Neuro-esthetics is an area of research that involves cognitive science and aesthetics, and which is aside a neuro-scientific approach to the usual aesthetic analysis of the production and enjoyment of works of art. Contemporary philosophy tends to grasp in the interpretation of the works of art a privileged place for reflection on the meaning of the world and human existence.
Relations between philosophy and neuroscience have been variously judged: if the study refers to the relationship between mind and brain, as long as you do not give in to the sirens, under which an explanation covers all the others, there is probably no objection. On the contrary, if you give in to the seductive power of words and images, it's just a new rhetoric, destined to fade like so many other of the past. In any case, the debate is back to light wherever the philosophy of science, abandoning its logical-mathematical roots, addresses biological themes. Mettrie and Holbach in the eighteenth century, for example, already studied these issues, collaborating with physicians and anatomists. On this basis, around which tradition is rooted, it is, however, taking over the worm that, as taught by Leopardi, always accompanies itself to death, that is the fashion, able to make delicate, volatile, contingent and ephemeral matters even more serious. With fashion took over the neologisms, which sometimes - as in the case of "neuro-philosophy" - are legitimate, but at other times, when the base fragment into many branches becoming "neuro-phenomenology", "neuro-aesthetics", "neuro-ethics for all intuition possible: every apprehension of the subject takes place "in the" time and marks the meeting of knowledge between the inner dimension of temporality, the time of my conscience, the flow of my acts, and the time outside of 'object, a time "objective" that transcends the interior of my consciousness.
A "return" of philosophy to "issues of principle", in "search for truth" . It
is not lost, of course, the ethical and ideological scheme on which these reflections are grafted, which still has its (dramatic) actuality: in front of the dominion of opinions subjective and unproven, that have now invaded philosophy, or the various fashionable objectivism that cross it, it stands for philosophy the return to issues of principle. This return is connected to a well-defined idea of truth: truth which philosophy should aim because only a philosophical - and phenomenological - attitude can overcome both the individual psychological limitations and the reflections both pragmatic and specialist of the particular sciences. Philosophy must act as a continuous cognitive- critical reflection to come to a clear understanding of the meaning and essence of its operations.
Grasp the essences does not mean falling into Platonism, but believe that the aesthetic apprehension of the world should not result in a cult for the facts or for an "unfounded" presence. Through the intentional operations - immanent acts – it must be analyzed the ways in which we give those general contents ("event", "effect", "cause", "space", "time", etc.) to which all particular sciences refer. Phenomenology, since its first steps, wants then to be defined as the study of the knowledge link, temporally organized, including the content of knowledge and actions that are directed towards them.
It is in this context that Husserl speaks of essential intuition: because the essence that we want to know is neither a psychological datum nor an immutable Platonic ideality, but, in fact an "intuition".
It is here rooted the need to recover a rational sense of philosophy, and to recover it in that original ground which Husserl calls " world of life", which is the very meaning of the original foundation of temporality, of his "serving" in all our action.
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Dear Artur,
as far as the content of your outstanding intervention is concerned, part of the answer to your questions may be found – I believe- in a RG Question I am preparing by the title “Aesthetics is still possible in a Western culture, which has long turned its back on all forms of ontology, i.e. all forms of science of ‘being’?”
As you understand, it is ‘work in progress’ and it is having connections with what I am reading presently, being a modest learner in philosophy.
All the best,
Gianrocco
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