosophy, University of Rijeka, Croatia. She works primarily at the intersection of philosophy of art, ethics and epistemology, with additional interest in Kant’s aesthetics. She is an associate editor of the journal Philosophia and has been a member of the executive committee of European Society for Aesthetics. Her work was published in the Journal of aesthetics and art criticism, the Journal of aesthetic education, Projections, Croatian journal of philosophy, Estetika, etc. She is currently a principal investigator of the research project dedicated to the aesthetic education and humanities (https://aetna.uniri.hr/).

Deja una respuesta

Tu dirección de correo electrónico no será publicada. Los campos obligatorios están marcados con *