El martes, 8 de julio, a las 11.30, en la Sala de Juntas de Filosofía, tuvo lugar la última sesión de este curso del seminario TeC-FiloLab. Nuestro invitado fue Ryan Doran, de la Universidad de Barcelona. A continuación tenéis el título y el resumen de su charla, así como una breve nota sobre la trayectoria de Ryan.
Título: «True Beauty»
Resumen: What is the nature of the concept BEAUTY? Does it differ fundamentally from nearby concepts such as PRETTINESS? It is argued that BEAUTY, but not PRETTINESS, is a dual-character concept. Across a number of contexts, it is proposed that BEAUTY has a descriptive sense that is characterised by, inter alia, having intrinsically pleasing appearances; and a normative sense associated with deeply-held values. This account is supported across two, pre-registered, studies (N=500), and by drawing on analysis of corpus data. It is suggested that this can help to explain why beauty, unlike prettiness, is thought to be deep in both the sense of being important, and in the sense of being less closely tied to sensory surfaces.
Bio: I’m a philosopher and cognitive scientist at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona, where I am a Ramón y Cajal Fellow. I am a member of LOGOS and the Barcelona Institute for Analytic Philosophy (BIAP). I completed the majority of my postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge between 2018-2022, and prior to that did my PhD (Philosophy), MA (Philosophy) and B.Sci (Natural Sciences: Biology, Psychology & Philosophy) at the Universities of Antwerp, Sheffield, King’s College London and Durham. I’ve held visiting positions at the Institut Jean Nicod (2023-24) and Uppsala University (2024). I was awarded the 2024 Arthur Danto/American Society of Aesthetics Prize by the American Philosophical Association. I was Co-Director of the project «Higher Values: Aesthetic Experiences, Transcendence & Prosociality» at the University of Cambridge (2022-2025, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust) with Simone Schnall. I’m also Chair of the iCog network, and from 2015-2018 was co-editor of the British Society of Aesthetics’ journal Debates in Aesthetics.
