I'll be reading it tomorrow (Oz time) and will give some feedback then. It looks interesting so far!

Dear Sabine:

Thank you for drawing my attention back to this article. Two weeks ago I downloaded it, registered it in my working bibliography, and filed it away, since I didn't have time to read it at that moment.

Today I gave it a longer look, and I was impressed by the way you lay out your embodied/enactive model of aesthetic expression and reception. The review of the most relevant literature is extraordinarily concise, clear, and critical.

It is evident that you have been working in this area for some years and you have assimilated the core ideas to the point where you have come up with a coherent synthesis. This is rare. The emerging paradigm of embodied/enactive aesthetics has some unresolved internal contradictions. Your article takes important steps toward their resolution.

An unresolved contradiction that you don't mention is the matter of internal representations (see, for example, Tony Chemero's ideas about "radical embodiment" and his recommendation to follow up on Gibson's ecological theory of perception). I suspect that part of the problem lies in a diversity of definitions of the word 'representation.' This debate is relevant to aesthetics and the arts, and it is on my mind at present. Have you written about this, or do you have any thoughts to share on this thread?

Best regards,

David

Hello again, Sabine. I'm still looking for insights into the 'representation' problem and things are coming into focus. I have been rereading Chemero's treatment of this in his book Radical embodied cognitive science (2009), and there are some interesting ideas there, but I find greater clarity (for me, at least), in Mark Johnson's book The meaning of the body: aesthetics of human understanding (2007), especially where he points out the problems with the representational theory of mind. I think I'm going to have to go way back in time, to James, Dewey, Arnheim, Merleau-Ponty, and Maturana, to really get a handle on this. There is so much to read!

Dear David,

Thank you for your feedback. I will check out Chemero, who I have not read and get back to you.

Best, Sabine

You're welcome, Sabine. I met Tony Chemero last December, at the Body of Knowledge conference at the University of California, Irvine, and had the opportunity to talk to him briefly. That was good, because I had read his book a couple of months earlier. His keynote talk was recently uploaded to the conference website (it's the second video from the top down):

http://sites.uci.edu/bok2016/

There is an article with the same title that is more accesible than the book:

Chemero, Anthony

2013 “Radical embodied cognitive science,” in Review of General Psychology (American Psychological Association), vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 145-150 (https://www.academia.edu/6684841, accessed: 5 January 2016).

The idea behind the word "radical" in the titles of the book and the article is that "radical embodied cognitive science" rejects the notion of "representation", while some other types of embodied cognitive science don't go that far. He sees potential in James Gibson's ecological approach, for testing the ideas of the radical version.

I'm still trying to sort all of this out.