engleski

Matters of taste and cognitive aesthetics

Discussions regarding aesthetic judgments, or judgments of taste, focus on the question of whether such judgments are manifestations of subjective preferences, or whether they depict features that the objects objectively possess. Quite often, these discussions take a turn into a debate regarding the proper role of critical judgments, and the question of whether one should modify one’s own taste if one finds oneself disagreeing with others, most notably, the critics. In that sense, a theoretical framework within which the problem of aesthetic judgments is discussed consists of debates regarding realism vs. anti-realism of aesthetic properties, and debates regarding one’s entitlement to one’s aesthetic judgments and their subsequent justifiability. As I argue in this paper, contemporary findings of cognitive aesthetics offer valuable and much needed solutions to both of these debates. To show that, I position the problem of aesthetic judgments against the framework provided by the cognitive approaches to aesthetic issues, most notably cognitive and evolutionary theories about development of human aesthetic preferences. I show that traditional philosophical theories of taste, particularly those advanced by Hume and Kant, were anticipatory of some of the most contemporary conclusions advanced by cognitive aesthetics. I am primarily concerned with showing how some of Kant's most contentious claims get corroborated by cognitive aesthetics, emphasizing four in particular: his notion of autonomous judgments, his idea about the empirical interest in the beauty and its connectedness to sociability, his notion of sensus communis, and his notion of the ideal of beauty.

Hume, Kant, aesthetic judgment, aesthetic experience, taste

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