tailieunhanh - THE ROLE OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Research presented by Alumit Ishai at the conference aimed to throw light on the role of gender and sexual orientation on ratings of attractiveness for male and female faces. Participants included heterosexual and homosexual men and women. The results showed that for heterosexual women and homosexualmen, activa- tion in orbitofrontal cortex was higher for attractive male faces than attractive female faces, whereas the converse was true for heterosexual men and homosexual women. According to Ishai, the orbitofrontal cortex represents the reward value of faces of po- tential sexual partners, rather than reproductive fitness. It should be noted, however, that the relationship between facial beauty and reward is not necessarily straightforward. Aharon. | Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 4 No. 1 April 2007 The Role of Aesthetic Experience Anil Gomes Balliol College Oxford We develop language in the context of looking the metaphor of vision again . Iris Murdoch The Idea of Perfection . I. Introduction One of the abiding themes of the three essays which make up Iris Murdoch s wonderful The Sovereignty of Good1 is that experience can be a way of our coming to possess aesthetic concepts. We learn through attending to contexts vocabulary develops through close attention to objects and we can only understand others if we can to some extent share their spatio-temporal and conceptual contexts. IP . My interest in this paper is in what account of aesthetic experience can respect this intuition that close attention to objects can play an important role in our acquisition of aesthetic knowledge and concepts. I want to suggest that certain debates in the philosophy of mind can help us consider how aesthetic experience must be structured in order to play this role. II. Aesthetic Concepts What might it mean to say that experience can play a role in our acquiring aesthetic concepts Murdoch introduces the idea with the following example The art critic can help us if we are in the presence of the same object and if we know something about his scheme of concepts. Both contexts spatio-temporal and conceptual are relevant towards our ability to seeing more towards seeing what he sees . IP 1 Murdoch 1970 . I will use the following abbreviations to refer to the individual essays The Idea of Perfection IP On God and Good G and The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts SG . All page numbers refer to the Routledge Classics edition 2001 . Anil Gomes . The conceptual context is no doubt important here sharing a set of concepts -one might say a particular point of view - with the art critic is necessary for her to draw our attention towards the aesthetic aspects of the common object. But given that shared context it is the .