---

The project of naturalizing human consciousness/experience has made great technical strides (e.g., in mapping areas of brain activity), but has been hampered in many cases by its uncritical reliance on a dualistic "Cartesian" paradigm (though as some of the authors in the collection point out, assumptions drawn from Plato and from Kant also play a role). The present volume proposes a version of naturalism in aesthetics drawn from American pragmatism (above all from Dewey, but also from James and Peirce)-one primed from the start to see human beings not only as embodied, but as inseparable from the environment they interact with-and provides a forum for authors from diverse disciplines to address specific scientific and philosophical issues within the anti-dualistic framework considering aesthetic experience as a process of embodied meaning-making. Cross-disciplinary contributions come from leading researchers including Mark Johnson, Jim Garrison, Daniel D. Hutto, John T. Haworth, Luca F. Ticini, Beatriz Calvo-Merino.

The volume covers pragmatist aesthetics, neuroaesthetics, enactive cognitive science, literary studies, psychology of aesthetics, art and design, sociology.

---

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

1. Introduction to a Non-classical View of Meaning-making and Human Cognition: Meaning-making as a Socially Distributed and Embodied Practice - Jessica Lindblom

Part I Embodied Aesthetics: The Anti-Cartesian View and Aesthetics of Life

2. The Aesthetics of Embodied Life - Mark Johnson

3. Dewey´s Aesthetics of Body-Mind Functioning - Jim Garrison

4. Corpo-real Cognition: Pragmatist Aesthetics in William James - Thalia Trigoni

5. Ecological Embodiment, Tragic Consciousness, and the Aesthetics of Possibility: Creating an Art of Living - Tanya Jeffcoat

6. Emotionally Charged Experience - Pentti Määttänen

Part II Neuroscience, Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind

7. Embodied Aesthetics : Insight from Cognitive Neuroscience of Performing Arts - Luca F. Ticini, Cosimo Urgesi, Beatriz Calvo-Merino

8. The Aesthetic Stance - On the Conditions and Consequences of Becoming a Beholder - Maria Brincker

Part III Art Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy

9. The Last ´Touch´ Turns the Artist into a User: The Body, The Mind and The Social Aspect of Art - Mariselda Tessarolo

10. Art that Moves: Exploring the Embodied Basis of Art Representation, Production, and Evaluation - Kendall J. Eskine, Aaron Kozbelt

11. The Experience of Literariness: Affective and Narrative Aspects - David Miall

12. A Qualitative Study of Aesthetic Reflection as Embodied Interpretation - Tracie E. Costantino

Part IV Radicalizing the Anti-Cartesian View: Enactivism in Aesthetics
13. Enactive Aesthetics: Philosophical Reflections on Artful Minds - Daniel D. Hutto

14. Neuroaesthetics as an Enactive Enterprise - Christian Tewes

15. Aesthetics as an Emotional Activity That Facilitates Sense-making: Towards an Enactive Approach in Aesthetic Experience - Ioannis Xenakis, Argyris Arnellos

16. Enactive Literariness and Aesthetic Experience: from Mental Schemata to Anti-representationalism - Alfonsina Scarinzi

Part V Creating with and for the Embodied Mind

17. Creativity in Digital Fine Art - John Haworth

18. Autopoietic Aesthetics as a Lens for Interactive Art - Jennifer Hall

19. No Neuron Is an Island: a Neuroaesthetic Inquiry into Omer Fast´s Mimetic Interactions - Sally McKay

---